VIENNA IN WAR TIME.
Scene Along the Danube.
I had never realized the wonderfulness of the German food card system until I went to Vienna. In Germany you can buy at a reasonable price your allotted ration of food, and the poor people are just as well off as the rich, but in Vienna the rich people have everything and the poor people are in great need because of the lack of food regulations, and while there is an abundance of food it is so dear that the poor cannot afford to buy. And Vienna is not like Berlin—there are a great many poor people in Vienna.
Funeral of Franz Josef. The Emperor and Crown Prince of Austria in the Foreground.
Viennese Vegetable Woman.
For some time there has been a bread card in Vienna, and at the time of my visit, November 1916, the government was just beginning to take the food question in hand, and a few weeks before Christmas a coffee and a sugar card were issued. But the Austrians have not the gift for organization which the Germans have, and I heard that even six months later the food distribution was in a very poor state. I talked to many Austrians, and they all told me that they were anxious to have the entire German food card system established in Austria.
Collecting Books, Papers and Tobacco for the Hungarian Soldiers.
Austria is a great agricultural and wheat-raising country, and yet when I was there, there was very little bread in Vienna. The beautiful white Viennese bread had entirely disappeared, and a soggy brown stuff had taken its place. There was one kind called "Anker Bread" that was still very good, and the people stood in line to get it. And all this was not because flour was scarce but because of its poor distribution.
None of the restaurants are allowed to serve bread, even if you have a bread card you cannot get it, and the only place a stranger can get bread in Vienna is for breakfast at his hotel. People who eat in restaurants carry their bread with them, and generals and all sorts of high officials have little packages of bread concealed in their pockets which they slyly pull out at the table.
All the white flour is baked into cakes, and the Viennese cakes are as white and as wonderful as in their palmiest days. But the price! In a café a piece of cake of two thin layers costs one crown twenty-five hellers, about a quarter in our money.
Wholesale Cabbage Market in Vienna.
In most German cities one person gets about a pound of meat a week, but in Vienna there is no meat card and you can buy as much meat as you like if you can afford to buy it. Every meat shop in Vienna is hanging full of meat—sausage, ham, pork, beef, chickens and geese. I went through the great Viennese market which is squares and squares long. Everywhere meat, meat, meat. I had forgotten that there was so much meat in the world. Stall after stall just loaded down with hams, but no bacon. Mostly young pigs. But no one was buying, only looking—like Till Eulenspiegel, as though the smell was enough. The hams were from one dollar to one dollar and sixty cents a pound, and the beef was even higher. Sausage was not so expensive, and geese were cheaper than in Germany.
I had never seen such an abundance of everything. Acres and acres of cabbages piled up as high as a house—great, hard-looking heads of a fresh green color. Then barrels and barrels of apples. Not such good apples as we have in America, but at such a fancy price! For thirty-two cents we got six little dried-up apples that we could hardly eat.
From the apple market we went to the onion market. Can you imagine a square as big as Union Square in New York where nothing but onions are sold? Well, they have that in Vienna. And the most wonderful onions! Small white ones, small red ones, big yellow ones and green ones! Onion peelings flew around everywhere, and do you know that they really smelled sweet? But the old women in back of the stalls did not look sweet, but as though they had stood among onions so long that they had become dried-up onions themselves.
Waiting for Soup at a Viennese Soup-Kitchen.
They had no potatoes in the market, but the restaurants seemed to have plenty of them. Cheese was just beginning to be scarce, and one person could buy only a quarter of a pound at a time. We collected cheese to take back to Berlin with us, and we took turns going into the shops and buying a piece so that the clerks would not know that we were together. We collected a good many pounds and we got them safely over the frontier.
Eating in a restaurant in Vienna in war time is the most expensive thing of which I know. Small meat or deer orders were from eighty cents upward, and no potatoes go with this order. In Germany, you can get a piece of meat, two potatoes and a vegetable for thirty-two cents.
There seems to be plenty of milk and sugar in Vienna, but it is forbidden for any café to serve milk in coffee between the hours of two and seven o'clock, when every Viennese goes to a café to drink coffee. This restriction saves many gallons of milk. The coffee is real coffee and very good. You can have as many eggs as you like, very nicely cooked at fifteen cents an egg. Sugar is not served on the trains between Berlin and Vienna, but in a café they give you three lumps with a cup of coffee. Saccharine is served with tea.
Sick Hungarian Soldiers Receiving Gifts in Vienna.
The war has been very hard on the Austrians, and distress shows itself in the faces of the people you meet on the streets. They do not come of the sturdy stock that the Germans come from. They have always been a very religious people, and the war has made them more religious than ever, and now they are always burning candles before their favorite altar or saint's picture. The sacred picture in the Church of St. Stephen is always lighted by dozens of candles, and there is never a moment when the church is opened that some one is not kneeling before this picture, children, soldiers and old women with their empty market baskets. For the Catholic Viennese this picture is the center of everything, and in the war this inanimate object has played a big part. They pray to it to help the men in battle, to care for the wounded and to bless the souls of the dead. Centuries ago this picture was stolen by the Turks or some other kind of Pagan, and it is said that the eyes of the picture shed real tears until it was brought back and placed in a Christian church again. It stands on the ground on an easel, and people are allowed to touch the wire over it.
Small change is very scarce in Vienna, and they have torn the two-crown paper bills in two, and each half is good for a crown. They also use stamps for change as they do in Germany. Now they are making crowns and half-crowns of paper.
This winter is going to be terrible for the poor of Vienna, for last winter was bad enough. I really wonder what the people will do to get along.