The trees in their forests as of old stand ready for the cutting. The peasants are more anxious than ever to make their traditional excursion. But someone in Paris scrawled on a map with a blue pencil, so the trees are not felled and the peasants starve. Conditions are so bad in these primitive villages that the children would not have lived the year out had not the American Relief Administration made their rescue one of its special objects.
Here again, as with the miners, the starvation is not caused by unwillingness to work, but by the volcanic upheavals of war, followed by a political redistribution which has destroyed economic stability and criss-crossed Central Europe with hostile tariff walls in places where the flow of trade was once traditional and amiable. Whether these countries will be able to function efficiently after they have adapted themselves to their new boundaries is a question which only time can prove. For the moment, as though one had dammed torrents within new confines, diverting them from their ancient courses, there is a seething swirl of unrest, then an over-flowing and then stagnation.
All the railroads run towards Vienna, which was the great middleman city for the old empire. Hungary sent grain. Bohemia sent coal. They did their trading there and exchanged their products for commodities which they could not produce themselves. Today Vienna is isolated in a small patch of scrubby country which is the new Austria. The new Austria has no natural resources on which to maintain its population. The only way its people can hope to gain a living is by being again, what they once were, Central Europe's middlemen. But their currency is so debased that its purchasing value is almost gone. No one who had anything of actual value would go to Vienna to exchange it for their unreal money. Nevertheless, the railroads still converge there; there has been no time to change them. For all the purpose they serve they might as well run out into the Sahara desert. The political map, as re-arranged by the Peace, has built walls across most of the old travel-routes; it has given ancient hostilities a new means of venting their animosities, has destroyed confidence and dislocated the entire system of transport. This is without doubt the fundamental answer to the question, “Why does Central Europe starve?” The fault is not one of sulkiness or laziness on the part of the people who do the starving. They are not starving in order to spite the Allies or because they derive a patriotic ecstasy from starvation. They want to work and they prefer employment to charity. They claim the right to work; but if their work is to be of any value to the world, we must first restore to them their vitality, by nourishing their famished bodies, and then stabilise their economic conditions so that the marketing of the results of their industry may be assured.
CHAPTER X—BABUSCHKA
Prague is one of the more important of the jumping off points for Bolshevist propaganda in Europe; it is at the same time a rendezvous for exiled Russians of moderate views, who are conspiring to overthrow the Red regime the moment the hour seems propitious. These exiled Russians all belong to the Intelligencia—the cultured middle-class. They are university students, professors, doctors, engineers—the people of brains and small means who do the sane thinking for whatever nation. They are a class which is being rapidly exterminated in all the stricken countries. In Russia they have been smashed into oblivion with clubs and rifles; in Central Europe they are dying more respectably, because more privately, of famine. Here, in Prague, for instance, poorly as a working man is paid, his wages are higher than a school-teacher's.
A fund for their partial rescue has been placed in the hands of the American Relief Administration by the will of Mr. Harkness. I saw what it was accomplishing for the first time in Vienna, when I lunched with the professors of the University, many of whom are world-famous in their various departments of research. The terrible problem that they have to face is explained at once when it is stated that the highest salary paid to a professor, if exchanged into American currency, would be worth at most one hundred dollars a year. That is the highest; the bulk of the salaries are much less. Before the war, when a crown had the spending value of twenty-two cents, they could live comfortably and with the necessary ease of mind. Today, when the crown has shrunk to the value of one-sixth of a cent, they find themselves in penury.
The Harkness Fund is providing the professors of Vienna with one meal a day, to which the professors themselves contribute one twenty-fourth. I watched them come in to lunch and the ravenous way in which they ate. I tried to bring the significance of the scene home to myself by shifting the stage-setting to Harvard or Oxford. They were men of the highest intellectual type and of an achievement which speaks for itself. The science and learning of both America and Great Britain are already the wiser for their devotion. Today we are saving thousands of lives by the past results of their medical discoveries. Most emphatically they are the kind of men who, were they to perish, it would be impossible to replace. And here they were cold, ill-nourished, shabby, bending voraciously over a rough plenty as though they were outcasts from the gutter. As the lunch progressed one noticed that, despite their hunger, they were restraining their appetites. The bread by their plates remained untouched. To the bread they added various morsels, till by the end of the meal a little pile had grown up. Before each left, he drew out a piece of paper and surreptitiously made a bundle of the pile, which he slipped into his pocket, glancing this way and that to see whether he was observed. Then he hurried out to where a wife and children were counting the seconds till his coming.
The next time I saw the Harkness Fund at work was here in Prague. The American Relief Administration had taken a hall and provided a Christmas entertainment at which food-packages were to be distributed to the exiled Russian Intelligencia. When we arrived the hall was jammed. There were girl university students, with their hair cropped like the women in the Battalion of Death. They were clad for the most part in old dresses which had been collected by the Red Cross in America. There were tottering middle-aged professors, the counterpart of those whom I had seen in Vienna. There were soldiers of Denikin's and Kolchak's armies in the loose Russian military blouse. Most of these were students who are pursuing their studies at Prague University and living of necessity in human pigsties. And then there were mothers, dragged to pieces by adversity, carrying babies, with still more babies clinging to their skirts. Yet, despite their poverty, the gathering had an ecstatic, valiant look. One glanced from one white face to the next—at the gray-white sea they made when massed together. The spirit which lay behind those faces was not broken. Pinched, neglected, emaciated, misunderstood—yes; but it still stood erect to greet the future. It believed in the future. It hoped. Moving through the throng like a blessing, came a little bowed old woman. Her eyes were dim. She had to lean on a tall young soldier's arm to support herself. Over her cropped gray head she wore a gray piece of cloth, folded in a triangle. “Babus-chka! Babuschka!” the whisper went round. It grew into something like a shout. There was no surging, no jostling. The people went forward one by one to greet her. She placed her old gnarled hands on their shoulders, drawing their heads down, so that she could kiss them. Babus-chka—the little grandmother! They were all grandsons and granddaughters to her. She might have been a saint—but she was too human. She preferred to be what she has always been, the little grandmother of exiled Russia.