The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War by D. Thomas Curtin
page 282 of 320 (88%)
page 282 of 320 (88%)
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will wait hour after hour, docile and obedient henceforth, if
necessary until they drop--make no mistake of that. But the authorities also learned a lesson. "People think most of revolution when they are hungry," was what one leader said to me. On this Saturday of which I write not a potato was to be bought in the West-end of Berlin, where the better classes live. Berlin had been without potatoes for nearly a week. To-day they had arrived, and the first to come were sent to the East-end. In the West-end the people are filled with more unquestioning praise of everything the Government does; they applaud when their Kaiser confers an Order upon their Crown Prince for something, not quite clear, which he is supposed to have accomplished at Verdun. Therefore they can wait for potatoes until the more critical East-end is supplied. I went farther eastward through the Kottbuser district to the Kottbuser Ufer on the canal, along which, a couple of hundred people waited in an orderly column without any guardian--another evidence of the success of the drastic measures of July and early August, when the demonstrations against the war were nipped in the bud. These people were waiting for the free advertisement sheets from the gaudily painted yellow Ullstein newspaper building across the square. They had to stand by the side of the canal because a _queue_ of several hundred people waiting for potatoes wound slowly before Ullstein's to the underground potato-shop next door. I had not heard a laugh or seen anybody smile all day, and when darkness fell on the weary city I went to a cheap little beer-room where several "bad," but really harmless Social Democrats used to gather. Among them was the inevitable one who had been to America, |
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