The Austrian army officers and privates suffer by comparison with the Germans. The soldiers one sees in the streets of Berlin are big, husky, strong, healthy creatures, with jowls hanging over their collars. The officers are clean-cut, keen-eyed, and in splendid health and training. Austria seems distraught and unready for emergencies, the people are not as keen for the war as the Germans and appear to be more indifferent as to its results. I am predicting that the end of the war will see Japan, Italy, and Roumania gainers, and Belgium, Turkey, and Austria losers, while Germany and England will be approximately in the same positions as before the war. Russia has relatively little to gain or lose.
Monday, December 21st. I had a walk and talk with Ambassador Penfield this morning; took luncheon with Mr. Grant-Smith and went afterward to the Embassy. Later in the afternoon I went with Count Colloredo von Mansfeld to the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office and then called on the Countess Potatka to whom I had brought letters of introduction.
Tuesday, December 22d. After luncheon today Mr. Grant-Smith presented me to Wilhelm Prince zu Stollberg Wering Rode, Conseiller of the German Embassy in Vienna, who made an appointment with me for Thursday.
I am meeting many officials, American, German, and Austrian, but at present I cannot, without indiscretion, state just what they discuss.
I went today to the Wiener Bank Verein with Mr. Grant-Smith who wished to arrange some safe deposit boxes for the Embassy. The building is said to be the most beautiful bank building in the world, and I can easily believe it. Knowing my professional interest in architecture, Mr. Grant-Smith asked the Director to show me the building, which he most kindly did, taking me from top to bottom—a privilege I am told seldom granted to anyone, and for which I was very grateful.
Austria-Hungary is an extraordinary country. I doubt if anything like it exists in this our day our generation. The Emperor-King is everything. He could well say without exaggeration “L’État c’est Moi!” The common people really look upon the king as divine. Socialism and democracy do not exist,—the words seem to have no real meaning for his subjects; and Parliaments are but his dutiful servants. Lese-majesty is almost unheard of because the idea of questioning the Emperor-King or anything he does would no more occur to his subjects than to doubt the Immaculate Conception would occur to a devout Catholic.
And what an extraordinary old man—what a relic of past ages this Emperor-King Franz Josef is! He ascended the throne at the epoch of our war with Mexico, he had reigned nearly two decades at the termination of our Civil War. He refutes and blights the theories of Dr. Osler. Two successive heirs to the throne have died or been killed off, but he “goes on forever.” He is personally a very devout Catholic, but apparently has seldom or never allowed himself to be politically dictated to by the Vatican. When he learned of the recent ignominious defeat of his armies by the Serbians and of the retaking of Belgrade, the old man first burst into a furious rage and then sat down with elbows on the table, his head in his hands, and prayed for forgiveness and future successes.
In Austria’s history one discovers no victories. She is an unusual and pliant State to survive so many defeats. One finds her the easy prey of Frederick the Great, the pet victim of Louis XIV., the foe against whom Napoleon made his first youthful efforts and the vanquished of his prime, the defeated foe of Napoleon III., the vanquished tyrant of Italy united, the loser in Prussia’s Thirty Days’ War of 1867, and now the gradual loser against Russia’s wild, numberless hordes. She has already lost all of Galicia and stands with her back to the Carpathians and has been held off on equal terms by Serbia these four months past. A supine State, she is always defeated, and yet always remains and ever grows.