A Vienna Bread-Ticket
Vienna is full of wounded; in fact, I have never seen a city in which there were so many. I tried to find out as much as I could about the number of Austrian wounded throughout the country, but it was extremely difficult to glean information. In order that the public shall not be unduly depressed, the wounded are carefully scattered about in different towns and villages, particularly in Bohemia. Germans have told me that they have heard the same thing in regard to England, where hundreds of little Red Cross hospitals were to be found in provincial towns and villages all over the country!
The German method is also to keep the wounded away from the big towns as much as possible. The smaller villages are used for Red Cross stations. When in Frankfurt on one of my former trips I one day remarked to an old woman, a farmer’s wife with whom I got into conversation, that I could not understand why there were so few wounded in a large town such as Frankfurt. “Come and have a look at our village,” she answered, “we have them in our houses.” I accordingly went to Andernach, which was the name of the village. She gave me coffee and war bread, and treated me very kindly. There were six wounded soldiers in her house, and I learned that there was hardly a village on the slopes of the Rhine where wounded soldiers were not billeted to benefit by the invigorating air of the Rhineland hills, having first been treated in the hospitals. I was told by one of the wounded soldiers that in a hospital about half-an-hour’s run from Cologne 180 soldiers were lying disabled.
The Austrian authorities have their own particular methods; they arrange, for instance, that only a third of the convalescent soldiers shall be allowed out at the same time. Thus, if there are three hundred wounded in a hospital who are able to walk, only one hundred are permitted out at the same time for fresh air and exercise.
The number of blind soldiers is amazing. It was one of the most terrible sights I saw. Before Italy participated in the war the total number of Austrian soldiers who had lost their sight was 10,000, now it is 80,000. I was informed of this by Dr. Robert Otto Steiner, the head of the largest hospital in Vienna, probably the largest in the world, the Wiener Allgemeines Krankenhaus, which has 8,000 beds, and 3,000 being occupied by men who have lost their sight.
The reason for this terrible number of blind soldiers is that in the mountains the troops cannot dig adequate trenches, and the Italian shells burst against the mountains and send showers of rock-fragments in all directions. It was with a mournful expression that Dr. Steiner told me of the 70,000 Austrians blinded within six months. I asked him what was to happen to these poor fellows after the war, and he confessed that they presented a problem which seemed beyond the power of any Government to solve. Whether or not a monument be erected to the Kaiser in the Sieges-Allée, there will be throughout Europe thousands of living monuments to his “greatness” in the shape of the blind, the mad, and the paralysed, who will breathe curses upon the name German Militarism that has robbed them of nearly all save life itself.
In the course of my wanderings about the city I heard an amusing story about recruiting in England. It was told me by some Austrian officers, who were convinced that recruiting in this country had been a success. Their explanation was that the aristocracy had obtained from the Government an assurance that they would be retained for home service, whereas the poor would be sent to the front. Nothing that I heard showed a greater ignorance of the sporting instinct of the English gentleman than this grotesque statement, and that in spite of the ubiquitous Wolff and his wireless war news. Speaking of Wolff reminds me of a saying among the supporters of the Allies in Constantinople which runs: “There are lies, there are damned lies, and there are Wolff’s wireless messages.”
One night I had an interesting conversation with a captain in the Austrian Polish Legion, whose name is in my possession, but which in his own interest I refrain from printing. He told me several things which showed clearly the difficulties which the Germans are experiencing in combining their vastly varied forces. “I am with the Austrians now,” he said, “fighting the Russians because of the comparatively good treatment we Poles received from Austria. After the war we are promised a Polish Republic. If, however,” he added, “it comes to fighting for Prussia against the Russians, I for one shall desert and join Russia.”