There was a suggestion of the famine victims of India in many German faces, particularly among the poor of large cities and in factory districts. In a social stampede such as that surging through Germany for the past year or two those who get down under the hoofs of the herd are the chief sufferers. The poor, the sick, whether at home or in hospitals, the weak, the old, the less hardy women, and the little children showed the most definite evidence of the efficiency of the blockade and of the decrease in home production. On the streets, especially of the poorer districts, the majority of those one passed looked as if they ought to be in bed, though many a household included invalids never seen in public. Flocks of ragged, unsoaped, pasty-skinned children swarmed in the outskirts. Even such food as was to be had by those in moderate circumstances contained slight nourishment, next to none for weaklings and babies; while the most hardy found next morning that very little of it had been taken up by the body. Hasty visitors to Berlin, well supplied with funds, who spent a few days in the best hotels, often with the right to draw upon the American or Allied commissaries, or with supplies tucked away in their luggage, were wont to report upon their return that the hunger of Germany was “all propaganda.” Those who lived the unfavored life of the masses, even for as short a time, seldom, if ever, confirmed this complacent verdict. There were, of course, gradations in want, from the semi-starvation of the masses to the comparative plenty of the well-to-do; but the only ones who could be said to show no signs whatever of under-nourishment were foreigners, war profiteers, and those with a strangle-hold on the public purse. The scarcity of food was everywhere in evidence. Almost no appetizing things were displayed to the public gaze. The windows of food-dealers were either empty or filled with laborious falsehoods about the taste and efficacy of the _Ersatz_ wares in them. Slot-machines no longer yielded a return for the dropping of a pewter coin. Street venders of anything edible were almost never seen, except a rare hawker of turnips or asparagus—_Spargel_, for some reason, seemed to be nearly plentiful—who needed not even raise their voices to dispose of their stock in record time. It was no use dropping in on one’s friends, for even though the welcome were genuine, their larder was sure to be as scantily garnished as one’s own. The distribution of such food as remained was carried on with the elaborate orderliness for which the German has long been noted. All Berlin bloomed with posters advising those entitled to them where they could get six ounces of marmalade on such a day, or four pounds of potatoes on another date. The newspapers gave up much of their space to the _Lebensmittelkalender_, or “food calendar,” of Berlin, the capital being divided into hundreds of sections, or “commissions,” for the purposes of distribution: