The northern Bavarian complains that the people of Saxony outbid him among his own villages; the Saxon accuses the iron-fisted Prussian of descending upon his fields and carrying off the food so badly needed at home. For those with influence have little difficulty in reaching beyond the legal twenty-five kilometer limit. The result is that foodstuffs on which the government has set a maximum price often never reach the market, but are gathered on the spot at prices several times higher than the law sanctions. “You see that farm over there?” asked a food-canvasser with whom I walked an hour or more one Sunday. “I stopped there and tried to buy butter. ‘We haven’t an ounce of butter to our names,’ said the woman. ‘Ah,’ said I, just to see if I could not catch her in a lie, ‘but I pay as high as twenty marks a pound.’ ‘In that case,’ said the _Unverschämte_, ‘I can let you have any amount you want up to thirty pounds.’ I could not really pay that price, of course, being a poor man, working hard for nine marks a day. But when I told her I would report her to the police she laughed in my face and slammed the door.” It was easy to understand now why so many of those I had interviewed in my official capacity at Coblenz had expressed the opinion that sooner or later the poor of the cities would descend upon the peasants in bands and rob them of all their hoardings. The countrymen themselves showed that fear of this now and then gnawed at their souls, not so much by their speech as by their circumspect actions. The sight of these swarms of “hamsterers” descended from the north like locusts from the desert gave the prophecy new meaning. It would have been so easy for a few groups of them to join together and wreak the vengeance of their class on the “hard-hearted” peasants. Had they been of a less orderly, lifelong-disciplined race they might have thus run amuck months before. Instead, they plodded on through all the hardships circumstances had woven for them, with that all-suffering, uncomplaining sort of fatalism with which the war seems to have inoculated the German soul.