In Austria
The Austrian authorities were as discourteous as the German to foreigners, subjects of neutral countries. At Carlsbad the famous singer, Adelina Patti, and her husband, Baron Cederstrom, a Danish subject, were kept prisoners for several days in their hotel, where the police searched everything and rummaged through all their trunks and portmanteaus, while the crowd, who threatened to carry the hotel by assault, raised a hideous din by way of demonstration against the singer, who is a friend of Russia and France.
According to the Italian newspaper Messagero, an Italian commercial traveller, M. Ugo Lorenzini, and ten fellow-countrymen were ill-treated by the Austrians on their return from Berlin to Italy on the outbreak of hostilities. They were imprisoned at Innsbruck, then shut up in a motor wagon, which took a day and a half to bring them to Trente. There they were robbed of everything they had, especially of 2000 crowns, which was all the money in their possession. For a whole week the Austrians actually kept them digging trenches for fifteen hours a day: hardly any food was given them and they were struck with sticks and swords. One morning, after one of them had killed the guard, they managed to escape. A Trentino peasant helped them to make good their flight to the Italian frontier, where they arrived in a state of exhaustion.