On this subject of _Ersatz_, or far-fetched substitutes for the real thing, many pages might be written, even without trespassing for the moment on the forbidden territory of food. The department stores were veritable museums of _Ersatz_ articles. With real shoes costing about sixty dollars, and real clothing running them a close race, it was essential that the salesman should be able to appease the wrathful customer by offering him “something else—er—_almost_ as good.” The shoe substitutes alone made the shop-windows a constant source of amazement and interest. Those with frankly wooden soles and cloth tops were offered for as little as seven marks. The more ambitious contraptions, ranging from these simple corn-torturers improved with a half-dozen iron hinges in the sole to those laboriously pieced together out of scraps of leather that suggested the ultimate fate of the window-straps missing from railway carriages, ran the whole gamut of prices, up to within a few dollars of the genuine article. Personally, I have never seen a German in _Ersatz_ footwear, with the exception of a few working in their gardens. But on the theory of no smoke without some fire the immense stocks displayed all over the country were _prima-facie_ evidence of a considerable demand. Possibly the substitutes were reserved for interior domestic use—fetching styles of carpet slippers. On the street the German still succeeded somehow in holding his sartorial own, perhaps by the zealous husbanding of his pre-war wardrobe. Look where you would you were sure to find some new _Ersatz_ brazenly staring you in the face. Clothing, furniture, toys, pictures, drugs, tapestries, bicycles, tools, hand-bags, string, galoshes, the very money in your pocket, were but imitations of the real thing. Examine the box of matches you acquired at last with much patience and diplomacy and you found it marked, “Without sulphur and without phosphorus”—a sad fact that would soon have made itself apparent without formal announcement. The wood was still genuine; thanks to their scientific forestry, the Germans have not yet run out of that. But many of their great forests are thinned out like the hair of the middle-aged male—and the loss as cleverly concealed. There has been much Teutonic boasting on this subject of _Ersatz_, but since the armistice, at least, it had changed to wailing, for even if he ever seriously believed otherwise the German had discovered that the vast majority of his laborious substitutes did not substitute.