A trip to Semmering was one of the excursions which consoled one a little for the desolate spectacle of empty markets and idle factories, of a disintegrating civic life. Semmering is a four hours’ motor drive from Vienna, beautifully placed near the Styrian frontier. It is a health resort full at that time of rich refugees. At a simple guest-house on the slope of one of the hills President Seitz and his wife, with a few members of his Cabinet, recuperated during the week-ends for the arduous duties of the week. His secretary took me out there for the day. We were again a curiously mixed group. The overworked and courteous secretary was a baron of the old regime. Professor Leon Kellner, hearty in manner and ruddy of complexion, the famous Shakespearean scholar, was there; Otto Grockney, Minister for Education, gravely peering through spectacles at the new-comer; and Dr. Seitz.
Of this first President of the Socialist Republic of Austria, Karl Seitz, I have written before. He is a kind, amiable, benevolent, distinguished-looking man with a keen sense of humour. Someone hearing him thus praised exclaimed: “But what else do you expect from a President of Austria?” Looking at this polite and suave man of the world, every inch a president, it is with difficulty that one realizes that he was once on a time the fiercest leader of the Socialist Opposition in the turbulent Austrian Parliament. He started his career as an elementary school-teacher, became the fire-brand of the Lower Austrian Diet and ended as the President! He is a speaker of very great eloquence and power. He was always well liked, even by his opponents, and is extremely popular. Very few of the new type of potentate have the heart, the mind, the manners so ready to fit the new position.
Dr. Max Winter, the kind-hearted Vice-Burgermeister of Vienna, is the man to whom I owe most of my acquaintance with the civic life of the city. Day after day he or his secretary or his son, who had been a prisoner of war in England, took me out to see in particular what was being done for the children. Dr. Winter is always spoken of as “the children’s Mayor,” for the children are his very serious concern. In his company I saw the public feeding centres of the Americans, the clinics supervised by the Friends, the children’s hospitals so sadly lacking funds, the open-air play-centres in the public parks, and the country schools. The houses of rich nobles who have fled and the palaces of the ex-Kaiser were used for this purpose. There was a particularly attractive little hospital and feeding centre in a corner of the Schönbrunn Palace for those children whose parents could afford to contribute a little towards their keep, I think two crowns a day, worth at that time about one penny. At the holiday camps in the parks the children ran about all day in bathing suits, and very brown and jolly they looked with the exposure to the sun and the regular, if scarcely sufficient, food. “Freundschaft! Freundschaft!” they cried, running to kiss my hand after the custom of the country. Sometimes they sang their little songs and danced their pretty dances. Beautiful brown-eyed Viennese children dancing in paper dresses, and crowned with wood flowers in the Wiener Wald! I see them now in the mind’s eye, waving their thin arms and smiling sweetly, with not a thought of the bitter, cruel thing which is robbing them of health and life in their innocent young hearts.
After a sad excursion one day to the market, where little girls of twelve lay all night with their baskets waiting for the opening of the butcher’s shop, and the scramble for the ration of meat for the family dinner, I found waiting for me in the hotel about twenty women and one child all robed in deep black. They had come with a petition. It was to ask me to help them to get their husbands out of Russia, prisoners of war there. Some had not been heard of for four years. Terrible stories of their sufferings had come through. The women were frantic with grief. They had been to the Mayor; he could do nothing. They had been to the Government; the Government had made promises but done nothing. They had been to the Allied Missions and had been sent away empty. They were beginning to believe that the Government and the Allies were in concert to keep the men in Russia because of their fear of Bolshevist infection—afraid that the men had become converts. Someone had suggested that perhaps I could help. They begged with quivering lips that I would do something. Suddenly the child, a little fair-haired thing, sprang from her mother’s side, and falling on her knees at my feet, clasped her tiny hands and said in lisped English: “Dear kind English lady, do bring my daddy back to me.” The women burst into tears, such a sobbing and a wailing as would have melted a stone. It was deeply painful. What could I do? I promised to interest the women’s organizations of England and the Labour Party, and immediately wrote to both. Alas! when the relief came, thousands, tens of thousands, had died in exile, destroyed by hunger and disease.
The journey back to Berne was much quicker and more comfortable. By special permission I returned by the children’s train. Six hundred small victims of the famine came every six or seven weeks to hospitable Switzerland; I travelled with one train load. I can add nothing to the description of the sufferers I have already given; but I can add a word of praise of the Swiss. They have raised for themselves a lasting monument in the affections of the Austrian people, and have set an example of practical internationalism which should shame all those whose faith in blockades and tariffs and embargoes and prohibitions is not yet dead. But for the Swiss and the Americans Austria’s plight would have been beyond hope, and the world would be the poorer by the loss of one of the most cultivated, artistic and lovable races which have contributed to the happiness and elevation of mankind. Very late in the day the men of Paris have moved towards the relief of Vienna. Perhaps it is not quite too late to save the remnant. But the martyrs have been many, and the agony long.
CHAPTER VIII
AFTER ONE YEAR
At the first meeting of the International in Berne in 1919 I was very much interested in a lively little man from Alsace-Lorraine. His name was Grumbach, and he had a house in Berne, and a handsome wife with bright hair and a plump figure. In appearance he reminded me a little of an English coachman. He was smooth-shaven, with a bit of hair left on either cheek in the old-fashioned way. His face was round, and he had a sweet and rather childlike mouth. His eyes were very merry, and his manner kind. But the roar of him when he spoke was like that of a mad bull. He was very angry with the Germans, and could not contain himself on the platform, foaming at the mouth almost, as he lashed out at those unfortunate men on the front row. He made an excellent double bass to Renaudel’s tenor and Thomas’s baritone, whenever the wild music got going. And just as suddenly he melted into the utmost amiability. He disliked their past, and suspected the future policy of the Germans in relation to his own country. I have not seen him since the early days in Berne; but I have heard that his present discontent is with French administration and French behaviour in the restored provinces and that he favours an independent Alsace-Lorraine within the French orbit. I wonder what is true?