The Iron Ration: Three Years in Warring Central Europe

by George Abel Schreiner

The farmer thought it over for a while and then sold.

The reader uninitiated in war-food conditions may ask: Why didn't that farmer ship his daughter the potatoes she needed? He couldn't, of course. The economic-zone arrangement prevented him. That zone was the means which the government employed to regulate and restrict distribution and consumption without giving money an opportunity to tarnish in the hands of people who might not subscribe to war loans. The zone "mobilized" the pennies by concentrating them in the banks and making them available en masse for the war.

Yet the fact was that the daughter of the farmer, buying potatoes clandestinely, may have bought the very product of her father's land. Who in that case got the eighteen hellers difference? The middlemen, of course. That the poor woman, in order to feed her children, might have been able to use to good advantage two kilograms at thirty-six hellers, instead of one, is very likely, but this consideration did not bother the food sharks known as the Vienna Bank Ring.

On one occasion the same group of food speculators permitted two million eggs to spoil in a railroad yard at Vienna because the price was not good enough. The Bank Ring was just then agitating for a better price for eggs and hoped that the maximum would be raised. But the government was a little slow on this occasion, and before the price went up, "according to regulation," the eggs were an unpleasant memory to the yard-hands. Naturally, nobody was prosecuted in this case. I understood at the time that the Bank Ring presented to the Austrian government a sort of ultimatum, which read: "No profits, no war loans." The government surrendered.

The fact that many of these speculators were of the Jewish persuasion caused a revival of a rather mild sort of anti-Semitism. Several of the Christian newspapers made much of this, but the government censors soon put an end to that. This was no time for the pot to call the kettle black. The food shark came from all classes, and the Austrian nobility was not poorly represented.

There was the case of the princely house of Schwarzenberg, for instance. The family is not of German blood to any extent, as the name would seem to imply. Nowadays it is distinctly Bohemian, and in Bohemia its vast estates and properties are located. The managers of the Schwarzenbergs had a corner on almost everything that was raised in the localities of the family's domains. In the winter of 1915-16 they forced up, to unheard-of heights, the price of prunes. The prune was a veritable titbit then, and with most people in Central Europe it had come to be the only fruit they could get in the winter. Its nutritive value is great, and since every pfennig and heller had to buy a maximum in food values the demand for prunes soon exceeded greatly the supply—so everybody thought.

But the trouble was not a shortage. The crop had been good, in fact. Orchards, so far as they had not been harmed by the paucity of copper for the manufacture of vitriol and Bordeaux mixture for the extermination of tree parasites, had not suffered by the war. The trees bore as usual, and fruit crops were generally what they had been before. Nor had there been an increase in operation expenses, aside from what little extra pay there was given those who gathered the crop.

But the Schwarzenbergs and a few others made up their minds that they, too, would get a little of the war profits. They also were heavy investors in war loans.

So long as this corner was confined to prunes and other fruits the thing presented no great problem—as problems went then. But the activity of this particular ring did not stop there. Its members dealt in everything the soil produced.

During the first months of the war there had been set aside by the several military authorities certain agricultural districts from which the armies were to be supplied with food, forage, and the like. The idea was not a bad one. The armies were voracious consumers, and a scheme which would concentrate over as small an area as possible the supplies needed meant a great saving of time and effort when shipments had to be made.