In Bertolt Brecht’s war-torn Grusinia of The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Europe of the Thirty-Years War in Mother Courage the German dramatist highlights the gloomy picture of ordinary people such as farmers and inn-keepers profiting from the dire needs of others. In the Chalk Circle the maid-servant Grusha takes the helpless baby Michael away from the city of danger and is charged a week’s wages for a simple cup of milk.
In the second series of Downton Abbey the former footman Thomas Barrow, who has been returned from the Front to Yorkshire having acquired a ‘blighty’, starts up a profit-making business immediately the war ends in 1918. His intention is to profit from the difficulties facing ordinary people with rationing
In chapter five of Barbusse’s novel Under Fire (Le Feu), ironically sub-headed ‘Sanctuary’, the soldiers in a village in the Pas de Calais find a place to stay for a couple of days but have to pay disgraceful sums of money to the farm-owner for the privilege. It prompts one of them to comment: ‘Damn the thieving natives, yes, yes! Some of ’em must be making fortunes. Everybody can’t go and get killed.’ One of the French soldiers chats to the woman’s son and asks him:
“Tell me, little one, come here a bit, “ says Cocon, taking the boy between his knees. “Listen now. Your papa, he says, doesn’t he, ‘Let’s hope the war goes on,’ eh?”
“Of course,” says the child, tossing his head, “because we’re getting rich. He says, by the end of May, we shall have got fifty thousand francs.”