The New Germany Part 5

_Tuesday Morning._--A fourth-cla.s.s carriage in the "parliamentary" to Magdeburg. There are third-cla.s.s carriages, but a haversack on the floor is more comfortable than a straight-backed wooden bench. But imagine traffic between London and Derby reduced to three trains daily, two of which stop at every station. A peasant woman sitting on a sack is complaining:--"We get up at four every morning and work till dark. The cabbages and potatoes lie at the stations for days; the sun s.h.i.+nes on them, the rain rains on them, and they rot--no trains--so we starve in the fields and you starve in the towns. A burgher frau tells how a barge load of American wheat has arrived at her town--"but what use is it at that price?" A man explains the high price is only for the extra ration and that most of it goes to make up the old ration at the old rate. "But," objects another, "we shall have to pay for it all the same, and we can't." "Emigration, that's what it means," says a soldier. "Why emigrate?" says a young man--"socialisation and Council Government are what's wanted, then the workmen will work and we can pay." You can hear more sound politics and economics now in fourth-cla.s.s carriages than at Weimar, for hunger is the best political education. But--"Oh, politics, always politics now,"

protests a pretty girl The soldier gallantly responds and the debate becomes a Beatrice and Benedict duel, altogether too Shakespearean to report.

_Tuesday Evening._--The General's headquarters. I hand my friend the General my credentials from my right-hand pocket, in my left are letters to Brunswick leaders. Public disorder makes for personal orderliness, and getting pa.s.ses mixed in his pockets cost an officer acquaintance of mine his life lately. The General tells me he is marching against Brunswick--horse, foot and artillery--next evening. I can go ahead in the armoured train or an armoured car. But I explain this time I want to see the occupation from the other side and so must get into Brunswick well ahead. However, the General doesn't respond to my request to be set down outside Brunswick from one of the aeroplanes employed in distributing proclamations. Brunswick has been cut off by road and rail for days, and he evidently prefers it should remain so.

Brunswick, he says, means to fight and must get a sharp lesson. Anyway it's impossible for anyone to get in now. And at first sight one would say he was right. Brunswick is sixty miles from Magdeburg by rail, trains only run in other directions, and even for them one must have a permit. All planes and cars are under control of the troops. So it will have to be the "underground railway" for me. For, when you drive a revolution underground it won't be long before there's an underground railway. It's quite easy even for a foreigner without local friends to get down the lifts and along the pa.s.sages to it, provided he can find the way in. And a good place to look for the entrance is a newspaper office.

_Wednesday Morning._--A back room in a beerhouse of a back street in Magdeburg. I am being booked through to Brunswick on the underground.

The "tickets" are being made out among the slops and my guide is getting his instructions. For all tours on the underground are personally conducted.

_Wednesday Evening._--A beerhouse in a back street of Brunswick. We have run the blockade successfully, and are waiting to be sent for by the revolutionary government. We reached Brunswick soon after dark, having travelled hard all day. First, leaving Magdeburg by train and going north, we got out at a wayside station where a carriage and pair was waiting. This drove us at a great pace over the rolling uplands to the outskirts of a village. Whom it belonged to I didn't hear, but it had the best pair of horses I saw in Germany. Next came a sharp run across country to a halt on a local steam tramway, which took us down to a junction where we got a train. The train had to be left unostentatiously _en route_. Fortunately, German trains don't go very fast nowadays; but standing on the end platform and waiting to jump while my Communist guide turned somersaults on the embankment, I should have preferred even my lop-winged Halle aeroplane to the Brunswick "underground." Another walk to a local station from which a train ran backwards and forwards to Brunswick. As we arrived it came up loaded with refugees who were retiring to country farms to escape the imminent invasion of the Prussian troops.

_Wednesday Midnight._--Government House Brunswick.--The town is plunged in darkness but the Government building is all ablaze with lights and a-bustle with figures hurrying to and fro past the lighted windows. Inside there is a curious nightmare feeling of hampered haste and of imminent menace. Round a long table in an upper room sits a sort of council of war distractedly discussing whether Brunswick shall resist the Prussian troops that are due to arrive at dawn. In a sort of drawing-room adjoining, other members of the Independent Government sit about listlessly in fauteuils brought over from the palace, or pace restlessly about the room. A Communist is trying to spur the Council on to fight, a.s.suring them that the soldiers and sailors are ready to face the tanks and trench mortars--which is true, and that the workmen will support them--which is not. A sailor suddenly appears in the Council room excitedly waving an object in his hand which it seems is a bomb that has just been found hidden in the cellars--but whether intended to blow up the revolutionaries or to be subsequently found by the reactionaries and exploited as an "atrocity" is not clear. Anyway, no one pays any attention to him, and annoyed at this he proceeds to take it to pieces to prove it's a real bomb. I persuade him to go away and drown it.

Soon after the Council decide not to fight. This definite decision wakes us all up from the nightmare. Telephone orders are at once sent out to the outposts, everyone hurries off on some mission, and as we go home the dark alleys are full of dim hastening groups hauling heavy objects--machine-guns and rifles to be thrown into the river or buried.

_Thursday Morning._--A hotel window looking on the main square. I am taking down the history of revolutionary Brunswick from the dictation of one of the leading revolutionaries, while below the Prussian troops are marching in. The organisation of the Independent Government has made good in its last crisis and not a shot has been fired, to the openly expressed disappointment of the invaders. The hotel, awkwardly enough, has been commandeered as an auxiliary headquarters, and I have to escort my informant out past groups of officers and see him safely away into the "underground railway." He is one of the few wanted men who get clean away. Merges and others escaping in aeroplanes and in cars are with few exceptions caught. Merges himself, subsequently, is released by friendly jailers.

The burghers in the streets exult at their deliverance and some of the girls throw flowers to the troops. A young volunteer in an armoured car catches a bunch gracefully and I recognise him as a scion of the princely house of Reuss. At the back of the crowd stalwart men in ill-fitting civilian clothes glower gloomily. A girl at an attic window in a side street cries shrill abuse at the "steel helmets" and one boy in joke points his rifle at her. It goes off, the bullet stars the plaster and the boy looks as terrified as the girl. It is the only shot fired at the fall of the Free Republic of Brunswick.

_Thursday Evening._--The General has deposed the Government of Independents and set up another of Majoritarians, has arrested all the leaders he can find and has proclaimed the severest form of martial law. Many burghers are already regretting the revolutionary _regime_.

The streets are almost deserted for it is already dusk and no one may be out of doors after sundown. In the shadows under the overhanging gables of the mediaeval market-place gleams the steel helm of a Prussian picket. Other cloaked and helmed figures gather round a fire down a side street. Brunswick is back in the Middle Ages and these might be Tilly's men. A fat burgher creeps cautiously past the hotel.

Every evening for years he has trotted to the cosy beer cellar round the corner. Shall these bed.a.m.ned Prussians keep a free Brunswicker from his beer. After several false starts he marches boldly out across the market. Bang goes a blank cartridge from the Prussian sentry and the burgher bolts back into obscurity. The liberty of Brunswick is no more.

The establishment of a Rate Republik at Munich got more attention than the Brunswick attempt but was really less interesting because less indigenous. The relative importance of the two was more accurately a.s.sessed at Berlin. Berlin has always had a difficulty in taking Munich politics seriously. It has had to recognise its superiority in Art and Literature, but compensates itself in matters political by an amused arrogance not unlike the att.i.tude of London to Dublin. But Munich is not Bavaria. If it were, the Prussians and Wurtembergers would never have ventured to interfere; for the Bavarian is far too fierce a fighter and too jealous of his freedom for all the rest of Germany to coerce him as a nation. However, it soon became evident that Munich Communism represented only a section of the Munich workmen and was resented by Bavaria as a whole, with the exception of the proletariat in the large industrial towns. Even so, the Berlin Government acted cautiously. It was indeed in a difficult position; for the policy that Scheidemann's socialism stood for was one of compromise with political clericalism and provincial particularism.

His minister, Preuss, then framing the const.i.tution, had been reluctantly compelled to reject the conception of the more radical reformers who had hoped to found a wholly uniform and wholly united centralised German Socialist State. The Government had been forced to use the political jealousies of the German States and the clerical prejudices of the Centrum as weapons against the social revolution. It would not be too much to say of this period of German politics that only the revolutionary adherents of the Council movement were Germans; while the upper and middle cla.s.ses had again become Prussians, Saxons or Bavarians. And now it had become necessary to coerce the capital of Bavaria, the centre of Roman Catholicism and the most sensitive and important of the minor kingdoms. And this, too, at the very time when everything was being done to induce German-Austria, Bavaria's neighbour, to accept the same sort of position in the Realm as that held by Bavaria. It was a most awkward predicament and the German Government showed less than its usual tactlessness in dealing with it.

It arranged with the Bavarian bourgeois Government, when matters came to a crisis at Munich, that it should take refuge at Bamberg, where it could be protected by the Government's troops centred at Weimar. Then it arranged with Wurtemberg and Baden to supply troops to restore this Bamberg _ancien regime_, supporting them with Saxons and, at first, keeping the Prussian corps in the background. Operations were then begun, first against the Franconian towns of North Bavaria, where Bavarian sentiment was weak. Any attempt against Munich was delayed until a raging Press propaganda against the rule of the Munich Bolshevists in the Wittelsbach Palais, and the crus.h.i.+ng of the movement everywhere else, had excited the cla.s.s feeling of the propertied farmers and burghers and had exorcised temporarily Bavarian jealousy of Prussia. All this, however, would not have ensured Berlin success, but for the inherent weakness of the Munich revolutionaries.

The movement for Council Government and general Communism had lost all chance of success when it was forced either by the policy of its enemies or by the jealousies of its supporters into the hands of men like the Russian extremists, Levine and Levien.

I saw a good deal of both men during my stay in Munich a few days before their fall, and both were very frank as to the hopelessness of their position. They were very different. Levine was a black Jew of a common and rather criminal type, with a bad record, but great ability of a sort. Levien was a cosmopolitan and a Bohemian--in appearance and abilities a dissolute and demoralised version--a Bohemian and Bolshevist caricature--of the Treasury official who now represents us and rules Germany on the Reparation Commission.

A curious picture it was this Communist dictators.h.i.+p in the Wittelsbach palace. Outside--crowds of workmen waiting for the posting of the bulletins in which decrees were proclaimed. Inside--a great coming and going of seedy-looking revolutionaries--a frantic clattering of typewriters pounded by unkempt girls--hurried conclaves in corners--remains of meals on marble tables--the dubious atmosphere of a Quartier Latin garret--the high pressure of a Bolshevist headquarters and the melancholy madness of a Wittelsbach pavilion.

The political situation in Bavaria after the revolution had rested entirely on the personal power of the idealist Jew, Kurt Eisner. His influence over both revolutionaries and reformers produced in Munich a coalition of Socialists in which the predominant element was progressive; whereas in Berlin, for want of any such personality the coalition split up into reactionaries and revolutionaries. The a.s.sa.s.sination of Eisner and the disablement of Auer on 21st February were succeeded by some weeks of the Hoffmann Government during which the issue as between parliamentary and council government was defining itself. The distribution of force at this time appears from a division in the a.s.sembly of Councils where the proclamation of a Rate-Republik (a Council State) was outvoted by 230 to 70; Levien himself, the Bolshevist, declaring against it as premature. But during March the strong movement to the left and towards a Council const.i.tution, noticeable in the Berlin Rate-Congress, made apparently even greater progress in the Bavarian industrial towns. Majority-Socialists, the Social-Democrats, found their followers going over _en ma.s.se_ to the Independents, while the latter lost equally heavily to the Communists.

In Prussia the Majoritarians had made up for this loss of popular support by creating a military force strong enough to resist any attempt to overthrow them by other than const.i.tutional means. But in Bavaria the Majority party found itself being left in the air. It seems thereupon to have adopted a policy of outbidding its opponents.

At Augsburg, late in March, Niekisch, a leading Majoritarian, declared for a Rate-Republik exclusive of Parliament, and succeeded in getting it voted. The vote was later rescinded under influence of the Independents and Communists, but restored under Majoritarian pressure.

The same curious reversal of roles followed in Munich, where a Majoritarian, Thomas, pressed for a Rate-Republik. A commission of Left Majoritarians and Right Independents was appointed on April 4th and adopted a programme including the dictators.h.i.+p of the working cla.s.s, the organisation of a council system on an industrial and professional basis, the socialisation of industries, banks, and land, the revolutionising of administrative, judicial, and educational systems, the separation of Church and State, compulsory work for all cla.s.ses, the formation of a Red Army, and alliance with Hungary and Russia.

This programme was to be executed by a Central Council and Commissioners, equally composed of Independents, Communists, and Social-Democrats. At first the Communists refused to join and attacked the new Government bitterly as a humbug; but later, after proclamation of the Rate-Republik and a Council const.i.tution, agreed to co-operate in the Central Council in an advisory capacity. The Rate-Republik was proclaimed on April 7th. The Hoffmann Government left; but soon after reappeared, first at Nuremberg and then at Bamberg, where it established itself as a sort of Bavarian Weimar. The Berlin Government at once refused recognition to the new _regime_, while it gave every countenance and support to the Bamberg Government.

A few days later, Sunday the 13th, a "_putsch_" under the leaders.h.i.+p of a _ci-devant_, von Seifert.i.tz, and a Majoritarian, Lowenfeld, supported by the Republican _Schutztruppe_, overthrew this Government and arrested the Independent members of the Central Council, as also Muhsam, a non-partisan idealist. The Communists then took immediate action and a hundred or so armed workmen under Toller, a young Independent officer, ejected as many soldiers from the railway station at the cost of two killed and a few wounded and some broken windows--a scuffle represented in Berlin as a desperate battle in which the station and surrounding houses had been completely destroyed. The Communists then formed a "Bolshevist" Government under Commissioners, among whom were included the Russians Levien and Levine, and an Executive Council, on which were two Independents and a moderate, Maenner--an able man in charge of finance.

Of course in this curious _cha.s.ser-croiser_ it is open to anyone to regard the Majoritarians as mere governmental _agents provocateurs_, working for a premature proclamation of the Rate-Republik, with such motives as it may suit the critic to attribute to them. This was the view taken by the _Times_; but personally I am inclined to see merely the manoeuvring of demagogues ambitious of power, in a people with little political experience. To retain power, the Majoritarian Socialists of Prussia were prepared to re-introduce militarism; while those of Bavaria were prepared to introduce "Bolshevism" for the same object.

Both the course and the collapse of Munich Communism give an answer to the question whether Russian Bolshevism can take root in Germany. If Bolshevism meant Sovietism and merely is a const.i.tutional conflict between parliamentary and council government, it could. There is no such traditional belief in the parliamentary system in Germany as to make it an essential foundation of const.i.tutional government. Neither the old Berlin Reichstag nor the Weimar a.s.sembly acquired popular confidence. But if by Bolshevism we mean an economic cla.s.s conflict concerning the dictators.h.i.+p of the proletariat, the answer seems to be that it cannot be established in Germany, under normal conditions.

The short life of the Munich Commune seemed to show this. The Government consisted of Commissioners--a sort of inner Cabinet, an Executive Council--a sort of Ministry, and an a.s.sembly of Councils--the Legislature. The first was Bolshevist, in general standpoint, the second Independent Socialist and Moderate Communist, the third predominantly Moderate Socialist. The Commissioners, especially the Russians, did not enjoy the confidence of the a.s.sembly, still less of the garrison. I believe that they would soon have been replaced by a Socialist _regime_, but for the military action of Prussia and Wurtemberg.

Nor were the measures taken by this _regime_ what could be called Bolshevist. The absurd newspaper yarns, reproducing all the old calumnies against Russian Council Government, including the communisation of women, gave quite a false impression. I have a complete list of the Communist measures, and they contain nothing very sensational and mostly existed anyway only on paper. I will give two examples which I heard discussed before the a.s.sembly. The _cafes chantants_, a great feature of Munich, had all been closed on moral grounds, not without justification, as those who know Munich will admit. The delegates of the employes appealed against this as throwing three thousand people out of work. The debate showed that this measure was largely a protest of the workmen against the irregular lives of the Communist leaders themselves, and the cafes were allowed to re-open under the control of a committee of the a.s.sembly. Further, the middle-cla.s.s papers had been suspended by the Commissioners. So representatives of the Communist and Independent papers rose to say they would suspend publication until this prohibition was removed.

This threat was carried out and at the time I left the prohibition was about to be repealed.

As to the practical results of the Bolshevist _regime_ it was difficult to judge from the two or three weeks it was running; all the more that half this time was pa.s.sed in the general strike proclaimed by the Communists which they could not prevent after their accession to power. But after work was resumed it was clear that conditions were normal. Order was not disturbed and the revolutionary tribunal as to which wild stories were told was a mild affair. It was even recognised by the local bar--and when an agent of the Anti-Bolshevist League was caught with false Communist papers and large funds he was only fined the amount in his possession. Telegraph officials, accomplices of a spy in running a secret telegraphic service to Nuremberg, were acquitted as only irresponsible agents. Russian Bolshevism would have given them a short shrift. The only practical difference between Communist Munich and Independent Brunswick was that the Munich revolutionaries not having the hearty support of the garrison had to form volunteer corps of Red Guards. These, like the Government volunteers, were highly paid and fed, the means being provided partly by money confiscated as illegal remittances abroad, partly by printing new notes. The extent of the attempted exportation of money may be guessed from the thousand mark note, the only convenient means of exportation, having been worth fourteen hundred marks. The removal of the note printing presses to Bamberg embarra.s.sed the Communists for a time, but they had succeeded while I was there in printing twenty mark notes, which were, of course, declared worthless by the German Government.

At the time I left Munich the garrison had declared in favour of negotiating with the expeditions menacing Munich from Augsburg and Ingolstadt, and the workmen, though against negotiating with the troops, would clearly have welcomed a peaceful solution even at the cost of expelling the Russians. This I was able to report to the Premier Hoffmann at Bamberg, whom I found under the impression that negotiations were hopeless. Three days later, they were opened at his invitation at Nuremberg, but led to nothing, as the workmen would not agree to disarm. The troops accordingly marched in, driving the "red army" before them; and Munich, less happy in its leaders than Brunswick, became the scene of the usual sniping and skirmis.h.i.+ng by insurgents with machine-gunning and bombarding by the troops. The influence of the Russians was probably responsible for one particularly ugly incident, the cold-blooded murder of a number of "hostages" in reprisal for the wholesale shooting of prisoners by the troops. Levine, the leading member of the Russian clique, was captured and shot and several less dangerous and even quite harmless revolutionary or Radical leaders also perished, some "by accident."

Levien was arrested some months later but escaped to Vienna. The new Bavarian Ministry, or rather the old Bamberg Government restored, then took on the same character as the Ministry in Berlin; that is a Government by military force behind a Moderate Socialist facade.

The failure of the revolution in Munich was its last effort in this first volume of the German revolution. The movement thereafter adopted Leipzig as its centre, an Independent stronghold; but when later the Government picked a quarrel with Leipzig, occupied it with troops and abolished its Independent _regime_, there was no resistance.

In this autumn of 1919 the German revolution seems hunted to death. It has, however, only gone to ground.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] "Brunswick succeeded more thoroughly than any other German town in reaching the goal of the whole development of mediaeval civic life--that is the emanc.i.p.ation and elevation of the working cla.s.s....

"The Guilds developed unusually early in Brunswick those activities which rendered them everywhere schools of political education and centres of revolution. In Brunswick first of all did the workmen make head against the Burghers. And if old records can be trusted what immoderate ambitions appear even in their first rising in 1292. They were not merely in revolt against abuses or for some moderate partic.i.p.ation in government, but proposed nothing less than the suppression of the old Const.i.tution and to make themselves absolute masters of the town." Chroniken der Deutschen Stadte. Braunschweig. Vol.

I., p. xxvi.

CHAPTER IV

RUIN AND RECONSTRUCTION

The mistake we are all making about Germany over here, and a very natural one, is that we can't realise what Germany to-day is like.

While we are rapidly getting back to the material and mental conditions of pre-war days, Germany is daily getting farther and farther away from us. It is difficult to express the difference. We all know the curious psychological change that comes over our lives when the doctor tells us we must "give up"; how then in a moment, as we sink into bed, we are changed from responsible personalities, ruling our own and others' lives, to helpless enc.u.mbrances ruled by doctors and nurses; and how we only recover our rights through a long convalescence. Germany has given up. It carried on until it collapsed, and now lies semi-comatose; and we, still absorbed in our quarrel, keep pestering it with solicitors and foreclosures instead of patching it up with doctors and food. Descriptions of economic conditions in Germany must therefore be read with the realisation that they are morbid symptoms. Germany may be, no doubt is, working its way through revolution to a saner, sounder condition, but at present is as abnormal and helpless as a snake changing its skin. Meantime, we, using the complete control over Europe that the war has put into our hands, have so interfered with this process as to risk making out of Germany as great a danger to the existing order in Europe as we made out of Russia.

Nor is the danger one of to-day only. In ten years' time when the Blockade will be no more than a memory, but when the surviving childhood of Germany, bodily wasted and mentally warped, comes to maturity, Europe will suffer for it. The fathers will have eaten their sour grapes by then, but the children's teeth will still be set on edge.

"I do not complain of your blockade, it ended the war," said to me a former Minister and a leader of political thought. "Yes, I've lost four stone since I left the trenches"--he was indeed only the framework of a once big and burly man with the low voice and languid bearing of the underfed. "I'm all right on what I get, it's the children--I could give you statistics, but you wouldn't believe them; I never do. Go and see them yourself."

So I went. First a tour of the cellars of the great tenement houses of Berlin--cellars closed before as unfit for habitation, but now, under stress of house shortage, lived in by the large families of the German working cla.s.s. In one I find a war widow keeping five children on the bare ration: 5 lb. of potatoes, 5 lb. of bread per head a week, lb.

of meal and 1 lb. of jam when they can afford it and find it. The bigger children get a quart of skim-milk a week, too sour for anything but soup--the younger about two quarts of full-milk. They are having their supper--cabbage and potatoes. The younger children nibble suspiciously at gifts of chocolate. They do not know what it is and suspect a new "subst.i.tute." The younger children look better than the elder. The eldest boy has lost his job because he "can't keep his feet." The mother is emaciated. Next door is another family--the father, a painter, is in work, but is continually losing days from "stomach-trouble." They have lost one child from decline.

And so on, always the same stories of struggle against decline from want of fats or sugar, for the sugar supply failed when the Poles occupied Posen--against dirt from want of soap--against dark and cold, for the gas and coal are getting daily shorter.

Then I went to a public soup kitchen where a long queue of every cla.s.s was waiting for its plate of potato-soup, just potatoes, absolutely nothing else, and they too deducted from the week's ration. "Splendid, splendid soup," says an enthusiastic little man, a small shopkeeper, perhaps, "not a rotten potato in the whole plateful."

Thence to the creches and children's hospitals of the organisation started by the Empress Frederick and run for many years by English ladies. In these big, bright rooms there was the same ominous quiet as in the dark cellars. "We can keep them alive when we get them in time, but we can't do more. We can fill them, but we can't feed them with this," said the sister, ladling out potatoes and cabbage to the older children and oatmeal gruel to the younger. Everywhere swollen bellies and shrunken limbs--children of three that had nothing actually wrong with them but couldn't yet stand--children with "English sickness" as rickets is called--children of school age that couldn't be sent to school because they were so mentally and physically backward. Here and there a st.u.r.dy infant that owed a better start to some stronger mother, but the most of them lying silent or wailing feebly. "We could save even that one," says the sister, unwrapping a baby so shrivelled it looked scarcely human, "but we can get nothing, though they give us here whatever there is. They know it's the children that matter most now."

Children have always meant much to the Germans, and in those days of growing disgust with the past and of growing despair as to the future they meant so much that nothing else seemed ever to matter to the women at any rate. I heard a woman prominent in politics say she was glad to hear that the Allies were going to occupy Essen, Dusseldorf and the industrial district, because then they must see what was happening to the children there, owing to the blockade and to the barring off of the milk supply from across the Rhine.

I soon saw enough to be satisfied that though food could still be got at a price in the eating houses of Berlin, private households of the whole working cla.s.s and lower middle cla.s.s were so straitened for food that some members of each family were being starved; either because they were too sickly to digest such food as could be got or because they were giving it to the children. The same conclusion was come to by the numerous Commissions sent out to report, even though these were generally composed of young officers; instead, as they should have been, of experienced medical men and food experts. These Commissions were given every facility for estimating how far under-nourishment had deteriorated the working power of the poor and was deterring them from work. Also how far the low development and high death-rate of the children was due to this. And their reports show what a terrible responsibility we a.s.sumed when we maintained the blockade after the armistice, as a means of political pressure and a method of penal procedure. These reports are easily accessible to English readers, so I will only give here, for what they are worth, the conclusions come to by one representative neutral and one native authority. A Copenhagen a.s.sociation for studying the economic results of the war, estimated that the German population, which at the beginning of the war was about 67.8 millions, would, but for the war, have risen by now to about 70 millions and had sunk to about 65 millions. Of this decrease 3.5 millions was due to diminished birth-rate and 2.1 millions to increased mortality. In the last years of war the birth-rate fell to one-half. Of the increased deaths, 700,000 were ascribable to insufficient nourishment, mainly in the last two years of war. In 1918 the death-rate for both s.e.xes over 60 increased by half and doubled for children between 4 and 14. My observations also suggest that it was children of this age that suffered most from the blockade. The loss of about two millions of men in the prime of life, the decreased vitality of the women and children who suffered especially from the blockade, and the general economic conditions of the country, make any early re-establishment of previous productivity impossible.

Again, in the _Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift_ one, Geheimrat Rubner, compares losses by war and blockade as follows:--

Military losses by Civil losses Wounds. Disease. by blockade.

1st year of war 481,506 24,394 88,235 2nd " " 330,332 30,329 121,174 3rd " " 294,743 30,190 259,627 4th " " 317,954 38,167 293,700[B]