Here is one little picture of Central and Eastern Europe which tells its story plainly. These bribes are not really paid by the trader. They are added to the price of the goods. The wretched consumers pay. The workless proletarian and poor peasant are the exploited; but the breaking point always comes. It will come in all the countries if international action to restore life to its normal basis be not taken in time. And that way revolution and Bolshevism lie.
At 6 o’clock on the fourth morning after leaving Berne I came to Vienna. The cabman who drove me to the Hotel Bristol, a mile away, charged 100 crowns. In pre-war values that would have been about £4. In present day values it is about 1s. 3d.! My room at the best hotel in Vienna cost 28 crowns a day. Before the war that was a guinea. To-day it is about 2d.! The meals at the Bristol were very ordinary, but the minimum decent meal cost about 150 crowns. Once that sum counted as £6. Now it is less than 2s.! The value of Austrian money has declined almost to vanishing point through the war and the peace.
I arrived at the Hotel Bristol before anybody except the night-porter was astir. He sleepily informed me that he could not give me a room until the secretary arrived. I had wired a week before and engaged the influence of President Seitz in addition; but the porter knew nothing about this. I sat in the hotel vestibule more than half asleep and feeling as though driven from home, when the secretary arrived, and from that moment all was well. The President had made secure for me a room in that crowded and popular guest-house, once the rendezvous of princes, now the abode of Entente Commissioners and the profiteers of all nations.
The traveller in the broken countries of Europe, enemy or allied, will see little of the real life and condition of the people if he live at the big hotels. This is true at any time, but more unfortunately true now; for the lazy and the prejudiced come home from their trips to write letters to the newspapers which give totally wrong impressions, and are meant to discourage every proposal to alleviate suffering. The same is true of every country in Europe which has been engaged in the war, the allied only less than the others. Perhaps Austria has suffered most; unless it be Russia. The country round is scoured to buy food for the big hotels. Even so the evidences of real poverty in the hotels were abundant in the patched and darned bed linen, the scanty blankets, the paper table-covers, and the entire absence of hot water, which was a luxury undreamt of at the time of my visit. Then, a cake of soap was a present of most conspicuous value to a friend in Vienna!
Fat cunning rogues ate (and still eat) plentifully of the food which in their real money they could buy more cheaply in Vienna than at home. No thought of the starving poor whose supplies they were lessening afflicted these gorging and guzzling adventurers, as busy with the pickings of profit as unclean birds tearing the last shreds of flesh off the bones of a corpse. Allied Commissioners by the hundred if not the thousand, with little or nothing to do, paid for by this starving little nation, were eating their heads off when I was in Vienna, whilst half-famished leaders of the proletariat struggled to keep down the spectre of revolution which the sight of so much abundance in the midst of starvation continuously tempted and provoked. I soon found it impossible to eat in the comparative luxury of the Bristol Hotel, and discovered a cheap quiet restaurant where well-conducted Austrians passed away the hours of their enforced idleness. Even there it was painful to eat. To be watched by dozens of pairs of envious eyes with every mouthful of the simple food one ate filled one with cold horror at the thought of what it implied, a slowly dying city of 2¹⁄₄ millions of people. For the rest of my time in Vienna I contrived to share my meals with strangers whenever it was possible to do so without hurting their pride. And I found that pride is a plant which rarely survives where hunger and cold have starved the soil for several years.
What sad sights were there for the observant in the streets and cafés of the once gay city of Vienna! The postman who delivered the letters at the hotel was dressed in rags. The porters at the railway stations were in worn cotton uniforms, and were glad of tips in the form of hard-boiled eggs and cigarettes. Uniformed officers sold roses in the cafés. Delicate women in faded finery begged with their children at street corners. Grass was growing in the principal streets. The shops were empty of customers. There was no roar and rush of traffic. The one-time beautiful horses of the Ringstrasse looked thin and limp. Frequently they dropped dead in the streets, of hunger.
I climbed a hill outside the city, and from the many hundreds of chimneys of mill and factory no smoke was rising. At the Labour Exchanges many thousands of men and women stood in long lines to receive their out-of-work pay. I moved amongst them, speaking English, and heard no bitter word, saw no hard look from these gentle people who have been so grievously wronged by their own and other exploiters. In every one of the hundred one-roomed dwellings I visited were pitiful babes, small, misshapen or idiotic through the lack of proper food. Consumptive mothers dragged themselves about the rooms tearful about the lack of milk, which their plentiful paper money could not buy because there was none to sell. Gallant doctors struggled in clinic and hospital with puny children covered with running sores, with practically no medicines, no soap, no disinfectants. But for the magnificent help given by the American Relief Commission, the Society of Friends, and the Save the Children Fund, the coming generation would have dwindled out of existence and the problem of Vienna solved itself without the aid of the dilatory politicians of Paris by the simple process of the extermination of its population. As it is tens of thousands of child lives and old lives have been ended by famine and the diseases of famine; whilst over a long period the number of suicides from hunger and despair amounted to scores in every week.
The first call I made in Vienna was upon Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Thomas Cunninghame, at the headquarters of the British Military Mission in the Metternichstrasse. Sir Thomas is a tall Scotsman, buoyant, kindly and of progressive sympathies. He is slightly deaf, but spares no effort to try to understand his visitor’s needs. He gave me generously of his time, to put me in the way of understanding Austria’s problems. His sympathy for the unhappy people he had been appointed to watch over was very real, and the universal regard in which I discovered him to be held appeared to be thoroughly deserved.