In the train which took me from Berlin to Vienna the civilian passengers were no more than half a dozen; all the other passengers were officers and soldiers, mostly wounded Austrians returning to their motherland. Some were very seriously injured and groaned continuously; others had horrible wounds badly bandaged; some were disfigured; some had had limbs amputated.
They begged from the other passengers a few coppers to buy fruits or cigars, but hardly anybody took any notice of them. They were nearly all cavalrymen, and, as is usual in Austrian regiments, were of different nationalities. This explains the lack of fellowship among them—the lack of a sentiment which generally so much sustains soldiers of other nations.
At a frontier station we were able to buy some Austrian papers. They gave us a sort of foretaste of life in Vienna. There was very little news, but talk about wonderful victories in Galicia and Serbia (official), followed by a long white space where a comment had been cut out by the Censor.
Two hours before publication a complete proof of every Austrian paper must be presented to the Censor. Anything not considered fit for publication is cut away; consequently the paper is often much ornamented with blank spaces.
The big station at Vienna presents a really astonishing sight. Wounded soldiers and refugees are everywhere. Outside the station it is the same—and it is the same in the large central streets, in the parks, in the churches. Vienna is the first great town completely transformed by the war that I have seen.
On the broad footways at the sides of the streets there are two unending processions of tired, famished-looking refugees. Most of them are from Galicia, but there are thousands also from other provinces of the Empire.
The authorities do not know where to place them; they do not know what to do. They make the refugees walk with all that they still possess on their shoulders. Often a sack and an old chair or some other piece of furniture will be carried about for days and days.
These people have the eyes of those who have seen the horrors of war without knowing what it is all about, without asking or being able to understand why their fields should be destroyed, their houses burned, and their pacific existences overturned by the calamity. Vienna does not know what to do with them.
The subscription list started for the refugees has not been successful, and Vienna is invaded by an enormous number of women, children, and old men, penniless, without clothes, and with no means of subsistence. It is very difficult to suggest a solution to such a condition of things. The Government has sent 60,000 to 70,000 of the fugitives to towns in the west; but there the same phenomenon repeats itself on a smaller scale.