"It was terrible," she said in rather good English. "I was in America for a whole year. I saw Niagara Falls. Then shortly before the war broke out my mother wrote for me to come home. We had such a nice house, and such nice things in our house. They belonged to my ancestors. On the 4th of October we heard that the Russians were coming toward our village and that they were only forty kilometers away. We had already sent our best horses to the army. The ones left behind were sent to the village for the old people. My mother and father rode, and my husband and I walked or rather ran after them for two days as fast as we could. We hadn't time to take anything with us, and we had to leave even our glassware and silver behind. I had a new Persian lamb coat that I left hanging in the cupboard. We have never been able to go back to our homes since." She wept a little.
It was ten o'clock when we came to Vienna. We had a hard time getting a cab, and when we did get one it rattled over the stones as though it had no rubber on its wheels. The first thing we had to do the next morning was to go to the police, and it took us the whole morning until two o'clock in the afternoon to get registered. There were only two clerks and about fifty people waiting. We came in turns, and if any one tried to get in ahead of his turn the rest of us howled, "Wait your turn." One fat, important-looking foreigner tried to get into the clerk's room without waiting. Three men waiters jumped up and turned him out. This pleased the rest of us and we all giggled with glee.
Uniform of a Viennese Red Cross Girl, Field Gray Trimmed in Red.
VIENNA IN WAR TIME.
Scene Along the Danube.
I had never realized the wonderfulness of the German food card system until I went to Vienna. In Germany you can buy at a reasonable price your allotted ration of food, and the poor people are just as well off as the rich, but in Vienna the rich people have everything and the poor people are in great need because of the lack of food regulations, and while there is an abundance of food it is so dear that the poor cannot afford to buy. And Vienna is not like Berlin—there are a great many poor people in Vienna.
