The pedestrians gradually break up into little companies, most of them going to Kronenberg and other model colonies founded by Frau Krupp—­“Bertha,” as she is affectionately called throughout Germany.  The highest honour the Germans can bestow upon her is to name their 16-inch howitzer “Fat Bertha.”  Frau Bertha Krupp, it may be well to recall, was the heiress to the great Krupp fortune, and on her marriage in 1906 to Herr von Bohlen und Halbach, a diplomatist, he changed his name to Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach.

Though a private corporation with 12,500,000 pounds share capital owned by the “Cannon Queen” and her family, it is to all intents and purposes a Government Department just as Woolwich Arsenal is an adjunct of the British War Office.  In the past, as the elaborate centenary (1910) memorial proudly recites, fifty-two Governments throughout the world have bought Krupp guns, armour, shells, and warships, with Germany by far the biggest customer.

Out of the stupendous profits of war machines the Krupps have built workpeople’s houses that, as regards material comfort, would not be easy to excel.  These houses are provided with ingenious coal-saving stoves, that might well be copied elsewhere, for though Essen is in the coal centre of Germany, they are just as careful about coal as though it were imported from the other end of the world.

Frau Bertha and her husband (a simple and modest man, who is, I was informed, entirely in the hands of his specialists, and who has the wisdom to let well alone) have put up a big fight with Batocki, the food dictator.  The semi-famine had not reached its height when I was in Essen, and the suffering was not great there.  A munition-maker working in any of the Rhenish-Westphalian towns is regarded by Germans as a soldier.  As the war has proceeded he has been subject to continuous combing out.

The amount of food allowed to those engaged in these great factories and rolling mills is, I estimate, 33 per cent. more than that allowed to the rest of the civil population.  In all the notices issued throughout Germany in regard to further food restrictions, there is appended the line, “This change is necessary owing to the need for fully supplying your brothers in the army and the munition works.”

Essen is a town that before the war had a population exceeding 300,000.  A conservative estimate makes the figure to-day nearly half a million.  The Krupp Company employ about 120,000.  A prevalent illusion is that Krupps confine their war-time effort exclusively to making war material.  That is a mistake.  A considerable part of Krupp’s work is the manufacture of articles which can be exchanged for food and other products in neighbouring countries, thus taking the place of gold.  At Lubeck, I saw the quays crowded with the products of Essen in the shape of steel girders and other building machinery going to Sweden in exchange for oil, lime from Gotland, iron ore, paper, wood, and food products,