“Food supply!” he roared.  “My dear fellow, you must have been reading the English newspapers!  Food supply!  My dear professor!  Have you not heard?  We have got over that difficulty entirely and for ever.  But come, here is a restaurant.  In with you and eat to your heart’s content.”

We entered the restaurant.  It was filled to overflowing with a laughing crowd of diners and merry-makers.  Thick clouds of blue cigar smoke filled the air.  Waiters ran to and fro with tall steins of foaming beer, and great bundles of bread tickets, soup tickets, meat cards and butter coupons.

These were handed around to the guests, who sat quietly chewing the corners of them as they sipped their beer.

“Now-then,” said my host, looking over the printed menu in front of him, “what shall it be?  What do you say to a ham certificate with a cabbage ticket on the side?  Or how would you like lobster-coupon with a receipt for asparagus?”

“Yes,” I answered, “or perhaps, as our journey has made me hungry, one of these beef certificates with an affidavit for Yorkshire pudding.”

“Done!” said Boobenstein.

A few moments later we were comfortably drinking our tall glasses of beer and smoking Tannhauser cigars, with an appetising pile of coloured tickets and certificates in front of us.

“Admit,” said von Boobenstein good-naturedly, “that we have overcome the food difficulty for ever.”

“You have,” I said.

“It was a pure matter of science and efficiency,” he went on.  “It has long been observed that if one sat down in a restaurant and drank beer and smoked cigars (especially such a brand as these Tannhausers) during the time it took for the food to be brought (by a German waiter), all appetite was gone.  It remained for the German scientists to organise this into system.  Have you finished?  Or would you like to take another look at your beef certificate?”

We rose.  Von Boobenstein paid the bill by writing I.O.U. on the back of one of the cards—­not forgetting the waiter, for whom he wrote on a piece of paper, “God bless you”—­and we left.

“Count,” I said, as we took our seat on a bench in the Sieges-Allee, or Alley of Victory, and listened to the music of the military band, and watched the crowd, “I begin to see that Germany is unconquerable.”

“Absolutely so,” he answered.

“In the first place, your men are inexhaustible.  If we kill one class you call out another; and anyway one-half of those we kill get well again, and the net result is that you have more than ever.”

“Precisely,” said the Count.

“As to food,” I continued, “you are absolutely invulnerable.  What with acorns, thistles, tanbark, glue, tickets, coupons, and certificates, you can go on for ever.”

“We can,” he said.

“Then for money you use I.O.U.’s.  Anybody with a lead pencil can command all the funds he wants.  Moreover, your soldiers at the front are getting dug in deeper and deeper:  last spring they were fifty feet under ground:  by 1918 they will be nearly 200 feet down.  Short of mining for them, we shall never get them out.”