The Iron Ration: Three Years in Warring Central Europe

by George Abel Schreiner

Travel about the country has often brought to my attention that in certain districts intermarriage for centuries had led to degeneration. Goiter, one of the first signals of warning that new blood must be infused in the race, was prevalent. Scientists had drawn attention to this long before the war. But there was nothing that could be done.

The Russian prisoners-of-war came to serve as the solution of the problem. Their offspring were unusually robust, and some cranium measurements that were made showed that the children were of the best type mentally.

A state which was losing men at a frightful rate every day could not be expected to view this increase in population with alarm. So long as the mothers were Austrian all was well from the political point of view, since it is the mother usually who rears the patriot. The Russians, moreover, soon grew fond of the institutions of Austria, and gave return to their own people hardly any thought. Conversation with many of them demonstrated that, on the contrary, they were not anxious to go home. Russia was then still the absolute autocracy, and these men were not minded to exchange the liberal government of Austria for the despotism they knew.

I may state here that the Austrian government, serving in this instance as the example of all others in Central Europe, had done its level best to promote this very thing. On several trips to prison camps I visited the schools in which the Russian prisoners were being taught German. Thousands of the men were thus given their first chance to read and write, and to the more intelligent was apparent the irony of fate that caused them to read and write German instead of their own language. No more deliberate attempt to win friends could have been devised and executed. Small wonder that on one occasion a Russian working detachment employed in road-making on the Italian front rushed to the assistance of the Austrians who were being overwhelmed, and cut down the last of their allies with their spades and picks.

To what extent Russian blood has been infused in the rural population of Austria and Hungary is at present entirely a matter of conjecture. The same applies to Germany, though I must state that in this case the number cannot be so great.

Dreary as the picture is, it is not without its brighter spots. The mixture of blood which has occurred in many of these countries will improve the human stock. And who would care to gainsay that governments are not in the habit of looking at populations from that angle—the angle of stock? None will admit it, of course, they may not even be conscious of the fact that they hold this view. But so long as governments are interested more in quantity than in quality of propagation they cannot easily clear themselves of the suspicion. I am not at all sure that it is not better thus.

I have so far treated the post-bellum aspect of sex morality entirely from the position of the man. Women will ask the question: What do the women think of it?

That depends somewhat on conditions and circumstances.

"When one is forty, one is satisfied with being madame," said a Hungarian lady to me once, when the subject had been discussed. She meant that the woman of forty was content with being the head of a household.

Such an attitude takes a breadth of view altogether unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world. I found it often in Central Europe, especially in Austria, where one day were pointed out to me two couples who not so very long before had changed mates by mutual consent on the part of all four concerned. One of the husbands is a rich banker, and the other, his best friend by the way, is also well off. The double pair go to the same café, sit at the same table, and their friends think nothing of it. They are regularly divorced and married, of course.