Franck found the musty-smelling war’ bread particularly repellent, ‘half sawdust and half mud, heavier and blacker than an adobe brick’. ‘Yet on this atrocious substance’, he wrote, ‘the German masses had been chiefly subsisting since 1915. No wonder they quit!’30 Even the occasional smear of turnip jelly or ersatz marmalade did little to improve it. And because such food contained so little nourishment, people’s ability to put in a full day’s work became seriously compromised. Nor was just food ersatz. Everything from rope to rubber, shirts to soap was an imitation, occasionally ingenious but
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