The mother looked in on her way to the street, basket under arm.  She was tired, and was dulled by the daily routine of trying to get food.  She talked bitterly about the war, but though she blamed the Agrarians for not doing their part to relieve the food situation, she expressed no animosity against her own Government.  The father had been through Lodz in Hindenburg’s two frontal assaults on Warsaw, where he had seen the slopes covered with forests of crosses marking the German dead, and his words were bitter, too, when he talked of his lost comrades.  And then, the depressing feeling of returning from an army pursuing the mirage of victory to find his family and every other family struggling in the meshes of that terrible and relentless blockade!

It never had occurred to him that his Government might be in the least responsible for the misery of his country.  Like the great bulk of the German people he is firmly convinced that the Fatherland has been fighting a war of defence from the very beginning.  “To think that one nation, England, is responsible for all this suffering!” was the way that he put it.  He is a “good” Social Democrat.

When I once more resumed my walk I saw the lines of people waiting for food in every street.  Each time I turned a corner great black masses dominated the scene.  I paused at a line of more than three hundred waiting for potatoes.  Ten yards away not a sound could be heard.  The very silence added to the depression.  With faces anxious and drawn they stood four abreast, and moved with the orderliness of soldiers.  Not a sign of disturbance, and not a policeman in sight.  Some women were mending socks; a few, standing on the edge of the closely packed column, pushed baby carriages as they crawled hour after hour toward the narrow entrance of the shop.

Every line was like the rest.  The absence of policemen is particularly noteworthy, since they had to be present in the early days—­a year ago—­when the butter lines came into being.  Drastic measures were taken when the impatient women rioted.  Those days are over.  The Government has taught the people a lesson.  They will wait hour after hour, docile and obedient henceforth, if necessary until they drop—­make no mistake of that.

But the authorities also learned a lesson.  “People think most of revolution when they are hungry,” was what one leader said to me.  On this Saturday of which I write not a potato was to be bought in the West-end of Berlin, where the better classes live.  Berlin had been without potatoes for nearly a week.  To-day they had arrived, and the first to come were sent to the East-end.  In the West-end the people are filled with more unquestioning praise of everything the Government does; they applaud when their Kaiser confers an Order upon their Crown Prince for something, not quite clear, which he is supposed to have accomplished at Verdun.  Therefore they can wait for potatoes until the more critical East-end is supplied.