he innocent were made to suffer for the guilty and we were not
generous. We maintained the blockade, and German children starved, and
German mothers weakened, and German girls swooned in the tram-cars,
and German babies died. Ludendorff did not starve or die. Neither did
Hindenburg, nor any German war lord, nor any profiteer. Down the streets
of Cologne came people of the rich middle classes, who gorged themselves
on buns and cakes for afternoon tea. They were cakes of ersatz flour
with ersatz cream, and not very healthy or nutritious, though very
expensive. But in the side-streets, among the working--women, there was,
as I found, the wolf of hunger standing with open jaws by every doorway.
It was not actual starvation, but what the Germans call unternahrung
(under-nourishment), producing rickety children, consumptive girls, and
men out of whom vitality had gone They stinted and scraped on miserable
substitutes, and never had enough to eat. Yet they were the people who
for two years at least had denounced the war, had sent up petitions
for peace, and had written to their men in the trenches about the Great
Swindle and the Gilded Ones. They were powerless, as some of them told
me, because of the secret police and martial law. What could they do
against the government, with all their men away at the front? They were
treated like pigs, like dirt. They could only suffer and pray. They had
a little hope that in the future, if France and England were not too
hard, they might pay back for the guilt of their war lords and see a new
Germany arise out of its ruin, freed from militarism and with greater
liberties. So humble people talked to us when I went among them with
a friend who spoke good German, better than my elementary knowledge. I
believed in their sincerity, which had come through suffering, though
I believed that newspaper editors, many people in the official
classes, and the old military caste were still implacable in hatred and
unrepentant.

The German people deserved punishment for their share in the guilt of
war. They had been punished by frightful losses of life, by a multitude
of cripples, by the ruin of their Empire. When they told me of their
hunger I could not forget the hungry wives and children of France and
Belgium, who had been captives in their own land behind German lines,
nor our prisoners who had been starved, until many of them died. When
I walked through German villages and pitied the women who yearne