CHAPTER II—THESE MY LITTLE ONES
Today I visited one of the strategic points where the battle against hunger is being fought. It was a former barracks, now a soup-kitchen of the American Relief Administration, situated in the poorest district of Vienna, where meals are daily prepared for 8000 children. There are 340,000 undernourished children in Vienna—a total of 96 per cent, out of the entire child-population. But these, whom I visited, were all hand-picked and medically certified as being sufficiently near to extinction to be admitted. Funds are too low to feed any save those who are within measurable distance of dying.
The sight was a disgrace to civilization. The snow, which the bankrupt Government has no money to clear away, had turned to slush. One's well-shod feet were perishing. The road which approached the desolate banquet-hall, was an oozy quagmire of icy mud. Within the building at wooden tables sat an army of stunted pigmies, raggedly clad and famished to a greenish pallor. They were the kind of pigmies to whom Christ would have referred, had He been with me, as “These, my little ones.” They ranged in age all the way from the merest toddlers to the beginnings of adolescence. No one would have guessed the adolescent part of it, for there wasn't a child in the gathering who looked older than ten. They didn't talk. They didn't laugh. They were terribly intent, for each had a roll and a pannikin of cocoa over which it crouched with an animal eagerness. And the stench from the starveling bodies was nauseating.
The people who attended to their needs were Austrians. There are less than forty American officials in the whole of Europe to superintend the workings of the Relief Administration. The food had been provided one-third by American philanthropy, the other two-thirds by Austrians—which is an answer to those thrifty economists who are so afraid of pauperising Europe. This is the fixed rule of the American Relief Administration's activities, that it contributes one-third of the expense and does the organising, while the country assisted provides the other two-thirds and the personnel of the workers. When the country is able to function for itself, as is the case with Czecho-Slovakia, the machinery remains but the Administration withdraws. Another useful fact to remember is that one American dollar, at the current rate of exchange, keeps one of these little skeletons alive for a month. And yet another fact is that the whole of each dollar donated is expended on food and nothing is deducted for organisation.
As I stood in that dingy hall and watched the overwhelming tragedy of spoliated childhood, my memory went back three years. The last time I had witnessed a misery so heart-breaking had been at Evian, where the trains entered France from Switzerland, repatriating the little French captives who had existed for three years behind the German lines. It had seemed to me then that those corpselike, unsmiling victims of human hate had represented the foulest vehemence of the crime of war. Yet here today in Vienna, two years after our much prayed for peace, I have been confronted by the same crime against childhood, being enacted with a yet greater shamelessness, for the war is ended, four-fifths of the world has an excess of food and there is no longer any excuse of military necessity. Today our only possible excuse is hard-heartedness and besotted selfishness.
Here today, to all intents and purposes, are the same little slaves of famine and ill-usage that were to be seen passing through Evian three years ago, the only difference is that their nationality has changed. Those were French and these are Austrians. “Poetic justice! Retribution!” someone may say. To such a man I would reply that the war was not waged against children. The children of whatsoever nations we fought never ceased to be our friends.
And these children whom I saw today, most of them were not born when the war started. They had no voice in our animosities. They did not ask to he brought into such a world. Many of them since their first breath, have never known what it was to be warm and not to be hungry. To them joy is a word utterly meaningless. They have always been too weak to laugh or play. Two years after our madness has ended they are still paying the price of the adult world's folly. We have returned home to our comfortable firesides, but their tender bodies still shudder in the trenches which an unwisdom, which was partly ours, dug for them.
I entered a shed where little feet were being measured for the Christmas gift of boots which had arrived from America. What feet! How deformed with cold, and swollen and blue! They lad never been anything else since their owners could remember. There was nothing childish about them, except that they were small. Some were wholly naked; some were wrapped in rags; some were thrust into the recovered derelicts of splendid adults like myself. My feet were like stones with trudging through the melting snow, but I could look forward to a time when mine would be warm. What about theirs, the feet of little children whose pain was never ended—small feet that should have learned to dance?
On a bench sat a tiny boy, wizened and jaded as an old man. He was being fitted. A little ragged girl who was no relation, but was acting mother to him, told me his age. He was nine, but he was not as big as seven. No, he wasn't being fed by the Americans—not yet. He wasn't famished enough; there were other children who were worse. There wasn't enough food to feed you unless you were very bad. Perhaps he would be bad enough soon after Christmas.
I didn't dare to tell her that after Christmas, unless the conscience of the happier world is aroused, there won't be any funds to feed her little friend, no matter how bad he becomes.