That the food question should have become acute first in a state as
distinctly agricultural as the Ottoman Empire furnishes an apt
illustration 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 grasses, 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 grass" 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 quantity 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 multitude 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 masses of Germany and Austria-Hungary had to eat
war-bread in prescribed quantities, 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 class 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 passed 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 class. 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 Erdödy, a Hungarian
nobleman 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 Erdödy, no longer a
young man, would spend weeks at a stretch doing the heaviest of farm
work, labor in which he was assisted 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 masses,
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.
"They have left me my youngest son. He is a mere boy--just eighteen.
The other boys--three of them--who helped me run this place, I have
lost. One of them was killed in Galicia, and the other two have been
taken prisoners. I may never see them again. They say my two boys are
prisoners. But I have heard nothing of them.
"My crops would have been better if I hadn't tried to follow some of the
advice in the government circulars. It was my duty to raise all I could
on my land, they said. I doubted the wisdom of putting out too much,
with nobody to help me.
"It would have been better had I followed my own judgment and plowed
half the land and let the other lie fallow, in which case it would have
been better for the crops next year. Instead of that I planted all the
fields, used a great deal of seed, wasted much of my labor, first in
plowing, then in cultivating, and later in harvesting, and now I have
actually less return than usually I had from half the land."
The records of the man showed that from his thirty acres he had
harvested what normally fifteen would have given him. Haste makes waste,
and in his instance haste was the equivalent of trying to do with two
pairs of weak hands what formerly three pairs of strong arms had done.
The farmer explained that for several years before the war he had done
little work, feeling that he was entitled to a rest.
Nor had his heart been in the work. One of his sons had been killed. Two
others were in captivity, and the fourth, Franz, might be called to the
colors any day. It seemed to him futile to continue. What was the use of
anything, now that his family had been torn apart in that manner?
[Illustration: Photograph from Brown Brothers, N. Y.