“Our nobility is too pleasure-loving, too loath to acknowledge responsibility. To-day, with all of our outside territory in the throes of a death struggle, with three nations across our borders, and with the ugly rumble of national revolution, the fashionables still parade grandly about, affecting to ignore conditions. Last week there were bread riots and the scum of the city’s alleys and back streets sacked shops throughout the Leopoldstadt district. It took two regiments of soldiers to drive them back. Conspiracy is rank around us; pestilence stalks abroad through the byways. I hear that Bohemia is already in revolt. No one knows what terrible disaster will come in the next news from the front.
“The aged Emperor can do nothing but sit there in the Hofburg, while his peers, fled here in terror from all other parts of the kingdom, spend their time in the gambling casinos, dance as if frenzied in the Zinspaeleste or, believing the end of the world at hand, are lost to religion, morality and the commonest decencies of mankind in debauching there in the Tabarin and vice-sinks like it.
“All day long they ride in landaus with silk parasols, lap-dogs and frippery, where cavalry divisions should be maneuvering. Silk hats are seen where helmets ought to gleam. The cane is more widely flourished here than the sword! But ‘drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die.’”
As the indignant officer paused in his tirade, the automobile wheeled into the Alsergrund district and in a few seconds more was at the foot of the great flight of gray stone stairs leading up to the official military hospital.
“We want to get a light, airy, private room for Lieutenant Racoszky,” Ned explained to the tired, white-uniformed attendant who met them.
He shook his head wearily, shrugged his shoulders and replied patiently:
“That is what they all say. Each day I hear it hundreds of times—as if there were room in all of the Alsergrund for half the sick in Vienna! Is this one of the plague-ridden too?”
Finally, however, accommodations were found for poor Racoszky, and the boys left, promising to return on the morrow. The officers then escorted them to their military headquarters, where their story had to be retold before they were given the liberty of the city. They told too of the gallant defenders in Przemysl and evoked loud cheers from all who heard them.
“Ah!” exclaimed one old soldier, “would that I were there to die a hero’s death with them, rather than standing guard over this madhouse here!”
Inasmuch as the night was still young, the boys decided to look about the city a bit before returning to Alan and the Flyer out in the Prater. In a rented taxicab they toured the city and found conditions much as they had been described to them. All of the street lamps, cafes, dance halls and places of amusement were ablaze with light and thronged with patrons as if on a gala night. The dreamy strains of a Strauss or Gungel waltz were weirdly intermingled with the barbaric staccato of banjorines thrumming the latest tango.