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 souls, 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 Church 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 Kärtnerstrasse, 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 clink 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.
The doctor told me of their work. It was life-saving, and increasing in range of action. They had organised a number of feeding centres in Vienna, and stores from which mothers could buy condensed milk and cocoa, and margarine, at next to nothing, for their starving babes. Austrian ladies were doing most of the actual work apart from organisation at headquarters, and doing it devotedly. From America, and from England, money was flowing in.
“The tide of thought is turning,” said the doctor. “Every dollar we get, and every shilling, is a proof that the call of humanity is being heard above the old war-cries.”
“And every dollar, and every shilling,” said Eileen, “is helping to save the life of some poor woman or some little mite, who had no guilt in the war, but suffered from its cruelty.”