The Iron Ration Part 5

The trouble was that the shipments secured in Bulgaria never reached their destination unless bribes moved the trains. The Serbs held the central reaches of the Danube, which, in addition to this, was ice-bound just then, and all freight from Bulgaria, going north, had to be taken through Roumania. To get them into that country was simple enough, but to get them out took more cash, more diamonds, and considerable champagne. In a single month the price of that beverage in Bucharest jumped from eighteen to forty francs, and, as if to avenge themselves, the Germans began shortly to refill the shelves with "champus" made along the Rhine.

With Bulgaria explored and described, I set out for Turkey, where, at Constantinople, in July of that year, I ran into the first bread-line formed by people "who had the price."

The Ottoman capital gets its food-supplies normally over the waterways that give access to the city--the Bosphorus from the north and the Black Sea and the Dardanelles from the south and the Mediterranean. Both of these avenues of trade and traffic were now closed. The Russians kept the entrance to the Bosphorus well patrolled, and the French and British saw to it that nothing entered the Dardanelles, even if they themselves could not navigate the strait very far, as some eight months' stay with the Turkish armed forces at the Dardanelles and on Gallipoli made very plain to me.

The Anatolian Railroad, together with a few unimportant tap lines, was now the only means of reaching the agricultural districts of Asia Minor--the Konia Vilayet and the Cilician Plain, for instance. But the line is single-tracked and was just then very much overloaded with military transports. The result of this was that Constantinople ate up what stores there were, and then waited for more.

There was more, of course. The Ottoman Empire is an agricultural state, and would be more of one if the population could see its way clear to doing without the goat and the fat-tailed sheep. That its capital and only large city should be without breadstuff as early as July, 1915, was hard to believe, yet a fact.

In May of that year I had made a trip through Anatolia, Syria, and Arabia. By that time the crops in Asia Minor are well advanced and wheat is almost ripe. These crops were good, but, like the crops of the preceding season, which had not yet been moved, owing to the war, they were of little value to the people of Constantinople. They could not be had.

I hate estimates, and for that reason will not indulge in them here. But the fact is that from Eregli, in the Cappadocian Plain, to Eski-Shehir, on the Anatolian high plateau, I saw enough wheat rotting at the railroad stations to supply the Central Powers for two years. Not only was every shed filled with the grain, but the farmers who had come later were obliged to store theirs out in the open, where it lay without shelter of any sort. Rain and warmth had caused the grain on top to sprout l.u.s.tily, while the inside of the heap was rotting. The railroad and the government promised relief day after day, but both were unable to bring it over the single track, which was given over, almost entirely, to military traffic.

Thus it came that the shops of the _ekmekdjis_ in Constantinople were besieged by hungry thousands, the merest fraction of whom ever got the loaf which the ticket, issued by the police, promised. That was not all, however. Speculators and dealers soon discerned their chance of making money and were not slow in availing themselves of it. Prices rose until the poor could buy nothing but corn meal. A corner in olives added to the distress of the mult.i.tude, and the government, with that ineptness which is typical of government in Turkey, failed to do anything that had practical value. Though the Young Turks had for a while set their faces against corruption, many of the party leaders had relapsed, with the result that little was done to check the rapacity of the dealer who h.o.a.rded for purposes of speculation and price-boosting.

Yet those in the Constantinople bread-lines were modest in their normal demands. Turk and Levantine manage to get along well on a diet of bread and olives, with a little _pilaff_--a rice dish--and a small piece of meat, generally mutton, once a day thrown in. With a little coffee for the Turk, and a gla.s.s of red wine for the Levantine, this is a very agreeable bill of fare, and a good one, as any expert in dietetics will affirm.

I had occasion to discuss the food shortage in Turkey with Halideh Edib Hannym Effendi, Turkey's leading feminist and education promoter.

She a.s.signed two causes. One of them was the lack of transportation, to which I have already referred as coming under my own observation. The other was found in the ineptness of the Ottoman government. She was of the opinion that there was enough food in the Bosphorus region, but that the speculators were holding it for higher prices. This, too, was nothing new to me. But it was interesting to hear a Turkish woman's opinion on this nefarious practice. To the misfortune of war the greedy were adding their l.u.s.t for possession, and the men in Stamboul lacked the courage to say them nay. That men like Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey, who had taken upon themselves the responsibility of having Turkey enter the lists of the European War, were now afraid to put an end to food speculation, showed what grip the economic pirate may lay upon a community. What the Allied fleet and military forces at the Dardanelles and on Gallipoli had not accomplished the food sharks had done. Before them the leaders of the Young Turks had taken to cover.

IV

FAMINE COMES TO STAY

That the food question should have become acute first in a state as distinctly agricultural as the Ottoman Empire furnishes an apt ill.u.s.tration of the fact that in the production of food man-power is all-essential. The best soil and climate lose their value when farming must be neglected on account of a shortage of labor. The plants providing us with breadstuff are the product of evolution. At one time they were mere gra.s.ses, as their tendency to revert to that state, when left to themselves, demonstrates in such climates as make natural propagation possible. It is believed that the "oat gra.s.s" on the South African veldt is a case of that sort.

But apart from all that, every cropping season shows that man, in order to have bread, must plow, sow, cultivate, and reap. When the soil is no longer able to supply the cereal plants with the nutriment they need, fertilizing becomes necessary.

I have shown that bread-lines formed in Constantinople when out in the Anatolian vilayets the wheat was rotting at the side of the railroad track. This was due to defects and handicaps in distribution. But there was also another side to this. I made several trips through Thrace, that part of the Ottoman Empire which lies in Europe, and found that its rich valleys and plains could have supplied the Turkish capital with all the wheat it needed had the soil been cultivated. This had not been done, however. The mobilizations had taken so many men from the _tchiftliks_--farms--that a proper tilling of the fields was out of the question. A shortage in grain resulted, and the food sharks were thus enabled to exact a heavy tribute from the public.

It is a case of hard times with the speculator when things are plentiful. He is then unable to gather in all of the supply. There is a leakage which he does not control and that leakage causes his defeat in the end. It is a well-known fact that a corner in wheat is impossible, and a dangerous undertaking, so long as from 15 to 30 per cent. of the grain remains uncontrolled. That quant.i.ty represents the excess profit which the speculator counts upon. Not to control it means that the supply available to the consumer is large enough to keep the price near its normal curves, to which the speculator must presently adhere if he is not to lose money on his corner.

But a great deal depends upon how corrupt the government is. The Turk-Espaniole clique in Stamboul and Pera had cornered the Thracian wheat crop in 1915, and the Anatolian Railroad was unable to bring in enough breadstuff from Anatolia and Syria. The bread-lines were the result.

It was not much better in Austria and Hungary. Here, too, production had fallen off about one-fifth, and the many war purveyors, who had been driven out of business by saner systems of army purchasing, had turned their attention to foods of any sort. In Germany the same thing happened in a slightly less degree.

Since in the Central states the bread ticket had meanwhile been introduced, and the quality and price of bread fixed, one may ask the question: Why was bread short in those countries when formerly they produced fully 95 per cent. of their breadstuffs?

The answer is that, firstly, production had fallen off, and, secondly, there was much cornering by the speculators.

It must be borne in mind that bread regulation so far consisted of attempts by the government to provide for the mult.i.tude bread at a reasonable price, without distribution being placed under efficient control. The rapacity of the food shark had forced up the price of breadstuffs, and nothing but government interference could check the avarice of the dealers. But the population had to have cheap bread, and attention had to be given the paucity of the supply. Fixed prices were to make possible the former, and a limitation in consumption was to overcome the latter.

It will be seen that this procedure left the food shark a free hand. He could buy as before and sell when and to whom he pleased. Thus it came that, while the ma.s.ses of Germany and Austria-Hungary had to eat war-bread in prescribed quant.i.ties, those better off materially still had their wheat-flour products. The authorities were not ignorant of this, but had good reason not to interfere. The time was come when the financial resources of the country had to be "mobilized," and this was being done by extracting from the population all the spare coin and concentrating it in the hands of the food speculators so that these could be taxed and enabled to buy war loans. These men were easily dealt with. Very often they were bankers, and kings of industry and commerce.

To provide the government with funds for the war was to them a question of profit.

The bread ticket did not favor an equitable distribution, nor was it ever intended to do that. Its sole purpose at first was to tax food in such a manner that those who were willing to buy more food than the bread ticket prescribed had to pay heavily for this indulgence. That this was a socio-economic injustice was plain to those who reasoned far enough. But the patient rabble accepted the thing at its face value, as it will accept most things that bear the stamp of authority.

I had no difficulty anywhere in getting all the wheat bread and farinaceous dishes I wanted. It was not even necessary to ask for them.

It was taken for granted that I belonged to the cla.s.s that did not have to eat war-bread and do without pudding and cake, and that was enough.

While I was supposed to have a bread ticket, few ever asked for it. In the restaurants which I frequented I generally found a dinner roll hidden under the napkin, which for that purpose was as a rule folded in the manner known as the "bishop's miter."

But gone for the many was the era of enough food. The bread ration in Berlin was three hundred grams (ten and a half ounces) per day, and in Vienna it was two hundred and ten grams (seven and two-fifths ounces).

Together with a normal supply of other eatables, flour for cooking, for instance, these rations were not really short, and in my case they were generous. But with most it was now a question of paying abnormally high prices for meat and the like, so that enough bread was more of a necessity than ever.

It was rather odd that in Austria the bread ration should be smaller than in Germany. That country had in the past produced more breadstuff per capita than her ally, and would have been able to import from Hungary had conditions been different. Hungary had in the past exported wheat flour to many parts, due largely to the fine quality of her grain.

Now, of a sudden, it, too, faced a shortage.

The fact is that Austria-Hungary had mobilized a large part of her male population and had for that reason been extremely short of farm labor during the season of 1915. The large reserve stores had been exhausted by improvidence, and, to make things worse, the crops of that year were not favored by the weather. Meanwhile, much of the wheat had pa.s.sed into the hands of the speculators, who were releasing it only when their price was paid. In Austria the bread ticket was the convenient answer to all complaints, and in Hungary, where the bread ticket was not generally introduced as yet, the food shark had the support of the government to such an extent that criticism of his methods was futile. Now and then an enterprising editor would be heard from--as far as his press-room, where the censor caused such hardihoods to be routed from the plate.

The food outlook in Austria-Hungary was no pleasant one. Drastic regulation would be needed to alleviate conditions.

It was no better in Germany, as a trip to Berlin showed. Food had indeed become a problem in the Central states of Europe.

The same area had been put under crops in 1915; the area had even been somewhat extended by advice of the governments that all fallow lands be sown. But the harvest had not been good. The shortage of trained farmers, lack of animal-power, and the paucity of fertilizers had done exactly what was to be expected. Then, the growing season had not been favorable. The year had been wet, and much of the grain had been ruined even after it was ripe.

For the purpose of investigating conditions at close range I made a few trips into the country districts. The large landowners, the farmers, and the villagers had the same story to tell. Not enough hands, shortage of horses and other draft animals, little manure, and a poor season.

One of the men with whom I discussed the aspects of farming under the handicaps which the war was imposing was Joachim Baron von Bredow-Wagenitz, a large landowner in the province of Brandenburg. As owner of an estate that had been most successful under scientific methods of farming, he was well qualified to discuss the situation.

He had tried steam-plowing and found it wanting. The man was on the verge of believing that Mother Earth resented being treated in that manner. The best had been done to make steam-plowing as good as the other form. But something seemed to have gone wrong. There was no life in the crops. It was a question of fertilizing, my informant concluded.

The theory, which had been held, that there was enough reserve plant nutriment in the soil to produce a good crop at least one season with indifferent fertilization, was evidently incorrect, or correct only in so far as certain crop plants were concerned.

Baron Bredow had employed some threescore of Russian prisoners on his place. Some of the men had worked well, but most of them had shown ability only in shirking.

The older men and the women had done their best to get something out of the soil, but they were unable, in the first place, to stand the physical strain, and, secondly, they lacked the necessary experience in the departments which the men at the front had looked after.

Elsewhere in Germany it was the same story. It simply was impossible to discount the loss of almost four million men who had by that time been withdrawn from the soil and were now consuming more than ever before without producing a single thing, as yet.

To show what that really meant let me cite a few factors that are easily grasped. The population of the German Empire was then, roundly, 70,000,000 persons. Of this number 35,000,000 were women. Of the 35,000,000 men all individuals from birth to the age of fifteen were virtually consumers only, while those from fifty years onward were more or less in the same cla.s.s. Accepting that the average length of life in Central Europe is fifty-five years, we find that the male producers in 1915 numbered about 20,000,000, and of this number about one-half was then either at the fronts or under military training. Of these 10,000,000 roughly 4,200,000 had formerly occupied themselves with the production and distribution of food. I need not state that this army formed quite the best element in food production for the simple reason that it was composed of men in the prime of life.

A survey in Austria showed not only the same conditions, but also indicated that the worst was yet to come. Austria and Hungary had then under the colors about 5,000,000 men, of whom, roundly, 2,225,000 came from the fields and food industries, so that agriculture was even worse off in the Dual Monarchy than it was in Germany.

The large landowners in Austria and Hungary told the same story as Baron Bredow. Experiences tallied exactly. They, too, had found it impossible to get the necessary labor, for either love or money. It simply was not in the country, and with many of the Austrian and Hungarian land-operators the labor given by the Russian prisoner of war was next thing to being nothing at all. The Russians felt that they were being put to work against the interest of their country, and many of them seemed to like the idleness of the prison camp better than the work that was expected of them on the estates, though here they were almost free.

I remember especially the experiences of Count Erdody, a Hungarian n.o.bleman and owner of several big estates. After trying every sort of available male labor, he finally decided to cultivate his lands with the help of women. The thing was not a success by any means, but when he came to compare notes with his neighbors he found that, after all, the women had done much better than the men on his neighbors' estates. As a sign of the times I should mention here that Count Erdody, no longer a young man, would spend weeks at a stretch doing the heaviest of farm work, labor in which he was a.s.sisted by his American wife and two daughters, one of whom could work a plow as well as any man.

The war had ceased to be an affair that would affect solely the ma.s.ses, as is often the case. Men who never before had done manual labor could now be seen following the plow, cultivating crops, operating reapers, and threshing the grain. The farm superintendents, most of them young and able-bodied men of education, had long ago been called to the colors as reserve officers, so that generally the owner, who in the past had taken it very easy, was now confronted with a total absence of executives on his estates, in addition to being short of man-power and animals of labor.

But the large farm-operators were not half so poorly off as the small farmer. I will cite a case in order to show the conditions on the small farms and in the villages.

The land near Linz in Austria is particularly fertile and is mostly held by small owners who came into possession of it during the Farmer Revolution in the 'forties. I visited a number of these men and will give here what is a typical instance of what they had to contend with in the crop season of 1915.

"It is all right for the government to expect that we are to raise the same, if not better, crops during the war," said one of them. "For the fine gentlemen who sit in the Ministerial offices that does not mean much. Out here it is different. Their circulars are very interesting, but the fact is that we cannot carry out the suggestions they make.