Vienna, Tuesday, January 12th. Last night and today twenty-three long trains of German regular troops have passed through the Ivanka station on their way east. They were apparently going to the Roumanian frontier. A train will hold two battalions of infantry, two thousand men, or a battery of artillery with full equipment. These trains would, therefore, represent something like thirty thousand men, and more were all the time coming. My car, in which I was en route from Budapest to Vienna, stopped at one station just opposite one of these military trains, which I thus had time to study. It contained a battery of German artillery and was a very long one, consisting of flat cars, freight cars, and one or more passenger coaches for the officers. The guns of the battery, with all the limbers and caissons, were placed on flat-cars, while some of the freight cars were used for equipment and ammunition and others for the soldiers. The doors of these latter were open and were boarded up to a height of eighteen inches to keep floor draughts off the men lying within. The cars were filled with clean straw, sprigs of which trailed out of the doorways. The soldiers, like all German soldiers that I have seen, were fat, healthy, happy, and cheerful, singing, waving hands and handkerchiefs to the responsive crowds on the platforms, and laughing and joking. They looked for all the world like big puppies hanging out of a box filled with straw. They were young men of Germany’s best troops and had that certain bearing of confidence and efficiency which marks veterans. Their faces, albeit smooth and healthy, were not the faces of boys, although some of them were still boys in years.
The guns and caissons at the first uncritical glance looked like junk, but a second look revealed the error. Their metal work was battered and their paint chipped off, but the wheels and running-gear and the long gray barrels were clean and spick and span.
The efficiency, rapidity of fire, and elasticity of cannon have so improved in the past decade that a battery of four guns now requires one hundred and eighty men, six or seven officers, and two hundred horses to manage it. What with mathematical instruments to direct fire, instrument wagons, field forges, spare parts, and twelve or sixteen caissons, every horse and man belonging to the battery is necessary when a stiff action is going on. The guns shoot six thousand yards and the four can between them fire eighty shots a minute. Each of the shells weighs about eighteen pounds, costs up to twenty dollars to manufacture, and is freighted with almost unbelievable possibilities of death and destruction. When using shrapnel a single battery can during any sixty seconds fire thirty-five thousand well-directed bullets against advancing infantry. A battalion of infantry in charging will average about two hundred yards a minute—and during that minute a single battery can fire against it thirty-five bullets for every man in the battalion.
The field guns of all nations shoot approximately the same shell, three inches in diameter. These guns are so small and light in appearance that it is difficult to realize their power until one has seen its effects. Their barrels are perhaps six feet long and from five to seven inches in exterior diameter. A light but very complicated running-gear supports them. This rests upon two wagon-wheels quite ordinary in appearance. The whole is painted smoke-gray and looks quite toy-like and harmless.
I had lunch with Mr. Penfield today at his official residence and it was an extremely interesting event. The building is said to be the finest ambassadorial residence in the world of any nationality. I can easily believe it. In the very heart of Vienna the house has behind it a garden of some two acres with many fine hothouses. Seven gardeners are required. On the other side, the Embassy faces on a large public garden and thus every one of the sixty big windows which the mansion possesses faces on one garden or the other. The house is adorned with Meissoniers, Van Dykes, Chinese rugs, and other things of a like value. The house was shown to me from top to bottom by Mr. Penfield.
At present there is great excitement in Vienna over the fall of Count Berchtold, the Prime Minister, announced publicly this morning.
I am to leave for Berlin, London, and Paris, and then home as soon as possible.