CHAPTER VII
DYING AUSTRIA (AUGUST-SEPTEMBER, 1919)
After spending two weeks at the mountain hotel in Berne I succeeded in getting a passport for Vienna in August, 1919; but it was an Austrian passport. A certain relaxation of the rules of the British Foreign Office in favour of the representatives of the Press wishing to travel in Austria was made in July of that year. For the future such people were not required to have a British visum for a journey to Vienna. So I was informed by several returned newspaper men who had taken no trouble of this sort. Twice previously my earnest plea for the necessary visum had been rejected, though Mr. Savery of the British Legation had met me with the greatest civility and had made, I am sure, sincere efforts on my behalf. I heartily rejoiced in the withdrawal of the regulation and made my plans. I had a commission from a London newspaper to report the Lucerne International, and secured a letter from the editor authorizing me to proceed to Vienna on his behalf. Armed with this I proceeded to the Austrian Legation to see what could be done.
Baron Haupt, the Austrian Minister, was exceedingly helpful. The passport was at once prepared by his secretary. A permit from the Swiss police to leave the country by a different frontier from the one by which I entered was all I needed in addition, and this was granted with the cordiality which the Swiss have invariably shown me whenever I have made a request. I was very happy to be equipped at last for the journey I had tried so often to take. I wanted intensely to discover for myself if the painful stories of Vienna’s misery were really true. I hoped I might find them grossly exaggerated.
It became rumoured in Berne that I was going to Vienna. Within half an hour half a dozen people unknown to me came and begged me to take parcels of food to their starving relations. The Swiss allowed a maximum of only 8 kilos (about 20 lb.) of food to be taken out of Switzerland by each traveller. It was necessary to protect their own people from the famine which would have ensued if unlimited quantities of food could have been carried away in this fashion. It was manifestly impossible to oblige all those poor people. I took 8 kilos of food for one family of whom I had heard and whose necessity was great. Several times en route attempts were made to relieve me of that box of food, but I would allow nobody to touch it. I almost literally sat on it by day and slept on it by night, and so contrived to bring it safely to its destination. I picture now the grateful look of the man who took the box from me with the air of receiving its weight in pure gold. It was my first glimpse at the reality of life in Vienna.
But there were troubles in Berne before I got away. I wanted to travel by the Entente express which touched at Basle on a particular date. To my astonishment I learnt that it was necessary to get permission from the French to board that train. Baron Haupt had received from Dr. Renner in Paris a telegram to say that the Foreign Minister was touching Basle on his way to Vienna with the Treaty of St. Germains in his pocket on a particular date, and that there would be five empty available places in his coach. The Austrian Minister offered me one of these places. But I must first ask leave of the French! It seemed utterly preposterous. The Austrians paid for the carriage. I was prepared to pay for my ticket. The seats were unoccupied. What had the French to do with it, if the Austrian Foreign Minister did not object to me as a fellow-traveller?
However, this was the rule, and must be obeyed. I hied me to the French Embassy feeling anything but pleased. I asked to see the First Secretary. I saw three men in succession, not one of whom knew a word of English, and told my story separately to each. I wanted to go to Vienna to investigate the condition of the people, and in particular the needs of the children, with a view to organizing relief. Where was the harm in that?
Three grave men solemnly debated the matter with shrugs of the shoulder and nods of the head, and finally decided to refuse permission. They excused the discourtesy by saying that only soldiers and diplomats travelled by that train, a statement which I knew to be untrue. Incredible numbers of French traders seeking to sell soaps and scents to the starving Viennese travelled regularly by the Entente trains. The stories I heard in Vienna of the abuse of this quick service would fill a book with scandalous tales. The result of this refusal was unpleasant for me. I was obliged to take the slow train. Instead of the twenty hours which the journey with the fast train would have occupied, I was four days and three nights travelling from Berne to Vienna. The horror of that journey is a recurring nightmare to this day!
It was not so much the physical discomfort I minded. I was prepared for that in a measure. I had brought with me cheese and chocolate for the journey. I dressed with the idea of having to curl up uncomfortably for two nights in the train. I plaited my hair in two severe bands, which I pinned tightly across my head, to present as neat an appearance as might be in the complete absence of toilet facilities. I took with me only a light suit-case, which I could carry with one hand, and the box of food with the other. The masses of flowers which were the farewell gift of the Hungarians had wilted in the heat before I reached Buchs. I left them in the train. I anticipated, as I thought, every trouble. But it was worse, far worse than my imagination had conceived.
The beginning was not so bad, although the inn at Buchs was far below the standard of Swiss inns. My room was small and dirty, and at the top of the building. The food was poor and badly served. Not till noon of the day following did the laggard train move out of Buchs for Feldkirch, the Austrian frontier town. There began the screaming and quarrelling and pushing and swearing I was familiar with on other frontiers, the stupid passport and Customs business which had delayed us at Buchs.
There were about three hundred passengers for the journey. I observed two women at the passport office, but I saw only one of them again. She was a beautiful Viennese prostitute. She succeeded in getting herself attached to a Spaniard who was travelling, a handsome, boisterous boy, with a very fine tenor voice. The other was an elderly Englishwoman married to an Austrian.
“Pardon me, madam,” I heard a thin voice say, as we struggled to get into the passport office. “I see you have an English passport, and I heard you say your name was Snowden. Do you by any chance know a Mr. Philip Snowden, who lives in England?”
“I know him very well,” I said, smiling at her eager old face. “He is my husband.”
Then followed warm handshaking and praiseful words about Mr. Philip Snowden from this lonely old lady, whom the prick of poisoned war pens had caused deeply to suffer. She loved her good Austrian husband; had been very happy in Vienna; liked the merry, kind-hearted people, and was very indignant over the extravagant falsehoods of the sensational Press. She left as soon as she recovered her passport, and I never saw her again. My name had not yet been called. A shrill scream from a railway engine, a clatter of moving wheels, and the last half-dozen of us saw the train move out without us, patiently waiting, still empty handed.
I was the very last to be served, and, as a matter of fact, was never called. Was there some mistake, I wondered? I grew cold as I thought of the possible loss of my English passport. Only later did I realize that only the Austrian one need have been handed in. I pushed past the young Austrian soldier resting upon his rifle, and walked through the Customs House into a tiny office. Nobody was there, but my open passport lay upon the table. I folded it and walked out with it. Nobody hindered me. I inquired for the next train. There was nothing till 8 o’clock. It was then 3 in the afternoon—five hours to wait! I made my way to the hotel garden and took a late lunch under the trees, sharing my Swiss cheese with a Polish musician, who divided his tinned chicken with me. We discussed the various operas in a droll mixture of French and English. He had played often in Paris, and conducted at Covent Garden, and was even then planning a return to London in the following spring. He wished greatly to improve his English, which was really very bad. “Your Engleesh it is très difficile. It have many meanings, one word. I speek never”; and he flung out both arms with a despairing gesture which nearly upset the slender garden chair on which he was sitting. He was intensely poetical, emotional, sentimental. “Ah, madame,” he exclaimed effusively, “a scene like this, the blue skies of Italy, soft music, and you—Mignon—pairfect!” And he hummed a strain from the old opera of Thomas, alternately singing and sighing until the going down of the sun, and the slow incoming of our shabby little train.
Picture a long length of incredibly dingy railway carriages with most of the windows broken, the leather straps cut away, the stuffing protruding from the torn cushions, the plumbing out of order, no lighting and no heating. Contemplate massed numbers of people of all nationalities, dirty, tired, quarrelsome, packing the carriages and crowding the corridors, filling the air with oaths and odours of unimaginable filthiness. Think of our being turned out of these carriages twice in one night, and groping our way along the railway lines in the pitch black darkness to find other carriages equally repulsive in other trains equally disreputable; a screaming babel of tongues with not a word of English deafening the ears; dragging heavy suit-cases and thrusting and elbowing with the rest of the unruly throng in the mad rush for a seat!
Eight of us found our way into one first-class carriage. It was dark, and we could not discover our companions. One man produced a piece of candle which he stuck on the table with a little melted wax. This supplied us with a dim light for several hours. After that we sat in the dark, the men roaring out comic songs to help keep up their spirits and while away the long tedious hours. The company this time included the Spaniard and his newly attached lady, two Poles, one Czech, one Hungarian, and a Frenchman, besides myself. French was the language used by all.
During two full days and nights we suffered every conceivable torture from dirt and discomfort. Offensive small creatures bit our arms and legs. We could not wash except by running out of the train when it stopped and dipping our hands in the water from the station fountain. Three hundred persons moved with the same desire would have reduced almost to zero the chances of any one. We were afraid to miss the train or lose our places, and stayed where we were. In addition to all this, the women found it wiser to stay awake during the night to save themselves from the unwelcome attentions of amorous men, unable to conceive that any business other than one could take a woman alone to Vienna in such circumstances and at such a time. This particularly disagreeable experience I do not forget I owe to the wanton discourtesy of French officials.
A curious incident took place when we were within a few miles of Vienna. The train stopped and a number of soldiers fully armed entered the train and insisted on examining the baggage of all those passengers who had not come from beyond the frontier. I observed a similar opening of bags whenever afterwards I was in the Vienna railway station. These were the soldiers of the Volkswehr attempting in this extra-constitutional way to stop profiteering in food. Thousands of people, unable to live on the ration when they could get it and generally unable to get it, were obliged to go into the country in search of food. To pay the reluctant peasants who produced it they took their jewels, their clothes, their household furnishings. The more they had the more food they could buy in this way. The supply was thereby reduced for the ordinary market. The poor suffered frightfully. The peasants preferred to sell in this fashion because the Government’s fixed price for food was very considerably below the world market-price for their products. Some of these purchasers of their stocks were gamblers in food who sold to the big hotels for fabulous prices. The people’s army determined to stop this. I learnt their method. It was certainly irregular. Was it effective? There were various opinions. It was frequently told me that the corruption had simply been transferred from one set of people to another, and that the wives and families of the soldiers of the people’s army profited at the expense of the poor of every other class. Upon one thing those in authority were agreed, that to prohibit the Volkswehr from acting in this way would mean rioting and civil war, and possibly a Bolshevik revolution!
Crime, corruption, and dishonesty are the awful first-fruits of famine in all the countries of Central Europe. It is the calamity that the best people everywhere most lament. German students must fasten their caps and coats to their pegs with chains. Boots and shoes must not be left outside hotel doors in Poland. Sheets and blankets have been stolen off the hotel beds in Vienna. Railway trucks disappear regularly in Rumania and Russia. Bribery is the order of the day. Railway officials, hotel porters, policemen, soldiers, school teachers, University professors, legislators, generals, cabinet ministers, ambassadors—there is nobody in that part of the world who cannot be tempted, and very few, I am told, who do not fall. Complacent English readers need not sniff superiorly. What would they do, if they saw their wives and children starving, and the wages for a month’s hard work not enough to buy them shoes?
An Austrian friend of mine told me of his brother’s experience on the frontiers of two Balkan states. This brother sent sixty truck-loads of goods from one country to the other. When he arrived in a passenger train at the frontier station he saw his sixty trucks, some of them broken open, standing in a siding. There were many trucks besides his own. As far as the eye could reach there was nothing but railway trucks, a wilderness of trucks, thousands upon thousands, halted for no reason that was apparent.
He made his way to the station official, and anxiously inquired about it. “When will my trucks be sent on?” he asked, with much concern. “It is most important that they should go without delay.” The stationmaster grinned unsympathetically, and pointed to the forest of railway wagons stretching before them. “You want your trucks sent at once! Look you there. All those trucks came before yours. They must go before yours.” And he prepared to walk away. “But I cannot stay here for months,” replied the man in dismay. “I have very important work waiting for me. And the people in my city are badly in need of those things. If they stay here the peasants will steal everything. I beg you to send them out at once.” But he argued in vain. The official was obdurate. Seeing that what he suspected was inevitable, the baffled trader drew out his pocket-book and asked the official to name his price. And he actually handed over to this corrupt servant of the public a sum which in the money of the country at pre-war values would work out at the rate of £100 for each of his sixty trucks! For this payment the goods were dispatched within a week.
Here is one little picture of Central and Eastern Europe which tells its story plainly. These bribes are not really paid by the trader. They are added to the price of the goods. The wretched consumers pay. The workless proletarian and poor peasant are the exploited; but the breaking point always comes. It will come in all the countries if international action to restore life to its normal basis be not taken in time. And that way revolution and Bolshevism lie.
At 6 o’clock on the fourth morning after leaving Berne I came to Vienna. The cabman who drove me to the Hotel Bristol, a mile away, charged 100 crowns. In pre-war values that would have been about £4. In present day values it is about 1s. 3d.! My room at the best hotel in Vienna cost 28 crowns a day. Before the war that was a guinea. To-day it is about 2d.! The meals at the Bristol were very ordinary, but the minimum decent meal cost about 150 crowns. Once that sum counted as £6. Now it is less than 2s.! The value of Austrian money has declined almost to vanishing point through the war and the peace.
I arrived at the Hotel Bristol before anybody except the night-porter was astir. He sleepily informed me that he could not give me a room until the secretary arrived. I had wired a week before and engaged the influence of President Seitz in addition; but the porter knew nothing about this. I sat in the hotel vestibule more than half asleep and feeling as though driven from home, when the secretary arrived, and from that moment all was well. The President had made secure for me a room in that crowded and popular guest-house, once the rendezvous of princes, now the abode of Entente Commissioners and the profiteers of all nations.
The traveller in the broken countries of Europe, enemy or allied, will see little of the real life and condition of the people if he live at the big hotels. This is true at any time, but more unfortunately true now; for the lazy and the prejudiced come home from their trips to write letters to the newspapers which give totally wrong impressions, and are meant to discourage every proposal to alleviate suffering. The same is true of every country in Europe which has been engaged in the war, the allied only less than the others. Perhaps Austria has suffered most; unless it be Russia. The country round is scoured to buy food for the big hotels. Even so the evidences of real poverty in the hotels were abundant in the patched and darned bed linen, the scanty blankets, the paper table-covers, and the entire absence of hot water, which was a luxury undreamt of at the time of my visit. Then, a cake of soap was a present of most conspicuous value to a friend in Vienna!
Fat cunning rogues ate (and still eat) plentifully of the food which in their real money they could buy more cheaply in Vienna than at home. No thought of the starving poor whose supplies they were lessening afflicted these gorging and guzzling adventurers, as busy with the pickings of profit as unclean birds tearing the last shreds of flesh off the bones of a corpse. Allied Commissioners by the hundred if not the thousand, with little or nothing to do, paid for by this starving little nation, were eating their heads off when I was in Vienna, whilst half-famished leaders of the proletariat struggled to keep down the spectre of revolution which the sight of so much abundance in the midst of starvation continuously tempted and provoked. I soon found it impossible to eat in the comparative luxury of the Bristol Hotel, and discovered a cheap quiet restaurant where well-conducted Austrians passed away the hours of their enforced idleness. Even there it was painful to eat. To be watched by dozens of pairs of envious eyes with every mouthful of the simple food one ate filled one with cold horror at the thought of what it implied, a slowly dying city of 2¹⁄₄ millions of people. For the rest of my time in Vienna I contrived to share my meals with strangers whenever it was possible to do so without hurting their pride. And I found that pride is a plant which rarely survives where hunger and cold have starved the soil for several years.
What sad sights were there for the observant in the streets and cafés of the once gay city of Vienna! The postman who delivered the letters at the hotel was dressed in rags. The porters at the railway stations were in worn cotton uniforms, and were glad of tips in the form of hard-boiled eggs and cigarettes. Uniformed officers sold roses in the cafés. Delicate women in faded finery begged with their children at street corners. Grass was growing in the principal streets. The shops were empty of customers. There was no roar and rush of traffic. The one-time beautiful horses of the Ringstrasse looked thin and limp. Frequently they dropped dead in the streets, of hunger.
I climbed a hill outside the city, and from the many hundreds of chimneys of mill and factory no smoke was rising. At the Labour Exchanges many thousands of men and women stood in long lines to receive their out-of-work pay. I moved amongst them, speaking English, and heard no bitter word, saw no hard look from these gentle people who have been so grievously wronged by their own and other exploiters. In every one of the hundred one-roomed dwellings I visited were pitiful babes, small, misshapen or idiotic through the lack of proper food. Consumptive mothers dragged themselves about the rooms tearful about the lack of milk, which their plentiful paper money could not buy because there was none to sell. Gallant doctors struggled in clinic and hospital with puny children covered with running sores, with practically no medicines, no soap, no disinfectants. But for the magnificent help given by the American Relief Commission, the Society of Friends, and the Save the Children Fund, the coming generation would have dwindled out of existence and the problem of Vienna solved itself without the aid of the dilatory politicians of Paris by the simple process of the extermination of its population. As it is tens of thousands of child lives and old lives have been ended by famine and the diseases of famine; whilst over a long period the number of suicides from hunger and despair amounted to scores in every week.
The first call I made in Vienna was upon Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Thomas Cunninghame, at the headquarters of the British Military Mission in the Metternichstrasse. Sir Thomas is a tall Scotsman, buoyant, kindly and of progressive sympathies. He is slightly deaf, but spares no effort to try to understand his visitor’s needs. He gave me generously of his time, to put me in the way of understanding Austria’s problems. His sympathy for the unhappy people he had been appointed to watch over was very real, and the universal regard in which I discovered him to be held appeared to be thoroughly deserved.
I believe I have not erred in judgment in having formed the opinion that, so far as the higher officials are concerned, the British Missions in Europe, with one or two exceptions, have behaved with a consideration and a courtesy towards the people in whose territories they were planted which did them great personal credit and advanced the real interests of their country in a remarkable degree. Wherever I went, in Berlin, Vienna, Riga, Reval, I heard the men of our Missions spoken of in terms of the highest praise. Unlike the French and Italian officers of rank, the British officers frequently attended the opera and other public places in plain clothes, or at least without their orders. There was no swanking about the streets by the younger British officers. Rarely was there an ugly and tasteless demonstration of their position as the representatives of the conquering Powers, irritating and humiliating to the conquered, as in Wiesbaden, where, at a certain time, all business must cease and people stop and hats come off to pay tribute to the French flag, under pain of heavy penalties if it is not done. I have seen for myself the strutting about the streets and cafés of Allied officers, provocative of scenes like the one in the Hôtel Adlon where Prince Joachim got himself into trouble; but seldom did I hear of British officers of the higher grade behaving with the swagger and bluster of the man who tries to maintain his dignity by standing on it; and who never succeeds! The comparative liking for the English in spite of the Peace Treaties and the growing hatred of France all over Europe is due in no small measure to the better manners of British officials and the greater sense of responsibility of the men brought up in the British tradition for those placed in their care. Noblesse oblige.
The one criticism of Sir Thomas Cunninghame which I heard very mildly expressed by a man who had a genuine liking for him was, that he showed too great a fondness for the Hungarian aristocracy. This it was suggested weakened his usefulness to the new-born Austrian democracy.
The Hungarian aristocrats are charming people to meet in a drawing-room. They are handsome and clever and full of friendliness; but cruel as the grave when their passions are aroused and credulous as babies where their material interests are affected. The vilest murderer in the service of the Revolution, the pervert and madman Szamuely, was more than equalled in ferocity and blood-thirstiness by certain delicate Hungarian ladies I know with the best blood of Hungary in their veins. It needed a hard grip upon principle to turn from denouncing the Red Terror and hear the White Terrorists declare what they would do when they got back into power, and not determine to be silent in a contest where both sides justify the cruellest reprisals.
Looking on the poverty and misery of the masses of Austria and Hungary, a flood of deep anger came over me as I thought of the Hungarian in Berne who could think of nothing but the loss of her clothes and jewels and in particular of a pair of beautiful white boots.
“I would kill every Bolshevik if I could have my way; and they shouldn’t die an easy death either. I would roast them in front of a slow fire. Think of what those dirty Jews have done to some of our best men. And all my clothes and jewels gone! I don’t know what on earth we shall do. We have scarcely a penny in the world. Summer is coming and I haven’t a decent thing to stand up in. My beautiful white boots are in Budapest. They are perfect dreams! And to think that those awful Bolsheviks have got them. Some horrid little Jewess is pulling them on to her ugly feet this very minute, I am positive. I could weep my eyes out. You have no idea how nice they are. The leather is perfect; and they come half-way to my knees. They are the smartest things ever seen. Oh, my poor boots!”
After the counter-revolution I saw her and asked if she had recovered her belongings. “Every stick, my dear. It is wonderful. See my boots?” And she stuck out two beautifully shod feet for me to see, her eyes sparkling with pleasure. “They hadn’t touched a thing. I shall sell the jewels in America. They will bring in a handsome sum.”
“Well, you at any rate will be able to speak well of the Hungarian Bolsheviks?” I asked.
“No, indeed. They are all filthy Jews, and they have behaved like savages. Do you know they hanged tiny little babies for the fun of the thing and old——”
“Stop, for Heaven’s sake,” I cried. “Don’t talk like that if you want to be taken seriously. It is too silly. You cannot prove what you say, and I, who am not a Bolshevik, know that what you say is not true. If you talk like that the only effect will be that you will make Bolsheviks by the dozen.”
Concerning Entente officials and the counter-revolution, all I can say is this: That it is widely believed by responsible persons that there is some mysterious relationship which does not blend with the general tone of the Hungarian Peace Treaty. Hungary has all this time been permitted to keep troops far in excess of the numbers laid down in the Treaty. The anti-democratic policy of the present Hungarian White Government has received no rebuke from the Allied Governments. The guarantees made to the Social-Democratic Government which succeeded Bela Kun were openly flouted. Only the strong agitation by democrats in England saved the lives of Professor Agoston and his colleagues, guaranteed by the British representative in Vienna; and these men are still in shameful imprisonment. And whether it is the fear of France that the union of Austria with Germany has become menacing through the attempt to make it impossible by denying to Austria the right of self-determination in the Peace Treaty, and the hope that the restoration of a Magyar ruler under French protection would counterbalance such an evil, or whether personal matters and the obligations of friendship enter into the calculation at all, it is quite certain that the tendencies towards a restoration of the old order are receiving encouragement from some amazing quarters. In all this the public suspicion rests rather upon France than upon Great Britain. The utmost of which Great Britain is accused is weakness in following, and indecision in the failure to grapple with, the Imperialists of France.
The union of Austria with Germany was the declared policy of the Social Democratic Party which took the reins of government after the abdication of the Emperor Charles. Dr. Otto Bauer, the Socialist Foreign Minister, proclaimed this policy from the housetops, thereby alienating the Allies, who demanded and secured his resignation in favour of the more tactful and diplomatic Renner. When I questioned Frau Freundlich, one of the women members of the Austrian Parliament, on the unwisdom of so outspoken a declaration of policy at such a time, with the nerves of France still atwitter with fright, she replied that open diplomacy was more honest and straightforward than secret diplomacy, and that the Socialists meant to carry out this principle of theirs regardless of consequences. I could only agree with the first part of her remark, adding to my words of approval that, even so, there was a time to speak and a time to be silent, and that this noble recklessness of consequences might be justified in a Party or a person but was doubtful wisdom on the part of a Government whose people needed food from the foe to keep them alive! Like Kurt Eisner and his passion for free speech, the Social Democrats of Austria would permit of no compromise in the matter of the Party programme.
I met Dr. Otto Bauer at the house of my friend Madame Zuckerkandl. We were quaintly assorted guests. There was the grave and dignified City Councillor Dr. Schwartz-Hiller, whose care of little Jewish refugees from Galicia deserves the highest praise. There was the wife of an impoverished ex-diplomat, who had spent many years in China and who was starving on a pension of almost nothing a month; there was Baron Hennet, the charming and able young diplomat whom I had met in Berne, known in England for his informed interest in agricultural matters and his advocacy of Free Trade; and finally there was Dr. Bauer.
He is a man of medium height, with a handsome young face, inclined to roundness, and the dark hair and brilliant eyes of the Jewish race. He is justly reputed one of the ablest men in the European Socialist Movement. Common report had it at one time that he is a Bolshevik; but his enemies did that for him! I inquired about him at the British Mission and they denied this story. I asked Dr. Bauer directly if he believed in Bolshevism and received a smiling but unequivocal reply in the negative. At the time of our talk he was helping to edit the great Socialist newspaper, the Arbeiter Zeitung, in the absence of the regular editor, Dr. Austerlitz, who was lying ill. His influence was much feared by the French. And his policy appears to-day to be likely to succeed in spite of the prohibition of the Peace Treaty, which forbids for all time the union with Germany unless with the unanimous approval of the League of Nations. If the Allies had determined on an act which would help the Austrians to achieve their desires they could not have done better than make it a point in the Treaty. The manifest injustice of refusing to Austria what is granted in theory to every other country in the world, the right to determine its own form of government, has united with the Social Democrats thousands of Austrians who had previously opposed this political proposal. Now it is clear from the Tyrol plebiscite of 97 per cent. in favour of the union that the policy has become national and must sooner or later be successful. The language of the Austrians is German. There appears to be little hope of substantial co-operation with the succession states for a very long time to come. The Austrians are ill-disposed to the eternal spoon-feeding of the Allies, which must mean expensive and irregular meals, with a constant threat of the withdrawal of supplies if something does not please the nurses. To the overwhelming majority of the six millions of Austria’s population the only means of living appears to be union with Germany, with a people speaking the same language and a country lying on their border.
But at the time of my visit to Austria there was a considerable difference of opinion in Vienna on the subject of the best future political arrangement for Austria. A number of people formerly of power and influence expressed hostility to the idea of union with Germany. They dreaded the merging of Austrian individuality in that of the stronger partner. They contemplated with real distress the future of their beautiful Vienna as a second-class city on the frontier of civilization instead of the sun and centre of culture which it had been. Some positively disliked the Prussian association because of its disciplined militarism. A few with the spirit of the flunkey desired to please the Allies. Others recognized the danger of flouting the Allies.
Of the various alternatives to the proposed union there were two which received noteworthy support, that which suggested union with the mild regime of a Bavaria independent of Prussia, and that which advocated what was called a Danubian Federation which should comprise the old states, and possibly Bavaria. The economic dependence of the states comprising the former Austro-Hungarian Empire was becoming clearer with every day that passed. The natural advantages as a clearing-house for trade and commerce of Vienna, in the centre of the system, as well as its amazing cultural facilities, provided every reason in common sense for a proposal of this sort. But hostile to the idea were those in Austria who would have welcomed an economic union apart from a political union, but who were unable to see how the one could be achieved without the other eventually following. The new states, particularly Czecho-Slovakia, jealous of any proposal which might restore to Vienna the importance they were determined to attach to Prague, pursued a policy of self-interest which menaced the very existence of Austria as an independent state, and looked askance at any idea of economic union between themselves and their ancient enemy. Anti-German feeling there was too pronounced for any other than the most individualistic action. Pro-German feeling in German-Austria favoured the union with Germany. The propaganda for the federation was conducted chiefly by agents abroad, and as I have already shown, a succession of events has made the proposal for union with Germany, originally the proposal of a party, a matter of united national policy.
Apart from its foreign policy the political problem of Austria appeared to be presenting itself along the line of peasant versus town worker. This is more or less true of every country in Europe. The peasants hated the city of Vienna. They had to maintain the two and a quarter millions of its population and got no adequate return for this in manufactured goods. The city could not manufacture for lack of raw materials and coal. The peasants disliked the “Red” Government because it fixed the price of foodstuffs in the interests of the poor of the towns careless of the reduced profits of the peasants. They disliked the towns because they were irreligious and full of the hated Jews. All these causes worked (and are working all over Central Europe and in Russia) at the time I was in Vienna.
“I very much fear,” said Otto Bauer to me, “that the social problem of Europe for a generation or more will be the town against the country. And which will win?” The victory of the country seems imminent. It has conquered in Bavaria and, in a measure, in Austria. It will conquer in Russia. And the victory of the country in European politics does not mean maypoles and flowers and flowing beer and fat living for everybody. It means, at present, the reign of ignorance and bigotry and superstition and individualism, and the decline of all the things which make for a cultivated civilization.
The second party in the state then, the first at the present moment, was the Christian Socialist. How they got the name I have not yet learnt. There is no means of proving that they are not Christian; but they are certainly not Socialists! I imagine they came by the name for a certain historic interest in schemes of municipalization, but their chief leaders are big capitalists, and their chief supporters the small shopkeepers of the cities and the peasant farmers of the country. They approximate to the old Liberals of the Manchester school in England. Free trade is an important plank in their programme. Their efforts in 1919 were being directed against the decontrol of food, and Mr. Julius Meinl’s theses on the subject have appeared in English in certain journals devoted to a similar policy. Dr. Redlich, the eminent writer, whose book on the British Constitution is regarded as the authoritative work upon the subject in much the same way as Lord Bryce’s volume on the American Constitution is said to be the last word on that subject, is another gifted leader of this now dominant party. So far the moderation of its course has saved the country from the reaction that a too-swift swing of the pendulum almost invariably produces.
Amongst the women friends I made in Vienna one stands out with peculiar interest. She is the lady to whom I have already referred, Frau Zuckerkandl, the widow of a very eminent Austrian physician, and one of the most delightful women it is possible to meet anywhere. I saw her first in her dainty flat, dressed in a fluttering loose robe of diaphanous silky material, a fairy figure with heaped-up masses of bright hair and rather tired blue eyes. Less than fifteen minutes sufficed to teach each of us that there were intellectual and spiritual bonds between us that made friendship ripe at the first contact. Both of us are devotees of good music. Both passionately admire the drama. Both recognize in art the living spirit of a true and lasting internationalism. Both feel the service of the oppressed to be a glorious privilege. Only twice or thrice in one’s life comes a friendship so rare and precious as I felt and feel this to be.
Frau Zuckerkandl’s father was the editor and proprietor of a great newspaper. She is a writer of merit, and was the musical critic for a Viennese journal. We visited the Opera together several times. This marvellous people, half-famished and almost wholly despairing, crowded the Opera House night by night, to revel at the feast of song which was the only rich banquet left them, and the last table they would willingly leave. “We can live without bread, but not without roses.”
My friend is related by marriage to the great Clemenceau. Her sister is the wife of “The Tiger’s” brother. I think it was she who told me the story that was afloat in Europe at that time of how, when Clemenceau was charged by some of his insatiable fellow-countrymen with having made a peace bad for France, he replied: “But how could I do better, with a fool on one side who thought he was Napoleon, and a damned fool on the other who thought he was Jesus Christ?”
Another good story which was going the round of the Vienna cafés deserves to be repeated. In one of the cafés, years before the war, a young Jew sat sipping his coffee day by day. Nobody was in the least interested in him, and he was distinguished for nothing except a shabby dress and a wild mop of tangled hair. His name was Trotsky.
In those days everybody was talking about the Russian Revolution. Many were fearful of it. The Vienna Foreign Office was constantly being warned about its coming, and worried to death about the consequences upon Vienna of its coming.
Exasperated beyond endurance by the endless fears of his colleagues, and full of contempt for them, one of the higher officials exclaimed: “But what nonsense is this talk of a Russian Revolution; who is to make the revolution? There is nobody. Perhaps”—and here came a gesture of superb contempt—“Mr. Trotsky of the Café Centrale!”
A trip to Semmering was one of the excursions which consoled one a little for the desolate spectacle of empty markets and idle factories, of a disintegrating civic life. Semmering is a four hours’ motor drive from Vienna, beautifully placed near the Styrian frontier. It is a health resort full at that time of rich refugees. At a simple guest-house on the slope of one of the hills President Seitz and his wife, with a few members of his Cabinet, recuperated during the week-ends for the arduous duties of the week. His secretary took me out there for the day. We were again a curiously mixed group. The overworked and courteous secretary was a baron of the old regime. Professor Leon Kellner, hearty in manner and ruddy of complexion, the famous Shakespearean scholar, was there; Otto Grockney, Minister for Education, gravely peering through spectacles at the new-comer; and Dr. Seitz.
Of this first President of the Socialist Republic of Austria, Karl Seitz, I have written before. He is a kind, amiable, benevolent, distinguished-looking man with a keen sense of humour. Someone hearing him thus praised exclaimed: “But what else do you expect from a President of Austria?” Looking at this polite and suave man of the world, every inch a president, it is with difficulty that one realizes that he was once on a time the fiercest leader of the Socialist Opposition in the turbulent Austrian Parliament. He started his career as an elementary school-teacher, became the fire-brand of the Lower Austrian Diet and ended as the President! He is a speaker of very great eloquence and power. He was always well liked, even by his opponents, and is extremely popular. Very few of the new type of potentate have the heart, the mind, the manners so ready to fit the new position.
Dr. Max Winter, the kind-hearted Vice-Burgermeister of Vienna, is the man to whom I owe most of my acquaintance with the civic life of the city. Day after day he or his secretary or his son, who had been a prisoner of war in England, took me out to see in particular what was being done for the children. Dr. Winter is always spoken of as “the children’s Mayor,” for the children are his very serious concern. In his company I saw the public feeding centres of the Americans, the clinics supervised by the Friends, the children’s hospitals so sadly lacking funds, the open-air play-centres in the public parks, and the country schools. The houses of rich nobles who have fled and the palaces of the ex-Kaiser were used for this purpose. There was a particularly attractive little hospital and feeding centre in a corner of the Schönbrunn Palace for those children whose parents could afford to contribute a little towards their keep, I think two crowns a day, worth at that time about one penny. At the holiday camps in the parks the children ran about all day in bathing suits, and very brown and jolly they looked with the exposure to the sun and the regular, if scarcely sufficient, food. “Freundschaft! Freundschaft!” they cried, running to kiss my hand after the custom of the country. Sometimes they sang their little songs and danced their pretty dances. Beautiful brown-eyed Viennese children dancing in paper dresses, and crowned with wood flowers in the Wiener Wald! I see them now in the mind’s eye, waving their thin arms and smiling sweetly, with not a thought of the bitter, cruel thing which is robbing them of health and life in their innocent young hearts.
After a sad excursion one day to the market, where little girls of twelve lay all night with their baskets waiting for the opening of the butcher’s shop, and the scramble for the ration of meat for the family dinner, I found waiting for me in the hotel about twenty women and one child all robed in deep black. They had come with a petition. It was to ask me to help them to get their husbands out of Russia, prisoners of war there. Some had not been heard of for four years. Terrible stories of their sufferings had come through. The women were frantic with grief. They had been to the Mayor; he could do nothing. They had been to the Government; the Government had made promises but done nothing. They had been to the Allied Missions and had been sent away empty. They were beginning to believe that the Government and the Allies were in concert to keep the men in Russia because of their fear of Bolshevist infection—afraid that the men had become converts. Someone had suggested that perhaps I could help. They begged with quivering lips that I would do something. Suddenly the child, a little fair-haired thing, sprang from her mother’s side, and falling on her knees at my feet, clasped her tiny hands and said in lisped English: “Dear kind English lady, do bring my daddy back to me.” The women burst into tears, such a sobbing and a wailing as would have melted a stone. It was deeply painful. What could I do? I promised to interest the women’s organizations of England and the Labour Party, and immediately wrote to both. Alas! when the relief came, thousands, tens of thousands, had died in exile, destroyed by hunger and disease.
The journey back to Berne was much quicker and more comfortable. By special permission I returned by the children’s train. Six hundred small victims of the famine came every six or seven weeks to hospitable Switzerland; I travelled with one train load. I can add nothing to the description of the sufferers I have already given; but I can add a word of praise of the Swiss. They have raised for themselves a lasting monument in the affections of the Austrian people, and have set an example of practical internationalism which should shame all those whose faith in blockades and tariffs and embargoes and prohibitions is not yet dead. But for the Swiss and the Americans Austria’s plight would have been beyond hope, and the world would be the poorer by the loss of one of the most cultivated, artistic and lovable races which have contributed to the happiness and elevation of mankind. Very late in the day the men of Paris have moved towards the relief of Vienna. Perhaps it is not quite too late to save the remnant. But the martyrs have been many, and the agony long.