A Popular History of The Great War/Volume 1/Page 114



HOW GERMANY WELCOMED THE WAR


flooded with an international nomenclature of shops, and cafés, even streets. On the outbreak of war there was a hasty change and whilst in London a Gambrinus still placidly continued business, the cafés of Berlin hastily deleted even names that might suggest a foreign origin. Sign painters had a busy fortnight changing the name of the Hotel Bristol, the Englischer Hof, the Café Piccadilly, the Prince of Wales's tailoring establishment, the London Bar, the Queen's Restaurant, Palais de Danse, and a host of other establishments. The café Piccadilly, the largest establishment of its kind in the world, was converted into the, Hoch Deutschland Kaffee Haus, the Queen's Restaurant became the Speise Haus, 1870, and the restaurants suddenly indulged in an orgy of newly-invented German names for foreign dishes. Greengages, for example, known for 40 years and more to German gourmets as Reine claude, suddenly became raenekloden or renge lodden.

The English word sauce was banned, and its place taken by the curious Germanised equivalent sosse. Russian eggs, a favourite Berlin dainty, suddenly disappeared from the bill of fare, and were replaced by a mysterious dish called "sauceeggs." Elsewhere the enthusiastic patriotism of young ladies' schools produced equally curious results. In a girls' high school in the Rhineland a deputation of Rhenish damsels waited upon the head teacher at the beginning of the day's work and informed her that it was not to be expected that patriotic German girls should consent any longer to learn the tongues of alien enemies. French and English, they declared, must forthwith disappear from the curriculum, and it was only when the mistress pointed out that up to the present they could still learn "American" that the young ladies consented to resume their study of the language of Shakespeare.

The tumult and excitement which ran riot through Germany in the first week of the war cooled rapidly when mobilization was complete. German thoroughness was not likely long to leave the question of the harvest, the problem of provision for the civil population, and of maintaining the large numbers of women and the lesser numbers of men thrown out of work, to the well-intentioned efforts of amateur organizations. Little by tittle the military control closed its grip upon the whole country.

Mob law ceased on August 15 when the steady growth of the Russian pressure in the east, combined with Austrian defeats

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