Pension schedules are being made up by different societies, and it is not yet certain which one the government will adopt; at present every woman whose husband is in the war is given a certain amount for herself and children. For women who are now widows the pension is according to the rank of the husband. For instance, the widow of a common soldier gets 300 marks a year. If she has one child she get 568 marks and so on, increasing according to the number of children, for four children she gets 1072 marks. The widow of a non-commissioned officer, a corporal or a sergeant, gets a little more, and the widow of a lieutenant gets over twice as much as a common soldier's widow. The widow of a major-general gets 3246 marks a year. When she has children, she gets very little more, for when a man has risen to the rank of major-general the chances are that he is old and that his children are grown up and able to take care of themselves. [Illustration: _Digging the Tunnel for the New Underground Railway in Berlin._] These schedules are also controlled by the number of years a man has served in the army, and they are trying to pass a new bill which requires that pensions shall be controlled by the salary the man had before the war. If the dead man had worked himself up into a good position of 1000 marks a month, his family should have more than the family of a man who could only make 300 marks a month. The schedule as it now stands for wounded men is that a private who has lost his leg gets 1,368 marks a year; a lieutenant gets 4851 marks a year; and a general 10,332 marks a year. [Illustration: _Caring for the Trees._] They have in Germany a "votes for women" organization of 600,000 members, but it will be years and years before it ever comes to anything, for German women are very slow in acting and thinking for themselves. GERMAN "SPARSAMKEIT." When the blockade of Germany began, no one believed that she could hold out without supplies from the outside world; that in a short time her people would be starving and that she would be out of raw material. During the few months before the blockade was declared, Germany had shipped into her ports as much cotton, copper, rubber and food as was possible. After the blockade started much stuff was obtained from Holland and Scandinavia. From the very first days of the war Germany set to work to utilize all the material that she had on hand, and her watchword to her people was "waste nothing." [Illustration: _Collecting Cherry Stones for Making Oil._]