The war had made fewer changes in the public and business world of the Fatherland than in Allied countries. Pariserplatz and Französischestrasse retained their names. Down in Munich the finest park was still the Englische Garten. Most American stocks were quoted in the newspapers. One might still get one’s mail—if any arrived—through the American Express Company, though its banking business was in abeyance. The repertoire of the once Royal Opera included the works of Allied composers, given only in German, to be sure, but that was the custom even before the war. Shopkeepers of the tourist-baiting class spoke English or French on the slightest provocation—often with provoking insistence. I found myself suddenly in need of business cards with which to impress the natives, and the first printing-shop furnished them within three hours. When I returned to the capital from one of my jaunts into the provinces with a batch of films that must be developed and delivered that same evening, the seemingly impossible was accomplished. I suggested that I carry them off wet, directly after the hypo bath, washing and drying them in my hotel room in time to catch a train at dawn. Where a Frenchman or an Italian would have thrown up his hands in horror at so unprecedented an arrangement, the amenable Teuton agreed at once to the feasibility of the scheme. Thus commerce strode aggressively on, irrespective of the customer’s nationality, and with the customary German adaptability. Some lines of business had, of course, been hard hit by the war. There was that, for instance, of individual transportation, public or private. Now and then an iron-tired automobile screamed by along Unter den Linden, but though the government was offering machines as cheaply as two thousand marks each, the scarcity and prohibitive price of “benzine” made purchasers rare. In the collections of dilapidated outfits waiting for fares at railway stations and public squares it was a question whether horse, coachman, or carriage was nearest to the brink of starvation. The animals were miserable runts that were of no military use even before the scarcity of fodder reduced them to their resemblance to museum skeletons. The sallow-faced drivers seemed to envy the beasts the handful of bran they were forced to grant them daily. Their vagabond garb was sadly in keeping with the junk on wheels in which they rattled languidly away when a new victim succumbed to their hollow-eyed pleading. Most of Berlin seemed to prefer to walk, and that not merely because the legal fares had recently been doubled. Taxis might have one or two real rubber tires, aged and patched, but still pumpable; the others were almost sure to be some astonishing substitute which gave the machine a resemblance to a war victim with one leg—or, more exactly, to a three-legged dog. The most nearly successful _Ersatz_ tires were iron rims with a score of little steel springs within them, yet even those did not make joy-riding popular.