II
IN HUNGER-STRICKEN AUSTRIA
I had wondered, not without anxiety, what it would feel like to be in an enemy country. Should I meet with stiff and resentful pride, or would the attitude be an even more painful cringing? It is neither of these things. Here in Vienna a nation which has made its bloodless Republican revolution believes with a pathetic simplicity in the fraternity of peoples. The chambermaid in my hotel gave me the watchword this morning. She came in smiling with a reminder that this was election day. In two minutes she had told me that she was going to vote Socialist. "Does it feel strange," I asked, "to talk to an enemy?" "No," she answered promptly, "the people has no enemies," and then followed the inevitable sentence which I have heard all day long from almost every one whom I met. "The people is not guilty of this war; the people did not want the war." As a Socialist Deputy put it, "There were perhaps ten thousand people among Austria's fifty millions who welcomed the war, and most of them were profiteers." Wherever I have gone during this momentous day in Austria's history, in the committee rooms of the Socialist candidates, the offices of the Socialist newspaper, and the big "Workers Home" or club-house of the central district, I had only to introduce myself as a foreign comrade to be accorded a welcome, and when I added that I am an Englishman there came a reassuring pressure of the hand.
Is it true, as we have all heard, for many weeks, that Austria is starving? As I crossed the frontier from relatively prosperous Switzerland, I was doubtful. There seemed at first to be plenty of food, rather nasty and very dear, in the station restaurants. Smuggling no doubt was easy. The train crawled slowly through the Tyrolese valleys, incredibly beautiful in their decorations of snow. There was ample time to read the local newspapers. The lack of coal has meant that express trains have ceased to run, and ours went at less than the speed of a London electric train. The first thing that caught my eye were the advertisements in the Socialist organ of Innsbruck. Would any one exchange a few sacks of coal for gold, cigarettes or tobacco? Had any one a little stout leather, or warm woolen stuff for a child's dress that they would give for a pair of golden earrings? In every newspaper that I picked up, the staring salient advertisements were for dealings in jewelry or furs. The middle-class is selling its luxuries for food. I turned to the election news in these local Tyrolese papers. Slander was painfully prominent, but the only mud which seemed to stick was a charge relating to food. The Clericals accused the Socialists of underhand practices in distributing flour; the Socialists retorted with a shower of disconcerting facts. As I walked down one of the central streets of Vienna to-day, an army aeroplane, flying just above the roofs, dropped a little cloud of leaflets. They exposed the dealings of certain Hapsburg Archdukes who are said to have distinguished themselves as monopolists in food or milk or as army contractors. On the surface of this people's mind there are only two preoccupations; the first is food, and the second is coal. It wants no close observation to mark the lack of coal, even after a few hours' sojourn. In our main-line train, the only Continental "express," crawling along at about ten miles an hour, the conductor came round at nightfall to apologize for turning on the gas only at half-pressure. Walking down the platform at the next stop, I saw that in the third-class carriages, crammed like a London tube with standing passengers, no lights at all were lit. Even in this good hotel the sitting-rooms are chilly, the light barely suffices to read large print, and hot water is obtainable only in limited quantities within stated hours. Bread, of course, is severely rationed, at the rate of a half-kilogram (about 134 lb.) weekly. As one got it in the hotel, the portion amounted for the whole day to three slices of the long Viennese loaf, or about one moderately thick slice of an ordinary English loaf. Milk, butter, and cheese were in my experience unobtainable even in the best hotels and restaurants. Potatoes one could occasionally get in a good hotel, but for the working class they had entirely disappeared. Working-class families could get rationed meat once a week, but no oftener: the rich bought it from smugglers, but at fantastic prices.1 1 Returning to Vienna in April, I found it in its fourth consecutive meatless week.
Discomfort in the big hotel means starvation in the worker's garret. In the Socialist club of the "Favoriten" quarter I met the local Deputy for the Provincial Diet. He was good enough to take me round his constituency. The streets were filled with a rather dreary crowd, for the famous gaiety of Vienna is a distant memory. The clothes of the working class are manifestly faded and old, and one sees none of the cheap finery that strolls westwards from our East End on Sunday. Patches are so common that they look like a local fashion. The children and the poorer workers clatter along on wooden soles, for leather is the luxury of the rich. The faces of the women and the children are of any tint from yellow and gray to ashy white, and their lips suggest that nearly every one is anemic. I have seen such lips before among refugees in the Balkans. All Central Europe has been Balkanized to-day. We walked past gigantic blocks of modern flats, by no means tasteless as architecture. I asked my guide about the housing conditions. One-roomed dwellings, usually with a little unfit vestibule, are the rule, and the "cabinets" (I should prefer to call them cells) are sometimes no more than 12 feet by 6. My guide, whom every one greeted as we passed, took me into some of these dwellings, choosing them at random. The usual Austrian politeness and good nature made the conversation easy, though I had sometimes to ask for a translation into polite German of the broad Viennese dialect.
In one of the larger rooms was a family of four, a widower and three boys. A tall man, perhaps sixty years of age, stood in the ragged clothes that once were respectable, among the remains of his furniture. The carpet was gone. A bedstead remained. The bedding consisted of straw with something that looked like a horse-blanket eked out by sacks. He was a mason by trade, and in Austria, as elsewhere, building had ceased long ago. How did he live? The City pays six crowns a day to every unemployed man, with an extra crown for each member of the family. The daily income of this household was accordingly ten crowns. The crown used to be worth a fraction over a franc. Its exchange value is now about three pence. I was trying hard to imagine what this could mean in terms of food, when one of the boys came in with the evening meal, the Sunday treat, from the nearest national kitchen. A fragment of meat, probably horse, lay in the pan with a fairly generous supply of gravy, and a dumpling of meal, which is the usual substitute for a potato. The meat was, I should guess, about one-sixth of a pound, certainly less than a quarter. The cost of this banquet was four crowns and sixty-heller (cents), and it had to be shared among one man and three boys. It would leave about half the day's income intact. The old man poured out a long story. His eldest boy, he assured me, was a gifted artist, and moreover he had learned French and Tchech. He would have gone to college, if his father had been able to earn his good pre-war wages. The admiring brothers brought out a big portfolio of his sketches, and the irrelevant water colors, like the wrack of Austria's artistic past, fluttered on to the bare floor and the straw that covered the bed. Now that boy will become a day-laborer—if Austria can buy labor.1 1Five months later the Austrian government is writing begging letters to its victors. The blockade is lifted, but it lacks the means to buy raw materials, and without them, no work can begin.
In another flat was a family of nine. The man, who had just been demobilized, looked stout and well-fed, but he could find no work. The children had the familiar transparently white skin of anemia. Only one of the nine earns anything, a "young person" as our legislators would call her, who receives 30 kronen a week (say 7s. 6d.) in a factory. How did they live f Chiefly, I gathered, from daily portions of their soup and a slice of bread supplied in the public kitchens to the destitute. One family talked of the dearness of boots, even with wooden soles. Another reminded me that a sausage which used to cost four heller (cents) before the war is now worth four crowns. None of these, I should say, were habitually degraded families. Their style of speaking, their quiet good manners, and the relics here and there of past possessions stamped them as victims of something less than lifelong penury. "I hope one day to become a human being again," was the terrible phrase which one woman used of herself. In round figures my guide, the Deputy, told me that there are now 100,000 unemployed workers in Vienna. That means about half a million men, women, and children in a population of two millions. Figures tell little, but one figure which came from the house-porter of one of these blocks of flats needs no comment. In his barrack, with its sixty-two one-roomed dwellings, there were thirty-four war-widows.
Literal starvation, in this city, which is even shorter of coal than of food, would have been the general fate had it not been for the public kitchens. I watched the distribution at one of these to-day. The queue had been standing for two hours when I arrived, and still there were from three to four hundred waiting to be served. Most of them were more or less ragged: all were in very old clothes. What struck me most about them was the contrast between the personal cleanliness and tidiness of the women and the poverty of their attire. A woman who had done up her hair with an elaboration which we in England would think coquettish and excessive would be wearing a shawl or a pair of boots in the last stages of decomposition. The raggedness, I concluded, proceeds not from lack of care or self-respect, but from sheer penury. Some ate their portions at tables; the majority carried them home. The meal consisted of one plate of soup or a soup of mixed vegetables. Both were almost wholly lacking in fat. A strange-looking thing called meat was added. It was, in fact, a sort of rissole, which looked like meat in the sense that it was solid and brown. The proportion of meat in it would not have soiled the conscience of a vegetarian. A single portion of this dish cost 4d., a double portion, twice as much (8d.). I suppose this portion would just keep a man alive, if he were reasonably idle. In point of fact most of these dinners went home, which meant that one portion, single or double, was the day's food for a family of several persons.
That is the diet of those workers who can still pay. There is a free distribution from soup kitchens to those who are wholly destitute. This free soup is doled out in half-liters, without meat or bread, and as the cook sadly confessed to me, there is no fat in it at all. On cabbage day it must be nearly valueless as nourishment; on haricot days it should be sustaining. It is, however, for most of these people their only hot meal in the twenty-four hours. I stood and talked to a group of boys who survived upon it. All of them had that terribly white transparent skin which means severe anemia. All of them were wearing men's discarded boots tied together with string. I made them show me the soles. All of them were in pulp. One only of the four had reasonably warm clothes (it was ten degrees below zero three nights ago), and that was because he had luckily obtained an old infantry uniform which hung about him like a drooping flag on a pole. Under the rags in which these children are clad peeps out the ashen-white skin tightly stretched over the bones. They live still, chiefly because they possess the tradition of this once gay city, which jokes as it tightens its belt. As I turned away, the boys began to laugh at some private joke of their own. "Well, what is it?" I asked. "Wir sind Wiener Kinder," was the answer of the brightest of them. They cultivate laughter on a very little oatmeal.
The crisis, one may say, is over. Has not Mr. Hoover undertaken to supply grain enough to continue the present exiguous ration of bread? That is true, but on the other hand Vienna is about to enter on a period of meatless weeks. The Tchecho-Slovaks have now been shamed into allowing coal for Vienna to cross their railways. The fact remains that German-Austria cannot buy, for it has nothing to export. It lived on the coal of Bohemia, the wheat of Croatia and the meat of Hungary, and now it stands alone. For the factories and metal works of Vienna there is neither raw material nor market. It used to live by exchange with all the Hapsburg Dominions. Its territory for supply and demand is now shrunken to a fraction. Until the blockade is raised, no commerce can begin, and even then, until a substantial foreign loan permits the restoration of the worthless paper-currency, it is idle to talk of foreign trade.
Is the popular saying true, that the nation was
guiltless of the war? Perhaps there was a mad
week or two, which all would now forget, when
the Viennese middle-class crowd, well-fed, well-dressed, and gay as was its wont, cheered the
troops departing for the front. It has repented
of that folly. No one could doubt that, who reads
the electioneering placards and fly-sheets. Yesterday along the railway line, young soldiers, still in
uniform, stood beside our train, silently holding
up their party standards. One was a simple appeal to "vote red." Another was a cry to the
women voters, showing the figure of a mother
mourning for her son. The third, white on black,
represented a file of skeletons beating a military
drum, and the inscription: "They call to you to
make an end of war." We in England have come
through an election in which the chief reproach
against a candidate was that he was a pacifist.
Here in Austria the effort of every party is to
proclaim itself pacifist. No one can dispute the
claim of the Austrian Socialists; they never compromised over the war, or ceased demanding instant peace. They turn fiercely on Liberals and Clericals alike to remind them of their warlike
past—their bellicose speeches, their early newspaper articles, their decorations, their profiteering gains. The Liberals, or at least the strongest
of their many groups (the middle-class Democrats), make, here and there, the pathetic attempt
to discover among themselves a few genuine pacifists, whom they place at the head of their lists.
The real issue lies between Socialists and Clericals, with the Democrats as a balancing force.
The Socialists stand for the Republic, for pacifism,
for war on the profiteer. The Clericals represent
a sheeplike crowd of peasants and women, regimented by the clergy behind a peculiarly unscrupulous group of financiers, courtiers, and large
landowners. Though they do not openly campaign, for the restoration of the Monarchy, that
is probably their secret dream, and though they
also call for union with Germany, their zeal on this
question is open to suspicion. In their manifestoes, however, they pledge themselves both to the
Republic and to Union. You will know the issue
long before these lines appear in print. It cannot
be a Clerical Majority. Any other result is a victory for democracy and peace. 1 1The result was as I anticipated. The Socialist won a
sweeping victory in Vienna, and did well in other industrial
districts. The Clerical Party ("Christian-Socialists") carried
the more backward rural districts. The Keichsrat is composed of 70 Socialists, 64 Clericals, and 78 others. The
voting was, as in Germany and Poland by proportional representation, on the list system, with universal suffrage. Since no
party had an absolute majority, a Coalition was formed from
all three parties, but the Socialists have all the chief offices,
with Herr Spitz as President, Dr. Renner as Premier, Dr. Otto
Bauer as Foreign Secretary, and Dr. Deutsch, a frank and attractive personality, very popular with the soldiers, as War Minister.
This party is well disciplined and well led, and its leaders are
"intellectuals" to a much greater extent than in Germany. Its
organ, the Arbiter Zeitung, is to-day a better newspaper than
Vorwarts. The Left Wing is led by Dr. Fritz Adler, the son of
Dr. Victor Adler, who assassinated the late Premier Stllrgkh. He
is by far the most popular man in the movement, but though he
differs little in theory from the Communists and the more radical
of the German Independents, he remains loyally within the party
and opposes revolutionary tactics. These Austrian Socialists
have been singularly fortunate in their leaders, and contrive to
preserve their unity, though the various shades of opinion are
well marked. Dr. Bauer is the ablest of the more conservative
"Evolutionary" section, but one rarely meets among Austrian
Socialists the peculiarly wooden and almost obstructive conservatism which is painfully common in the German "Majority."
Another crucial difference should be noted. There are no reactionary mercenary "Free Corps," in Austria, like those which
Noske raised in Germany to crush the Spartacists. The only
armed force is the "Volkswehr," a militia which is composed
almost to a man (the officers included) of Socialist working-men.
Austria is singularly quiet and orderly to-day. To me it feels like
the quiet of men too weak and anemic to move.
Some said, when I expressed that opinion, "the
quiet before the storm." No nation will die without one despairing convulsion, and Austria is
doomed to death1 1I was able to obtain from official sources exact vital statistics
for Vienna, but only for the year 1917. The figures for 1918
must be very much worse. Comparing in every case the year
1914 with the year 1917, I will select some salient facts. The
number of children born alive fell from 36,000 to 19,000: deaths
of children over five rose from 5,000 to 35,000: deaths between
the ages of 50 and 70 rose from 8,000 to 13,000, and over
70 from 5,000 to 9,000: deaths from tuberculosis (due to the
absence of fats) rose from 6,300 to 11,800. Almost all working-class children in Vienna over two years of age were rickety.
Vienna was by no means the worst case. The Viennese
medical authorities told me that Linz and the towns of German
Bohemia were in a still more distressed condition. One of
Mr. Hoover's investigators asked the children in a school of
German Bohemia what they had had for breakfast. Out of 47
children 12 had had absolutely nothing and 13 had had black
substitute coffee and nothing else. Four only had milk with
coffee: the rest had had a dish of wild herbs gathered in the
fields. These were the Professors' children: the really poor
children had neither boots nor clothes, and could not go to school
at all. The lack of clothing was everywhere almost as serious
as the lack of food. I saw children dressed in suits neatly made
from sacks. In many hospitals children had to be wrapped in
paper, for want of sheets and blankets.
Germany was a little less miserable than Austria. None the
less, this spring 30 per cent. of the children born to married
mothers in Berlin died, and at Dûsseldorf, according to the correspondent of the Morning Post, 85 per cent. of the babies
perished for lack of milk. Professor Starling stated that before
the war the average consumption of calories in England was
3,600 per head daily: in Germany, after 1917, the average fell
to 1,500. The German miners were in consequence of underfeeding able to produce only 40 per cent, of the pre-war output, and
yet they had an extra ration. During one of the weeks of this
June the City Council of Berlin stated that 700 cattle and 17
swine were brought in to be slaughtered: the pre-war weekly
average was between 5,000 and 6,000 cattle and 25,000 swine.
In May the Swiss Colony in Germany, in a joint appeal to the
Swiss Government, stated that 800 deaths per day in Germany
were directly attributable to the blockade. The German official
reckoning, based on the excess of deaths over pre-war averages,
was that 1,600,000 civilians had died in Germany and Austria
as a consequence of the blockade.
Conditions in "Congress" Poland were in respect to food
decidedly better than in Germany, but the famine east of the
Bug was immeasurably worse than anything to be found
elsewhere.
The raising of the blockade will lead only very gradually and
slowly to an improvement in the food supply of Central Europe.
The plain fact is that with their currencies depreciated to a
fourth and a sixth of the old figure, Germany and Austria can
afford to buy only the barest minimum of food from abroad.
Nor can they without credit purchase raw materials. Thus the
resumption of industry is delayed, but even if they had anything
to export, there are in most of the Allied markets embargoes in
the way, which prohibit the import of most of the German
specialties.
Vienna, February 16, 1919.