This is one of the many instances which I shall cite throughout this book to show that because the German authorities know other countries they do not necessarily know other subjects.

As weeks of war became months and months became years, the censorship screws were twisted tighter than ever, with the result that docile editors were often at their wits’ end to provide even filler.

On July 14, for example, with battles of colossal magnitude raging east and west, the Berliner Morgenpost found news so scarce that it had to devote most of the front page to the review of a book called “Paris and the French Front,” by Nils Christiernssen, a Swedish writer.  I had read the book months before, as the Propaganda Department of the Foreign Office had sent it to all foreign correspondents.

It became noticeable, however, that as food portions diminished, soothing-syrup doses for the public increased.  Whenever a wave of complaints over food shortage began to rise the Press would build a dyke of accounts of the trials of meatless days in Russia, of England’s scarcity of things to eat, and of the dread in France of another winter.  The professors writing in the Press grew particularly comforting.  Thus on June 30 one of them comforted the public in a lengthy and serious article in the evening edition, of the Vossische Zeitung with “the revelation that over-eating is a cause of baldness.”

The cheering news of enemy privations continued to such an extent that many Americans were asked by the more credulous if there were bread-tickets in Kew York and other American cities.  In short, Germany is being run on the principle that when you are down with small-pox it is comforting to know that your neighbour has cholera.

The key-note of the German Press, however, has been to show that the war was forced on peace-loving Germany.  Of the Government’s success in its propaganda among its own people I saw evidence every day.  The people go even one step farther than the Government, for the Government sought merely to show that it was forced to declare war upon Russia and France.  Most of the German people are labouring under the delusion that Russia and France actually declared war on Germany.  This misconception, no doubt, is partly due to the accounts in the German papers during the first days of August, 1914, describing how the Russians and French crossed the frontier to attack Germany before any declaration of war.

A German girl who was in England at the outbreak of war, and who subsequently returned to her own country, asked her obstinate, hard-headed Saxon uncle, a wealthy manufacturer, if Germany did not declare war on Russia and France.  She insisted that Germany did, for she had become convinced not only in England but in Holland.  Her uncle, in a rage, dismissed the matter with:  Du bist falsch unterrichtet. (You are falsely informed.)

An American in Berlin had a clause in his apartment lease that his obligations were abruptly and automatically terminated should Germany be in a state of war.  Yet when he wished to pack up and go his German landlord took the case to court on, the ground that Germany had not declared war.