As we are carefully avoiding the mention of food, the most grievous source of annoyance to the rank and file of which we can speak here is the lack of tobacco. In contrast with the rest of the country there were plenty of cigars in Berlin—apparently, until one found that the heaps of boxes adorning tobacconists’ windows were placarded “_Nur leere Kisten_,” or at best were filled with rolls of some species of weed that could not claim the most distant relationship to the fragrant leaf of Virginia. I indulged one day, before I had found the open sesame to the American commissary, in one of the most promising of those mysterious vegetables, at two marks a throw. The taste is with me yet. American officers at the Adlon sometimes ventured to leave food-supplies in the drawers of their desks, but their cigars they locked in the safe, along with their secret papers and real money. In the highest-priced restaurant of Berlin the shout of, “Waiter, bring two cigarettes!” was sure to focus all eyes on the prosperous individual who could still subject his fortune to such extravagance. Here and there along Friedrichstrasse hawkers assailed passers-by with raucous cries of “English and American tobacco!” Which proved not only that the German had lost all national feeling on this painful subject, but that the British Tommy and the American doughboy had brought with them some of the tricks they had learned in France. These street-corner venders, not merely of the only real tobacco to be publicly had in Berlin, but of newspapers, post-cards, and the like, were more apt than not to be ex-soldiers in field gray, sometimes as high in rank as _Feldwebels_. Many others struggled for livelihood by wandering like gipsies from one cheap café to another, playing some form of musical instrument and taking up collections from the clients, often with abashed faces. Which brings us to the question of gaiety in Berlin. Newspapers, posters, and blazing electric signs called constant attention to countless café, cabaret, cinema, and theater entertainments. Every one of them I visited was well filled, if not overcrowded. On the whole they were distinctly immoral in tone or suggestion. Berlin seems to be running more and more to this sort of thing. There is something amiss in the country whose chief newspaper carries the conspicuous announcement: “NAKEDNESS! Fine artistic postals now ready to be delivered to the trade,” or with the city where scores of street-corners are adorned by crowds of men huddled around a sneaking vender of indecent pictures. Similar scenes offend the eye in most large cities the world over, of course, but something seemed to suggest that Berlin was unusually given to this traffic. The French claim that theirs is at heart the moral race and that the Boche is a leader in immorality, and they cite many instances of prisoners found in possession of disgusting photographs as one of the proofs of their contention.