Meat is plentiful and cheap, particularly beef, and in any of the big, popular “beer restaurants,” so common in Berlin, an ordinary steak for one person costs from thirty-five to fifty cents.  Pork, the mainstay of the poorer people, is comparatively expensive, because hogs have been made into durable hard sausages for the army, and potatoes, also expensive, have been bought up in large quantities by the government, to be sold in the public markets to the poor, a few pounds to each person, at a moderate price.  There are said to be eight hundred thousand prisoners now in Germany, and the not entirely frivolous suggestion has been made that the hordes of hungry Russians captured in the east are more dangerous now than they were with guns in their hands.  Yet there are no visible signs of such poverty as one will see in certain parts of London or Chicago in times of peace, and a woman in charge of one of the soup-kitchens where people pinched by the war get one substantial meal a day at ten pfennigs told me there was no reason for any one in Berlin going hungry.  Meanwhile, the scarcity of flour only adds fuel to the people’s patriotism, and they are told everywhere on red placards that England never can starve them out if every German does his economical duty.  Where so much thinking is done for the people, and done so efficiently, it is difficult not to feel that everything is somehow “arranged,” and one finds it difficult to become acutely anxious while the hundreds of crowded cafes are running full blast until one o’clock every morning and the seal in the Tiergarten has the bottom of his tank covered with fresh fish he is too indolent to eat.

“Society,” in its more visible, decorative sense, is as forgotten as it is in France, as it must be in such a time.  There are no dances or formal parties; every one who is not going about his civil business has in one way or another “gone to the war.”  The gay young men are at the front, the idle young women knitting or nursing or helping the poor, and it is an adventure uncommon enough to be remembered to meet on the street a pretty young lady merely out to take the air, with hands in her muff and trotting in front of her the timorous dachshund, muzzled like a ravening tiger and looking at the world askance with his rueful eyes.

The apparent quietness and gravity is partially due to the lack of a “yellow” or, in the British or American sense of the word, popular press.  There is none of that noisy hate continually dinned into one’s ears in London by papers which, to be sure, represent neither the better-class English civilians nor the light-hearted fighting man at the front, yet which are entertainingly written, do contain the news, and get themselves read.