CHAPTER VI—IT IS NOT SAFE
Today I had an interview, lasting for an hour, with Admiral Horthy, who is Governor of Hungary. It was he who snatched his country from the throes of Bolshevism and established in the midst of disaster a representative government. He is a patriot and man of the world in the finest sense. He was wounded in the Great War and has lived through to peace days without animosities. My object in seeing him was to obtain a personal statement from him of how he proposed to reconstruct the fallen destinies of Hungary.
I was met by a liaison officer whose wife is an American, resident in New York, and was taken in a car of the American Relief to the palace which sits above the Danube on the heights of Buda. The old magnificence of palace etiquette is still kept up. We mounted the marble stairs, encountering guards, with clanking swords, at every turn. The excursion seemed more like fiction than reality—more like a page out of The Prisoner of Zenda through which one walked as a living character. At the top of the staircase we were challenged by halbardiers, in medieval uniforms not dissimilar from those of the Swiss Guards. In an ante-room we were requested to remove our coats and to prepare for the interview. After a wait of not more than five minutes, we were summoned. Passing along a hall filled with priceless cloisonni, we came to a doorway outside which a soldier, caparisoned as though to take part in Grand Opera, was standing. Behind the door a seaman, as bluff and cheery as any British Admiral was seated at a desk. His breast was a rainbow flash of decorations. He rose with his hand outstretched as we entered; his whole attitude one of ease and friendliness.
His first act was to beckon us to a group of chairs and to offer us cigarettes. This was the man on whom at no far distant date the peace of Europe may depend. Admiral Horthy is a cleanshaven, square-faced man, with resolute eyes and the nose of a hawk. The kind of man who inspires trust and whom men cannot fail to like immensely.
My first question was how he accounted for Hungary's present forlorn condition. His answer was forthright—the Peace Treaty. The old Hungary was an economic entity, complete in itself. It had coal-mines, wheatfields, factories, and was a seagoing nation. Today it has no outlet to the sea, no mines and no money with which to buy the coal to operate its factories. It is like a body in which the arteries have been cut so that the blood cannot circulate. Even its wheatfields have been handed over in part as a bribe to other nations. This would not matter so much if the wheat-lands were under cultivation. But they are not. The wheat-lands apportioned to Roumania were divided among peasants who had not the capital to work them. They were compelled by their Government to accept them under the threat that, if they refused, they would be conscripted into the army. As a consequence, when the world is crying for food, large areas of Hungarian tillage in Roumanians hands are lying idle. They are like the engines and rolling-stock taken in reparation from the enemy, which may be seen in Roumania, Belgium and France rusting on the rails. The old Hungary consisted of a conglomeration of races mutually inter-dependent. Labour travelled from point to point at recognised seasons along recognised routes. At the harvest Roumanian peasants had for centuries come to Hungary to lend a hand. They tried to do the same this year, but were turned back at the frontier by their own soldiery with a loss of three hundred lives.
“What is the remedy?” I asked.
The Admiral leant forward, gazing at me keenly. “Patience,” he said. “In the world, constituted as it is today, injustice cannot triumph. Least of all economic injustice. My job at the moment is to sit on the lid and prevent men who do not know that it will hurt, from ramming their heads against a wall.” He made a soothing gesture with his hands, “Keep quiet and wait, I say.”
“But while they wait your people are starving,” I suggested.
“Yes.” He shuddered as though in some spiritual way he had known the agony of starvation. “Yes, they are starving; but it will not be for ever. After the war there was a great lethargy. The nations who had won only thought of themselves. Now they are beginning to think on broader lines—this drive to save our children that you are having in America is proof of that. Next you will begin to enquire into causes and then you will revise the hurried misinformation of the Peace Conference. If you don't, there is always Bolshevism.”
“Bolshevism!” I exclaimed. “Do you mean that Hungary would go Bolshevist again?”
“Never,” his face clenched like the fingers of a hand. “But if the spring drive of the Russians succeeds, Poland will be overwhelmed. If that happens, many States of Central Europe will go Bolshevist; Hungary will be the only State you will be able to trust. Poor Hungary, whom you have shorn of her possessions, she will be your bridge-head against the tide of anarchy. We shall get our chance to prove then that we are your friends.”
“But is there no other way of righting Hungary's wrongs save through violence?” I asked.
“Yes.” He spoke seriously. “Through justice. We are a proud people. We don't want charity. We want an opportunity to work. But our hands are——” He broke off and pressed his hands together as if they were manacled. “How can we work without coal? Our factories are closed. Our people are starving. It is not safe to let people starve too long.”
I went away from my interview with Hungary's strong man with those words ringing in my ears, “It is not safe to let people starve too long.” On returning to the American Relief Station I heard an uproar of piercing wailing. There was a crowd about the door where the candidates for relief enter. My liaison officer, by virtue of his uniform, elbowed a way for me to the front. On the cold stone floor a man in a cassock was kneeling. He held a crucifix. In a secret, murmuring flow of words he was praying. Before him lay a human wax-work, who was newly dead; he had collapsed when help was within handstretch. He was a young man, certainly less than thirty, bleached with under-nourishment. He was neatly clad in clothes which were thread-bare; he might have been a shop-keeper or a clerk. The priest continued to pray—the wailing dwindled into the distance down the corridor as a woman was led away. At last a door closed behind her and there was nothing but the silence of the crowd and the murmur of the praying. I glanced at the peering faces, and I knew that it was true, what the strong man of Hungary had said. It is not safe to let a nation starve too long.
CHAPTER VII—CHRISTMAS EVE IN VIENNA
This year Santa Claus made a mistake about Vienna; he forgot to come or else he had grown tired of paying visits to a people who are so unhappy. In Vienna they speak of 1920 as the sixth year of the war—they mean the war against hunger. They can afford no more Christmases till the Peace with Hunger has been settled. Some of us who had seen the toys taken from the children being auctioned for bread at the Dorotheum, suspected that this would be the case—Santa Claus would be too busy in England and America to find time to visit the stockings of Vienna; so we conspired to commit the fraud of impersonation. We each stumped up a certain sum with which to purchase flour, bacon, cocoa, rice, sugar and tinned milk. We obtained the addresses from the Society of Friends of twenty-five of the most desperate families. The American Relief Administration lent us a car. As soon as night had fallen we set off on our rounds; we were warned that if we started too late, we should find all the homes in darkness; the means of illumination are expensive. People go to bed as soon as it becomes dark and save the money that candles would have cost.
We were a curiously constituted party—an amalgam of the new friendship which can alone bring happiness to the world. Our chauffeur, as delighted at the undertaking as anyone, was a German. Our pillar of strength was Dr. John, an Austrian, who had been lamed in the front-line as a combatant by one of the Allies' shells. The rest of us were British and Americans. Three years ago we were all soldiers, thirsting for each other's blood; and here, on this Christmas Eve of 1920, we were crowded together in the same automobile, bound on the one errand. It was wonderful. We thought our way back to that No Man's Land of animosity; it was amazing that we should have hated so much.
We jolted our way between snow-banks, through dim-lit streets, to the poorest quarter of the city. But even here there was a look of tidiness, for Vienna has no slums. The absence of slums in a sense enhances the tragedy of the situation. These people, who are now on their last legs, were formerly thrifty and self-respecting. They did not merit such a fate. Vienna was a clean city and its municipal government was ahead of the times in the attention that it paid to housing conditions. So it happens that today in well-treed streets, flanked by model dwellings of artistic design, you are deceived unless you look behind the doors; for these people are not incorrigible slovens who parade their griefs and trade upon your pity. They are the unfortunates of a world-wide calamity, who creep into back rooms and prefer to die quietly. What I propose to do is what we did this Christmas Eve—push open a few of the doors and let you see what lies hidden. There is one point which in all fairness it is necessary to emphasize. In none of the cases which I propose to quote was the poverty due to shiftlessness. It was invariably due to one of two causes: the debased value of the currency or the inability to obtain work. The desire to work was always present. If you ask what is the solution, so that neither Vienna nor any other city may again pass through such a travesty of Christmas, I would reply the combined statesmanly effort on the part of more prosperous nations to stabilise Austrian economic conditions.
Between a row of tall houses we drew up against a snow-pile. Dr. John was the first to limp out of the car and to secure the bag of flour. Of all our gifts the flour was the most unpleasant to carry; it covered one's clothes with a film of white. There was a rivalry at each new stopping-place as to who should perform the task which was least pleasant. Dr. John showed a surprising agility in getting to the flour. If anyone outstripped him, he begged to be allowed to carry it. The reason he gave was that he could do so little for his people and that he alone was an Austrian.
We passed through a dark passage and rapped on a door. It was opened by a scantily clad woman, wasted with consumption. She had five children ranging from six months to fourteen years and a husband who was prematurely white. The room in which they lived was the size of a cupboard and almost entirely filled by a bed, lacking in coverings, and a cradle. The children sat about on the floor in rags. As you might imagine, there was nothing to betray that it was the night before Christmas. Upon enquiry we discovered that the man was a tile-layer and, since all building has been discontinued, is permanently out of work. And yet the astounding thing about these people was their courtesy and courage. They wished us the season's greetings and mustered smiles. The children were led forward to shake our hands. When we produced our presents, they were shaken by a tremor. One feared they were going to cry. I turned my back in shame at the smallness of the gift and bent over the cradle. Even the baby, when I stroked her cheek, pulled her fingers out of her mouth and gurgled. But the worst shame was yet to come, when we were taking our departure, after we had said good-bye. The father had followed us out into the darkness. I could scarcely see his face. Suddenly he stooped and I knew that he had kissed my hand. The man had been a soldier. Three years ago, had we met, we should have felt it our duty to kill each other. That he should have shown so much emotion made his need vivid. To be kissed by a starving man does not increase one's self-respect.
At the next house at which we halted, we felt convinced there must be some mistake. It had wrought-iron gates and an imposing courtyard. Playing Santa Claus is well enough, but if one left a bag of flour on John D. Rockefeller, the gift might be resented. We checked up the address which the Society of Friends had provided (it was printed in full) as we held the paper beneath the glare of the automobile-lamps. Dr. John set us an example in courage; collaring the bag of flour, he went first. We climbed a well-lighted staircase, passing other occupants of the dwelling who stared at us mystified. They manifestly belonged to the upper class and could not fathom the purpose of our errand. Again we rapped on a door. A pretty woman of about twenty-five, answered our summons. Dr. John, looking like a miller by this time, tactfully made the explanations. We had brought something for the children. The Society of Friends had told us that milk would be acceptable and we had added a few other things to our present.
There was no mistake. We had come to the right house. The apartment, beyond the hall, was stripped bare. Everything had gone to the Dorotheum—the national pawn-shop—to purchase bread. Her husband was a Government official; the salary he was now getting was four times as large as in pre-war times, but the purchasing power of a crown was a hundred and thirty times less. It was impossible to sustain life on it. They were still occupying their old house because a law had been passed restraining landlords from increasing their pre-war rents. But even at that they would soon have to get out. And then where could they go, with the whole of Vienna under-housed? To the streets, perhaps.
She still maintained her sense of pride. She was terribly grateful, but terribly afraid some of her neighbours might have seen us. Then she did a thing superbly eloquent. She had asked our nationalities. “American, British and Austrian,” we told her, “and there's a German in the car downstairs.” Her eyes flooded. She tried to gather all our hands together and clasp them to her breast. “The seventh Christmas of the war!” she said. “And you come here together to help me as friends. Almost you make me believe that the war is ended.”
We tiptoed out, moving noiselessly, while she closed the door furtively behind us. We shared her dread lest any act of ours should have betrayed her secret and the neighbours should have guessed.
After several calls we found ourselves again in a poorer district. It was getting late. There were no lights in the windows. We were a little hesitant about ringing more bells. The proper time for Father Christmas to arrive is when people are in bed; but in a city of suspicions and sudden arrests to be roused out of sleep by a group of strange men is more likely to cause alarm than pleasure. We threw in some extra cans of milk as compensation and chanced it.
Our ring was answered after an interval by a cheerful little woman with a wooden leg. She had seven children and was reckoned a widow; her husband had gone missing in the war. Each child had to be wakened and introduced to us in turn. They stood in a line, blinking shyly and rubbing their drowsy eyes. They had evidently been picked up off the floor, for in the inner room there was only a single bed which, as usual, had as its only covering a mattress. The clothes of the entire seven children would not have decently warmed one child. And yet, despite their leanness and rags they seemed to breathe their mother's optimism. We asked her how she managed to exist. She smiled bravely, tapping with her wooden leg. She worked when she could—yes, at washing. There was her man's pension, and then we must not forget the good God who had sent us.
We glanced round the unfurnished room. It was cold as the street outside, but scrubbed and speckless. There was no doubt that she was good, but one was puzzled to discover why she was so persuaded that God had been good to her. Then she let the secret out—or at least part of it. God was daily feeding three of her seven children at the American Relief Station. She seemed to have the idea that God had a lot in common with the Stars and Stripes. As we turned to go, my eye caught an embroidered motto on the wall, which read, “My kitchen is clean and my food well-cooked; otherwise I would not be here.” So she, too, like the Government official's wife, had her upholding pride. Poverty had failed to down her.
After this we lost our way for a time in a district where more knifings happen than in any other in Vienna. At last we found ourselves in a dank, unlighted room where people rose from the floor like shadows. It was tenanted in all by four adults and five children. One of the children was seriously ill. They hadn't been to see a doctor and didn't know what was the matter with her. She was a pretty, fair little girl and her body was shaken with fever. No, they had no food. That was nothing new. One of the men was a gardener; before gardens grew green it would be easy to die. The other man had been four years a prisoner in Siberia. He had walked most the way back to Vienna. The walking hadn't improved his health. He wondered why he had been so anxious to get back. He was rotting here; he could have rotted with equal ease out there. In the darkness they flapped their rags and coughed. When we produced our food, the men showed no enthusiasm. It was the women, hideously angular, who stooped over our hands and blessed us in the name of their children. We had done them no service with our Christmas presents; we had only prolonged their agony by a few days' respite. They made us feel that. Individuals could do nothing. It was nations who must act and act quickly if victims of this order were not to perish.
The last visit we paid was in all senses the happiest, for we, came face to face with triumphant youth. The single room was in the dreariest tenement we had entered. The snow lay in a melting quagmire outside. It was the nearest approach to a slum I have encountered in Vienna. The walls were peeling with damp and the woodwork was mouldy. We had to climb a flight and then cross along the front of the house by a rickety balcony. Pushing open a window we stumbled on a pathetic sight—six little boys and girls curled up asleep on the bare boards with their flesh showing through their rags. On a bed a handsome man was sitting, strumming softly on a guitar. He was evidently of gipsy origin; his hair was jet black, his moustaches were fiercely curled and his face was marble white. He stared at us doubtfully with his smouldering eyes while the Doctor explained our intrusion. Then he rose with an air of courtliness and made us welcome. There was a wild haughtiness about the man—a native aristocracy—which made us forget his poverty. He had seven children? Yes. We counted the little bodies strewn about and could reckon only six. He smiled. That was easily explained. The seventh was a girl of eighteen; she would be back presently. And his wife, we asked, where was she? His wife had died last May. She was out with a sack on her shoulder, picking over the old ash-heaps which have not been disturbed for twenty years. She was searching with other women as desperate as herself to find fuel. Not being an expert miner, the ashes had slipped back and buried her. She was smothered before they could dig her out. Since then his daughter, whom he hoped we should meet, had been their mother. For himself, he was a musician and sang in cafis, when people were so good as to listen.
At this point the sound of rushing feet disturbed us. A little girl, who certainly did not look eighteen, butted her way into the midst of us. It was plain that at first she had thought we were the police and was out to fight the lot of us. On finding that our intentions were kind, she fell to laughing. Her merriment was contagious and in strange contrast to her father's tragic attitudes. Her little brothers and sisters woke up and smiled at her. One could see that in her presence they felt safe.
She began to explain between smiles and gulps how happy we had made her. All day she had been puzzling what to get for the children. She had no money. Tomorrow would be Christmas. Not to give anything would not be right. And now, when she had begun to despair——. She dragged her ragged family to their feet and pushed them up one by one to kiss our hands. “You shall have a Christmas now,” she kept telling them; “a real Christmas. One of the finest.”
And it took so little to make this great happiness—such a meagre, unworthy sacrifice. One less present in each of your stockings would have brought the same gladness to every starveling in Vienna.
CHAPTER VIII—A HOSPITAL IN BUDA
Accounts of the starving children are likely to create the impression that the countries in which they starve are callous. The case is quite the opposite. Hungary, for instance, used to lead the world in its legislation for child-conservation. If the parent failed, the State automatically became the parent. If an unprotected woman were about to become a mother, the State undertook a man's responsibilities, both for the woman and the life unborn. The way in which the law operated was peculiarly humane. There were no barrack-like asylums for the care of these unfortunates. They were placed in the homes of peasants and visited at regular intervals by inspectors whose business it was to see that they were being treated kindly. The mother was not separated from her illegitimate child; they were placed together in surroundings where their position would become normal. Since the war this system has broken down; but as far as is possible it is still maintained. One needs to disabuse his mind of the prejudice against peoples who are starving, that they are starving because of their own intolerance. One finds instances of spiritual generosity which go far beyond the capacity of the Anglo-Saxon mind.
In Buda there is a mosque, which has stood there for centuries. It marks the tomb of the Mohammedan who brought the first rose to Europe. Because the beauty of his gift has made life more fragrant, religious bigotry, has kept aloof from his sleeping-place. There has never been a day since he was buried there that the call to prayer has not sounded from the minaret, proclaiming the greatness of Allah above the roofs of a city which serves a rival god. What does it matter, say the citizens of Buda, if it helps the soul of the giver of our first rose to rest? A people so poetically magnanimous are not likely to be wilfully cruel to children.
I visited the Foundling hospital in Budapest where parentless children are first adopted by the State. It is more like a palace than a hospital—an imposing series of buildings covering several acres; but it is only imposing from the outside. It is over-crowded and under-staffed. The war, with its retreats and invasions, has filled the land with tuberculosis and rickets. Five hundred are cared for in the cots; thirteen thousand have to be lodged elsewhere. The nurses are in patched clothing and rags. The doctors are worn and pale as ghosts. I saw many of the attendants trudging through the snow without stockings. The wards smell like menageries. They have no soap, no linen, no anything. And this is the institution which once led the world in child-conservation!
Do not think that these conditions are due to carelessness; they are caused by the national bankruptcy. Hungary's exchequer has been pillaged by both Bolshevists and Roumanians. In the money that is left a depreciation has taken place which would be equalled in American currency if the spending value of the dollar were to become less than that of one cent. Moreover, very many medical requirements have become absolutely unobtainable. Commodities so common as soap, powder, vaseline, linen are not to be purchased. The children born in the hospital are wrapped in paper. Even paper is so scarce that it has to be washed. After it has been washed it cracks. Its edges become sharp as a razor. There is not a baby in that hospital whose tender little body is not covered with cuts and sores. Yet what can the nurses do? Babies have to be clad. There is nothing but paper.
I wish the people who read this chapter could have accompanied me through those wards. It was the Christmas season. The occupants of the cots were little children; the mothers who bent over them, giving them the last of their strength, were more outcast than Mary.
Because of the coal shortage, no ward in the hospital was properly heated. I was wearing a coat and had to keep it on. In the little railed beds, the babies shivered against the bars on bare mattresses. They wore nothing but a single patched shirt, which left off at the legs for the sake of economy. The impression they created was not even remotely human; they looked like sick monkeys from the tropics who had not became acclimatised. There were lines and lines of them, their bodies blue with cold and criss-crossed with scars. Most of them could not shift themselves; their heads were bumpy and their legs withered. The thing that first struck me was their silence; they had finished all their crying. The doctor informed me that the mortality among them is over thirty per cent. Their ages were anything from the newly born to ten years old. It seemed that into those buildings was crowded the child misery of all the world.
I stopped to enquire who were their parents. They did not know. Their fathers had been killed in the war and their mothers had died. Some of them had been picked up in the streets where they had been abandoned by parents who could drag no further.
I found myself in the maternity ward. The women were as naked as the children. Of the old stock of gowns only a few were left, which had been patched and darned till there remained scarcely anything of the original fabric. Again, as in the case of the children, the mattresses were bare of coverings. The napkins of the new-born babies were of paper, broken and washed to shreds. And this was the hospital which for mercy once led the world!
I was taken to the laundry to see how the paper was laundered. It so happened that we arrived in time to catch a laundress using a brush to one of the tattered maternity garments. The fury of the Director, who escorted me, was extravagant. It knew no bounds. He shouted and thumped and gesticulated. It was as though the woman had dared to scrub a priceless piece of tapestry. I thought he would have struck her. Later he apologised to me for his passion, “On our retention of that gown some mother's life may depend.”
It was the kind of clout with which no self-respecting housewife in America would have deigned to mop her floor.
CHAPTER IX—AN ECONOMIC EXPERIMENT
They wouldn't need to starve if they would get to work.” The retort and the criticism which it implies are as shallow as they are selfish. Central Europe wants to work. It is begging for the chance to work; but it cannot work efficiently while it is under-nourished.
Here in Prague there is an American business man who has probed deeper into the Czecho-Slovak economic situation than all the politicians. He has found a way to feed the nation and to make a profit for himself. He bases his calculations on the firm belief that a people, heretofore industrious, still retains the habit; all they require to set them on their feet is food. He is willing to provide the food and to risk his capital on their bare word that they will play the game by him.
He has started his experiment with the miners of Carlsbad. The Government food-ration allowed to working miners is precisely half what it ought to be. He has offered to supply the other half of the ration, bringing their allowance up to normal, on condition that the miners will do their best to increase their output of coal by 20 per cent. They are not to make this increase by working overtime, but by speeding up during their ordinary working hours. The average of their present output is calculated on the results of the past nine months. As repayment and profit on his investment, he is given the option to purchase one-half of the 20 per cent, increased output at the inland price, i.e., the price that coal is selling for in Czechoslovakia. He makes his profit by exporting. The question immediately arises, why could not Czecho-Slovakia do the exporting and make the profit herself? The answer is that the partitioning of Austro-Hungary by the Peace Treaty and the consequent establishing of new frontiers has bred such a deep international distrust that the new nations are reluctant to let their freight-cars pass out of their own territory for fear they should never recover them. At the border merchandise is unloaded and re-shipped, which adds considerably to the expense of transportation. Major S., being an American, has a superior reputation for integrity and His word is accepted when he promises that cars carrying his shipments out of Czechoslovakia will be returned.
The scheme is much more far-reaching than at first sight it appears. It embraces not only the feeding of the men, but also of their families. His share of the coal he intends to sell to Austria, just across the border, where the scarcity of every kind of fuel is causing a crisis. When he has done this, many Austrian factories which have been standing idle will be able to re-open. So, by feeding the Carlsbad miners, he is re-employing the Austrian working-man.
He was warned when he first discussed his plans, that they would be rejected by Government and miners alike. On the contrary they have been eagerly accepted by both Government and miners; but most eagerly by the miners. The miners all over Czecho-Slovakia are clamouring to be given the same opportunity. If it pays an individual to indulge in this kind of commercial enterprise, it would equally pay the Allies. For, while this is no philanthropy, it attains the ends of philanthropy and has the added advantage that it is economically constructive. To state the case cynically, the politicians of the Allies can play the part of Good Samaritans and find themselves in pocket. The experiment which has started with the miners of Carlsbad can be extended to cover almost all branches of industry. But the value of the experiment and its eager acceptance proves that it is not unwillingness, but inability due to undernourishment, that prevents Central Europe from getting to work.
In Czecho-Slovakia, as in Hungary and Austria, the commercial stagnation which has produced every kind, of shortage, is chiefly to be traced to the establishing of new frontiers. When the Peace Treaty repartitioned Europe, it took apart a watch which was going, and failed to put it together. All the cogs and wheels are still here, but they lie scattered about and consequently there is no movement. An example of this disorganization is near at hand. The peasants of a certain district of what is now Czecho-Slovakia, were accustomed to gain their bread by felling trees in the winter and floating them down the rivers in the summer to Hungary. In Hungary they sold their logs and stayed to help with the harvest. Then they returned to their homes in the mountains to eke out a livelihood for the next nine months with the money they had thus earned. Now that Ruthenia has become Czecho-Slovak and a frontier has been established, they are no longer allowed to pass freely into Hungary; consequently they starve.
The trees in their forests as of old stand ready for the cutting. The peasants are more anxious than ever to make their traditional excursion. But someone in Paris scrawled on a map with a blue pencil, so the trees are not felled and the peasants starve. Conditions are so bad in these primitive villages that the children would not have lived the year out had not the American Relief Administration made their rescue one of its special objects.
Here again, as with the miners, the starvation is not caused by unwillingness to work, but by the volcanic upheavals of war, followed by a political redistribution which has destroyed economic stability and criss-crossed Central Europe with hostile tariff walls in places where the flow of trade was once traditional and amiable. Whether these countries will be able to function efficiently after they have adapted themselves to their new boundaries is a question which only time can prove. For the moment, as though one had dammed torrents within new confines, diverting them from their ancient courses, there is a seething swirl of unrest, then an over-flowing and then stagnation.
All the railroads run towards Vienna, which was the great middleman city for the old empire. Hungary sent grain. Bohemia sent coal. They did their trading there and exchanged their products for commodities which they could not produce themselves. Today Vienna is isolated in a small patch of scrubby country which is the new Austria. The new Austria has no natural resources on which to maintain its population. The only way its people can hope to gain a living is by being again, what they once were, Central Europe's middlemen. But their currency is so debased that its purchasing value is almost gone. No one who had anything of actual value would go to Vienna to exchange it for their unreal money. Nevertheless, the railroads still converge there; there has been no time to change them. For all the purpose they serve they might as well run out into the Sahara desert. The political map, as re-arranged by the Peace, has built walls across most of the old travel-routes; it has given ancient hostilities a new means of venting their animosities, has destroyed confidence and dislocated the entire system of transport. This is without doubt the fundamental answer to the question, “Why does Central Europe starve?” The fault is not one of sulkiness or laziness on the part of the people who do the starving. They are not starving in order to spite the Allies or because they derive a patriotic ecstasy from starvation. They want to work and they prefer employment to charity. They claim the right to work; but if their work is to be of any value to the world, we must first restore to them their vitality, by nourishing their famished bodies, and then stabilise their economic conditions so that the marketing of the results of their industry may be assured.
CHAPTER X—BABUSCHKA
Prague is one of the more important of the jumping off points for Bolshevist propaganda in Europe; it is at the same time a rendezvous for exiled Russians of moderate views, who are conspiring to overthrow the Red regime the moment the hour seems propitious. These exiled Russians all belong to the Intelligencia—the cultured middle-class. They are university students, professors, doctors, engineers—the people of brains and small means who do the sane thinking for whatever nation. They are a class which is being rapidly exterminated in all the stricken countries. In Russia they have been smashed into oblivion with clubs and rifles; in Central Europe they are dying more respectably, because more privately, of famine. Here, in Prague, for instance, poorly as a working man is paid, his wages are higher than a school-teacher's.
A fund for their partial rescue has been placed in the hands of the American Relief Administration by the will of Mr. Harkness. I saw what it was accomplishing for the first time in Vienna, when I lunched with the professors of the University, many of whom are world-famous in their various departments of research. The terrible problem that they have to face is explained at once when it is stated that the highest salary paid to a professor, if exchanged into American currency, would be worth at most one hundred dollars a year. That is the highest; the bulk of the salaries are much less. Before the war, when a crown had the spending value of twenty-two cents, they could live comfortably and with the necessary ease of mind. Today, when the crown has shrunk to the value of one-sixth of a cent, they find themselves in penury.
The Harkness Fund is providing the professors of Vienna with one meal a day, to which the professors themselves contribute one twenty-fourth. I watched them come in to lunch and the ravenous way in which they ate. I tried to bring the significance of the scene home to myself by shifting the stage-setting to Harvard or Oxford. They were men of the highest intellectual type and of an achievement which speaks for itself. The science and learning of both America and Great Britain are already the wiser for their devotion. Today we are saving thousands of lives by the past results of their medical discoveries. Most emphatically they are the kind of men who, were they to perish, it would be impossible to replace. And here they were cold, ill-nourished, shabby, bending voraciously over a rough plenty as though they were outcasts from the gutter. As the lunch progressed one noticed that, despite their hunger, they were restraining their appetites. The bread by their plates remained untouched. To the bread they added various morsels, till by the end of the meal a little pile had grown up. Before each left, he drew out a piece of paper and surreptitiously made a bundle of the pile, which he slipped into his pocket, glancing this way and that to see whether he was observed. Then he hurried out to where a wife and children were counting the seconds till his coming.
The next time I saw the Harkness Fund at work was here in Prague. The American Relief Administration had taken a hall and provided a Christmas entertainment at which food-packages were to be distributed to the exiled Russian Intelligencia. When we arrived the hall was jammed. There were girl university students, with their hair cropped like the women in the Battalion of Death. They were clad for the most part in old dresses which had been collected by the Red Cross in America. There were tottering middle-aged professors, the counterpart of those whom I had seen in Vienna. There were soldiers of Denikin's and Kolchak's armies in the loose Russian military blouse. Most of these were students who are pursuing their studies at Prague University and living of necessity in human pigsties. And then there were mothers, dragged to pieces by adversity, carrying babies, with still more babies clinging to their skirts. Yet, despite their poverty, the gathering had an ecstatic, valiant look. One glanced from one white face to the next—at the gray-white sea they made when massed together. The spirit which lay behind those faces was not broken. Pinched, neglected, emaciated, misunderstood—yes; but it still stood erect to greet the future. It believed in the future. It hoped. Moving through the throng like a blessing, came a little bowed old woman. Her eyes were dim. She had to lean on a tall young soldier's arm to support herself. Over her cropped gray head she wore a gray piece of cloth, folded in a triangle. “Babus-chka! Babuschka!” the whisper went round. It grew into something like a shout. There was no surging, no jostling. The people went forward one by one to greet her. She placed her old gnarled hands on their shoulders, drawing their heads down, so that she could kiss them. Babus-chka—the little grandmother! They were all grandsons and granddaughters to her. She might have been a saint—but she was too human. She preferred to be what she has always been, the little grandmother of exiled Russia.
Next day I went to see where the Intelligencia of Russia are living. They are housed in a damp, unheated barracks. I opened endless doors; there were rows and rows of spavined, unrestful beds. Czecho-Slovakia is not pleased at their presence; they are unwelcome guests. But, if their hope comes true, they are the brains of the new and better Russia which will give a lasting peace to the world. Because they believe their hope will come true, they train their brains relentlessly, studying, studying, studying. It does not matter that they are not wanted. They will be wanted. Meanwhile they starve and attend the University and learn.
And then I went to see Babuschka, who has kept this lamp of ardent idealism burning. She made me her grandson the moment I entered, brushing aside my stiffly proffered hand, putting her arms round my shoulders and dragging down my face to hers. After that things were easier; her all-embracing love had caught me in its web.
Why did they send her to Siberia? She is seventy-seven now and more than half her years have been spent in exile. After having achieved her goal, she has again been made an exile. This time by the Red Terror. You know who she is, for she has been several times to Great Britain and America. She is Catherina Breshkoffskaja, better known as the Grandmother of the Russian Revolution, and beloved by her countrymen as Babuschka.
For two solid hours she spoke to me about Russia, telling me how good and simple the Russian peasants were. “The Red Terror will be over by spring,” she said; “the peasants will not stand it longer. I know. We go into Russia secretly, constantly; we see for ourselves. We are educating the people at the risk of our lives, taking literature to them and preaching our program. When our hour comes, we shall establish freedom and give the land to the man who works it. I am seventy-seven, but I shall live to see the end of Bolshevism and the beginning of a happier world.” Her eyes became clear as a girl's; she clutched my hands. “Tell America and England to be patient with us. Make them believe that we are good like themselves. The Russian people are little children—they are not bad. They are growing up. Tell them we want their affection, so that we may grow up to be clean and valiant.”
The door opened; a man entered with a rush of footsteps. He knelt beside her, kissing her hands in reverence. He was going on a journey. When he goes on a journey, especially in an eastwardly direction, he is never certain whether he will return. Lest the blank wall and the firing-squad should wait for him, he had come to receive her blessing. Babuschka took his yearning face, kissing his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth. Across his shoulder she gazed at me and nodded. “It is Kerensky, the knight-errant of Russia, who wants nothing for himself.”