First World War Centennial

HUNGER AND REVOLUTION IN VIENNA

The events in Vienna to-day (April), are a trifle in the civil war which breaks out spasmodically-all over Central Europe. No field-guns were used, and the casualties were only five killed and forty wounded. None the less the day had for me a deep and tragic interest. On a small scale one saw at work all the devils that have entered the distracted house of the defeated peoples.

The Communists had called a series of open-air meetings for the unemployed, the returned prison­ers, and the disabled soldiers. On the steps of the City Hall (Rathaus) and in front of it a dense crowd had gathered. The place suggests respect­ability. It stands on the famous "Ring" of boule­vards; its ornate nineteenth-century Gothic is as spurious as our own St. Stephen's; and ironically poised above the crowd there pranced in the guise of a medieval knight a figure with the face of the old Emperor Francis Joseph. The crowd seemed tame, silent, depressed, irresponsive, and half the faces even of the demobilized men were as worn and gray as their old trench-clothes.

The speeches sounded as tame as the crowd looked. None of the orators had the lungs, or the wit, or the magnetism for this work, and their phrases about the misery of the workers, the sel­fishness of the capitalists, and the so-called treach­ery of the Socialist Ministers were shabby from long use. A German orator from Hungary de­scribed the glories of its social revolution, but a Moderate who followed him posed the unanswer­able question: If Vienna made a revolution, could Hungary send her the necessary twelve trains of daily bread? The official speakers damped the meeting at once by announcing that the Commun­ist party had come to the decision that the time is not yet ripe for action. Presently it was an­nounced from the steps that another and larger demonstration in the Prater had formed into a procession and was marching on the Parliament House to present its demands for grants that would compensate the prisoners and the disabled for something of what they had suffered.

The whole broad King was in motion. The electric cars had stopped; one saw nothing but the red banners and the masses of moving heads. Twenty thousand demonstrators (to make a rough guess) were before the Reichsrath. It is a pseudo-classic building, in a solid Doric style, and over the mass of revolutionary heads there towered a simpering, gilded Minerva and a whole Olympus of lesser stony gods. Here, too, there were speeches, to me inaudible. I heard only one of them, and it was of three words. "We are hun­gry," shouted a bluejacket who had climbed a lamp-post. He repeated it six times, and the crowd chimed in. It was a genial, irresponsible crowd. Some one hoisted "the red rag" on the official Parliamentary flagstaff, and then a humor­ist tied a neat red bow round Apollo's neck.

There came soon, however, a decidedly aggres­sive noise. Out of sight people were thundering at a door. The deputation had been refused ad­mission, and on its behalf the hotheads were break­ing the obstacle down. Soon one heard the crash of breaking glass, an inciting and exhilarating noise, and I could see street-lads and very young soldiers systematically dealing with the Parlia­mentary windows. It went on for half an hour or more before the mounted police appeared. A squad of men on fat horses (a well-fed horse is a strange sight in starving Austria) rushed round the building at a gallop. It was not a skilful maneuver. The crowd shouted, gave the minimum of ground, and closed up quickly in the rear of the charging police. After a short interval the "watch" (as Vienna calls it) charged again, this time with drawn swords. It dealt some nasty blows as it charged, but the only result was that the crowd, still forming up behind it, stoned it until its rush looked more like a flight than a charge. This time a pistol shot was fired as the watch went by. It came from a tall, well-dressed man, and he certainly fired in the air.

At last the foot "watch" came out from the Parliament with rifles. There was no ceremony, and none but a visible warning. Advancing like skirmishers among the trees of a little garden, the police fired single shots at close quarters. Close to me a disabled soldier, in uniform, fell wounded. He was shot in the thigh and groaned in pain as a stream of blood poured out on the pavement. His comrades gave "first aid" with practiced hands. They had dealt with such cases every day for four years. Three more were wounded round that little garden. The amazing thing was the conduct of the crowd. It certainly thinned a little, and the more respectable specta­tors retired to a distance. The "Invalids" (dis­charged soldiers) held their ground. "Nit Lauren" (Don't run) they called after the first in­stinctive movement, and few ran either fast or far. In a minute or two most of the men and some of the women were pressing forward again, shaking fists at the police and shouting "Murder­ers!" The peculiar horror of shooting wounded men made every one angry. As for the old sol­diers themselves, they cared nothing for rifle-fire, it was too familiar, but all round me they were lamenting that they had themselves no rifles.

After this achievement the police retired once more. An enterprising youth had appropriated Neptune's oar, and with it the business of smash­ing in the doors was resumed. A coal-cart tried to pass. Instantly the crowd drew it across the road to form a barricade. The coals were used as ammunition against the upper windows. Ten min­utes later women were gathering up the coals in their aprons to kindle proletarian hearths. So near is want to revolution.

The next intruder was a motor-car. It, too, was stopped; its petrol was the one thing needful. The same youths who had smashed the windows were now setting fire to the woodwork. It made a magnificent blaze, and in ten minutes the mount­ing flames were blackening the solid gray stones, and a roaring blast from four windows at once was invading the Parliament House. No fire-engine came near it, and the police kept their watch discreetly round a corner.

Parliament was in flames, and the crowd watched it with growing excitement and delight. They were easy to talk to, but they spoke more in exclamations than in sentences. "What do we want with a Parliament?" said one. "All power to the Soviets," said another. "We're all Bol­sheviks now," said a third. "Four years ago there were no Bolsheviks. It's the war that has done it." "The war!" The word seemed to touch a spring in every mind, and presently in the little group of disabled soldiers that had gathered round me every one seemed to be talking at once of what they had suffered on the Carso. They talked of ghastly wounds, severed heads, and limbs that sped through the air. It was hard to listen to all they said, and I heard more curses than narratives. Some cursed emperors and capital­ists, but in their instinctive way it evidently was the whole system of society and government in Europe that they damned. The plain man in England blames the Kaiser for the war. These Austrian cripples saw much further, and they watched the flames with savage pleasure, for they were consuming a symbol of a system. Two men on crutches stood in front of the crowd warming themselves luxuriously in the heat. Most con­spicuous of all was a lame but active man who skipped about on his two bent legs and a stick, dropping at moments on all fours. His face in the light of the flames was contorted with malice, and wherever he went he incited. Once he could stand upright and give his arm to a girl. To-day, like a four-footed beast broken and maimed for ever, he was taking his revenge on the past.

Loud cheers had broken out, and presently a motor-car came slowly through the crowd. A Volkswehr (militia) officer was in it, and he made a speech under the conflagration. "The Volks­wehr sympathizes with the just demands of the people. In twenty minutes it will be here. Don't attack the police. They are afraid of their lives. They must march out safely and their rifles shall be burned. ('No,' said the crowd, 'distribute them among us.') We will keep order. Mean­while let no one go away. Trust the Volkswehr and wait for us."

The crowd was overjoyed. "The revolution has begun," they said. "The Soviet Republic will be proclaimed." The crowd held its ground, but much more than twenty minutes passed, and mean­while there was another charge of the mounted men. It was the most murderous of all. In the dim light I could see human shapes writhing on the ground, and this time we heard many shots from the revolvers of the Communists, as well as from the carbines of the police. Two of the crowd appeared brandishing captured police sabers. Round the corner there had evidently been some casualties among the defenders. The flames burned on. Ambulances went about collecting the wounded. Amid it all a lamplighter quietly passed from lamp to lamp, and little superfluous points of green-yellow light contrasted with the red flames. So does convention go about its work of routine with punctual duty amid the chaos of the world. That lamplighter, who went his habit­ual way amid the dying and the blaze, seemed to me somehow to resemble a diplomatist.

At last the Volkswehr appeared amid the wel­comes of the crowd. The bayonets were not fixed, and almost casually they drew a cordon round the flames. They did not push or charge or threaten. "Comrade, please, a little way back," "Comrade, if you don't mind, will you please step over this railing?" And the comrades obeyed, and were glad to obey.

But what was going to happen? The Volkswehr is a Socialist force. Was it going to make a ring round the Parliament while it burned? It looked like that. But presently one realized that a ma­chine was playing on the flames from inside. In twenty minutes they were out. The Volkswehr, then, believes in parliaments. There is to be no revolution.^{1 1}Revolution was impossible in Vienna for the simple reason that it depended on the Entente for food. The British Com­missioner announced that all supplies of food would cease, if riots took place.

In much more intimate and less defensible ways than this, the Entente, through the Reparation Commission, will virtually govern Austria. The bankrupt State retains only a nominal independence. Its whole fiscal policy, and therefore its whole internal policy, will necessarily depend on the good will of the Commission. That result is by no means displeasing to the upper world of finance and society in Vienna. As a very influ­ential Austrian Liberal politician and financier said to me, "Control by the Entente will be welcome, for it will enable us to resist the schemes of our Socialists." It must be remembered that these ministerial Socialists are of the most moderate evolu­tionary school.

It is primarily because union with Germany offered the only prospect of escape from foreign tutelage that the Austria So­cialists demanded it, and will continue to demand it.

The crowd was melting away. Cordons were being drawn across all the approaches. One little group still remained in the King, gathered round something on the ground. A police horse had been shot in the last charge. The police horses are fat. One man carried off a steak, and another a leg. In a few minutes the skeleton and the saddle remained. "We are hungry," the sailor had said. "We are hungry," answered the crowd.

Vienna, April 17, 1919.