Germany in War Time: What an American Girl Saw and HeardMcAuley, Mary Ethel
History
Germany in War Time: What an American Girl Saw and Heard
McAuley, Mary Ethel
World War, 1914-1918 -- Germany
In most German cities one person gets about a pound of meat a week,
but in Vienna there is no meat card and you can buy as much meat as you
like if you can afford to buy it. Every meat shop in Vienna is hanging
full of meat--sausage, ham, pork, beef, chickens and geese. I went
through the great Viennese market which is squares and squares long.
Everywhere meat, meat, meat. I had forgotten that there was so much
meat in the world. Stall after stall just loaded down with hams, but
no bacon. Mostly young pigs. But no one was buying, only looking--like
Till Eulenspiegel, as though the smell was enough. The hams were from
one dollar to one dollar and sixty cents a pound, and the beef was even
higher. Sausage was not so expensive, and geese were cheaper than in
Germany.
I had never seen such an abundance of everything. Acres and acres of
cabbages piled up as high as a house--great, hard-looking heads of a
fresh green color. Then barrels and barrels of apples. Not such good
apples as we have in America, but at such a fancy price! For thirty-two
cents we got six little dried-up apples that we could hardly eat.
From the apple market we went to the onion market. Can you imagine a
square as big as Union Square in New York where nothing but onions are
sold? Well, they have that in Vienna. And the most wonderful onions!
Small white ones, small red ones, big yellow ones and green ones! Onion
peelings flew around everywhere, and do you know that they really
smelled sweet? But the old women in back of the stalls did not look
sweet, but as though they had stood among onions so long that they had
become dried-up onions themselves.
[Illustration: _Waiting for Soup at a Viennese Soup-Kitchen._]
They had no potatoes in the market, but the restaurants seemed to have
plenty of them. Cheese was just beginning to be scarce, and one person
could buy only a quarter of a pound at a time. We collected cheese to
take back to Berlin with us, and we took turns going into the shops
and buying a piece so that the clerks would not know that we were
together. We collected a good many pounds and we got them safely over
the frontier.
Eating in a restaurant in Vienna in war time is the most expensive
thing of which I know. Small meat or deer orders were from eighty cents
upward, and no potatoes go with this order. In Germany, you can get a
piece of meat, two potatoes and a vegetable for thirty-two cents.
There seems to be plenty of milk and sugar in Vienna, but it is
forbidden for any café to serve milk in coffee between the hours of two
and seven o'clock, when every Viennese goes to a café to drink coffee.
This restriction saves many gallons of milk. The coffee is real coffee
and very good. You can have as many eggs as you like, very nicely
cooked at fifteen cents an egg. Sugar is not served on the trains
between Berlin and Vienna, but in a café they give you three lumps with
a cup of coffee. Saccharine is served with tea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account