I who love France with a kind of passion, and had seen during the years of war the agony and the heroism of her people, did not begrudge them their ecstasy, and it touched my spirit with its fire so that in France I could see and understand the French point of view, of ruthlessness towards the beaten foe. But I saw also what many people of France saw slowly, but with a sense of fear, that the treaty made by Clemenceau did not make them safe except for a little while. This had not been, after all, “the war to end war.” There was no guarantee of world-peace. Their frontiers were not made impregnable against the time when the Germans might grow strong again and come back for vengeance. They could not stand alone, but must make new alliances, new secret treaties, new armies, new armaments, because hate survived, and the League of Nations was a farce, as it had come from the table at Versailles.
They looked round and counted their cost—a million and a half dead. A multitude of maimed and blind and nerve-shocked men. A birth-rate that had sunk to zero. A staggering debt which they could not pay. A cost of living which mounted higher and ever higher. A sense of revolt among the soldiers who had come back because their reward for four years of misery was no more than miserable.
So it was in Italy, stricken by a more desperate poverty, disappointed by a lack of spoil, angry with a sense of “betrayal,” afraid of revolution, exultant when a mad poet seized the port of Fiume which had been denied to her by President Wilson and his conscience.
Across the glittering waters of the Adriatic I went to Trieste and found it a dead port with Italian officers in possession of its deserted docks and abandoned warehouses and Austrians dying of typhus in the back streets, and starving to death in tenement houses.
And then, across the new State of Jugo-Slavia, cut out of the body of the old Austrian Empire now lying dismembered, I came to Vienna, which once I had known as the gayest capital of Europe, where charming people played the pleasant game of life with music and love and laughter.
In Vienna there was music still, but it played a danse macabre, a dance of death, which struck one with a sense of horror. The orchestras still fiddled in the restaurants. At night the opera-house was crowded. In cafés bright with gilt and glass, in restaurants rich in marble walls, crowds of people listened to the waltzes of Strauss, ate smuggled food at monstrous prices, laughed, flirted, and drank. They were the profiteers of war, spending paper money with the knowledge that it had no value outside Vienna, no value here except in stacks to buy warmth for their stomachs, a little warmth for their souk, while their stock of kronen lasted. They were the vultures from Jugo-Slavia and Czecho-Slovakia come to feed on the corpse of Austria while it still had flesh on its bones, and while Austrian kronen still had some kind of purchase power... And outside, two million people were starving slowly but very surely to death.
The children were starving quickly to death. Their coffins passed me in the streets. Ten—twelve—fifteen—in one half-hour between San Stefan’s Chinch and the Favoritenstrasse. Small living skeletons padded after one with naked feet, thrusting out little claw-like hands, begging for charity. In the great hospital of Vienna children lay in crowded wards, with twisted limbs and bulbous heads, diseased from birth, because of their mother’s hunger and a life without milk and any kind of fat.
Vienna, the capital of a great empire, had been sentenced to death by the Treaty of Peace which had so carved up her former territory that she was cut off from all her natural resources and from all means of industry, commerce and life.
It was Dr. Small, dear “Daddy” Small, who gave me an intimate knowledge of what was happening in Vienna a year after Armistice, and it was Eileen O’Connor who still further enlightened me by taking me into the babies’ crèches, the Kinderspital and the working people’s homes, where disease and death found their victims. She took me to these places until I sickened and said, “I can bear no more.”
Dr. Small had a small office in the Kârtnerstrasse, where Eileen worked with him, and it was here that I found them both a day after my arrival in Vienna. Eileen was on her knees making a wood fire and puffing it into a blaze for the purpose of boiling a tin kettle which stood on a trivet, and after that, as I found, for making tea. Outside there was a raw, horrible day, with a white mist in which those coffins were going by and with those barefoot children with pallid faces and gaunt cheeks padding by one’s side, so that I was glad to see the flames in the hearth and to hear the cheerful dink of tea-cups which the doctor was getting out. Better still, was I glad to see these two good friends, so sane, so vital, so purposeful, as I found them, in a world of gloom and neurosis.