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 class. 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, ½ 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 "substitute." 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 class 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 crèches 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 sturdy 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."