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In the beginning of 1918 the supply was very low, and by the end of February London was put on meat rations, and in April the rest of the country. The rationing system has made distribution easier and more fair and greatly lessened the distressing "queues" of people waiting before butchers' shops for their allowance. The regulations allow each person 4 coupons a week.
The Americans were all too few to hand the food out personally to the hosts in the soup lines, at the communal kitchens, and in the long queues with rations cards before the doors of the bakeries and the communal warehouses.
Men go to bed betimes who know that a bugle will sound the reveille at 5.30 in the morning. The end of the entertainment is planned to allow time for a final cup of tea or a glass of Horlick's Malted Milk before we go out to flounder through the mud to our tents. This last half-hour is a busy one for the ladies behind the counter in the outer hall. Long queues of men stand waiting to be served.
It became necessary for the government to sell at a nominal price the enormous quantities of grain which had been accumulated for the army and the punitive expedition against the South; and for many days a familiar sight was the endless blue- coated queues waiting patiently to receive as in war-time their stipulated pittance.
When the crowd overwhelm the place entirely, the officials clear them out by angry gesticulations and moral suasion, sometimes menacingly shaking the end of their own queues at them as though they were wielding black-snake whips.
The queues were gathered up at the crown, and all the hair, which had been allowed to grow since his birth, was plaited into a thick queue, which looked as black and as glossy as lacquer. Between the crown of the head and the extremity of the queue, hung a string of four large pearls, with pendants of gold, representing the eight precious things.
As the midday meal was in preparation, columns of black smoke appeared to southwestward. The squadron at once weighed anchor, cleared for action, and put on forced draft, while "dark-skinned men, with queues tightly coiled around their heads, and with arms bare to the elbow, clustered along the decks in groups at the guns, waiting to kill or be killed."
Haase himself was a drunken bully, who made advances to every woman he met, and whose complicated intrigues with the feminine portion of his clientèle led to frequent scenes with the fair-haired Hebe who presided at the bar and over his household. It was she and Otto who fared daily forth to take their places in the long queues that waited for hours with food cards outside the provision shops.
The saw is at work in the woodlands; and individual trees, which were not only the landmarks, but also the friends and companions of one's childhood, have disappeared for ever. The rich meadows by the tranquil streams, and the grazing cattle, which used to remind us only of Cuyp's peaceful landscapes, now suggest the sterner thought of rations and queues.
"I'm not, after all, going out of doors," Pao-yue observed, "nor will I wear a hat or frontlet, so that all that need be done is to plait a few queues, that's all!"
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