“Come and see. Come and see the mothers who have no milk for their babes, and the babes who are bulbousheaded, with rickets. Come and see the tenement lodgings where working families sit round cabbage soup as their chief meal, with bread that ties their entrails into knots but gives ‘em a sense of fulness not enjoyed by those who have no bread. Man, it’s awful. It tears at one’s heart. But you needn’t go into the slums to find hunger--four years of under-nourishment which has weakened growing girls so that they swoon at their work or fall asleep through weakness in the tram cars. In many of the big houses where life looks so comfortable, from which women come out in furs, looking so rich, these German people have not enough to eat, and what they eat is manufactured in the chemist’s shop and the _ersatz_ factories. I found that out from that girl, Elsa von Kreuzenach.” “How?” I asked. “She is a nurse in a babies’ _crèche_, poor child. Showed me round with a mother-look in her eyes, while all the scrofulous kiddies cried, ‘_Guten Tag! Guten Tag!_’ like the quacking of ducks. ‘After to-morrow,’ she said, ‘there will be no more milk for them. What can we do for them then, doctor? They will wither and die.’ Those were her words, and I saw her sadness. I saw something else presently. I saw her sway a little, and she fell like that girl Marthe on the doorstep at Lille. ‘For the love of Mike!’ I said, and when she pulled round bullied her. “‘What did you have for breakfast?’ I asked. “‘_Ersatz_ coffee,’ she said, laughing, ‘and a bit of bread. A good _fruhstuck_, doctor.’ “‘Good be hanged!’ I said. ‘What did you have for lunch?’ “‘Cabbage soup and _ein kleines brodchen_,’ she says. ‘After four years one gets used to it.’ “‘What will you have for dinner?’ said I, not liking the look of things. “She laughed, as though she saw a funny joke. “‘Cabbage soup and turnips,’ she said, ‘and a regular feast.’ “‘I thought your father was a Baron,’ I remarked in my sarcastic way. “‘That’s true,’ she says, ‘and an honest man he is, and therefore poor. It is only the profiteers who feed well in Germany. All through the war they waxed fat on the flesh-and-blood of the men who fought and died. Now they steal the food of the poor by bribing the peasants to sell their produce at any price.’ _Schleichandlung_ is the word she used. That means ‘smuggling.’ It also means hell’s torture, I hope, for those who do it.... So there you are. If Wickham Brand marries Elsa von Kreuze-nach, he marries a girl whose health has been undermined by four years’ semi-starvation. What do you think their children will be? Rickety, tuberculous, undersized, weak-framed. Wickham Brand deserves better luck than that, sonny.”