"
But the innocent were made to suffer for the guilty and we were not
generous. We maintained the blockade, and German children starved, and
German mothers weakened, and German girls swooned in the tram-cars,
and German babies died. Ludendorff did not starve or die. Neither did
Hindenburg, nor any German war lord, nor any profiteer. Down the
streets of Cologne came people of the rich middle classes, who gorged
themselves on buns and cakes for afternoon tea. They were cakes of
ersatz flour with ersatz cream, and not very healthy or nutritious,
though very expensive. But in the side-streets, among the working--
women, there was, as I found, the wolf of hunger standing with open
jaws by every doorway. It was not actual starvation, but what the
Germans call unternahrung (under-nourishment), producing rickety
children, consumptive girls, and men out of whom vitality had gone
They stinted and scraped on miserable substitutes, and never had
enough to eat. Yet they were the people who for two years at least had
denounced the war, had sent up petitions for peace, and had written to
their men in the trenches about the Great Swindle and the Gilded Ones.
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