Part 10

The art show at the Glass Palace was on when I was there, but I did not find it as interesting as the great show I had seen there the year before the war. There were too many landscapes of a dull color. This did not interfere with the sale of the pictures, and one-tenth of them were marked sold.

One day I paid a visit to the studio of Herr Franz von Stuck. He was very cordial. He is a splendid, big, strong man. Lately he has built an addition to his house so that he can have more room for his work, and he has one of the finest studios I have ever seen. The first floor is for modeling, and the second floor is for painting. He said that it was very hard to get good models now as all the men of fine physique were in the war.

"Do you get the same amount of bread as an ordinary man?" I asked him.

"Exactly the same," he answered. "The poorest workingman in the streets gets the same as I. That is why our system is so splendid."

He hardly mentioned his work at all, indeed he seemed quite shy about it. On his table was a dish made of Brazilian butterflies. He picked it up and turned it so that it showed blue, then brown, and then green. "Isn't it beautiful!" he said enthusiastically, "Look at it now!"

I looked around the room at all his wonderful pictures. I thought of all the fame that was his and of all the honors that had been heaped at his feet, and yet there he was admiring a butterfly's wing. I had the feeling that a great man stood before me.

FROM BERLIN TO VIENNA IN WAR TIME.

You would naturally think that it would be a very easy matter to go from Berlin to Vienna in war time, because Germany and Austria are allies, and that it would be as easy as traveling around Germany; that all you would have to do would be to pack your trunk, go down to the station, buy your ticket and get on the train. Of course you must do all these things, but you must do a great many other things before you do that.

The first thing that you do is to go to the police where you are registered and get what they call a _Fragebogen_, which means a question sheet. You cannot get this sheet unless you have a letter from some important person or firm stating that it is necessary for you to go. Your reason must be a very good one.

You fill out your _Fragebogen_, the police look up your record and if it is found out to be all right, they put your letter of recommendation, your passport, the _Fragebogen_ and half a dozen pictures of yourself in an envelope and seal it. You take this sealed envelope to the main police station in the district in which you live. Here the package is opened by several different men in several different rooms, and finally, after many questions and much stamping, you are told to write your name across your picture which has been pasted on a card.

After you are through with the German police, you must have your pass viséd by the Austro-Hungarian consul. Here you must go to three different men and be "stamped" and the last man takes two more of your pictures and pastes them on a pink card. Then you pay four marks to another man who does some more stamping. After all these things are done, you go back to your local police and register that you are going away, and then, after showing your pass at the railway ticket office, you are allowed to buy your ticket to Vienna. This was what a neutral American had to do before we got into the war--now I doubt if an American could go to Vienna at all.

It is a sixteen hours' ride from Berlin to Vienna with a one hour's wait at Tetschen on the Austro-German frontier. Our first stop was at Dresden, and like all German stations it was full of soldiers. The ride from Dresden to Tetschen is very beautiful. It runs through the Saxon Switzerland, a lovely country with mountains, streams of water and little villages. How peaceful everything was! How quiet! It did not seem like a country that was taking part in a great war.

At noon we reached Tetschen, a cold, dismal looking place. First we had our baggage examined by both Austrian and German officials. These officials are all clever men. Some of them are dressed up to look like common soldiers, but they are all fine lawyers and criminal experts.

A soldier stood up on a box and said that any one who had any writing about him should give it up. In my stocking I had my money and a letter of introduction that I had brought from America and which I was going to use in Vienna. I understood perfectly well what the soldier said, but for some unknown reason or other I simply didn't feel like pulling the letter out of my stocking. This was madness on my part, for I had learned long ago that if you follow directions in Germany you don't get into trouble, and if you don't follow them, you are sure to get into a mess.

After this, we were taken through a gate where we gave up our passes and they were taken away to see if the picture corresponded with the one sent down by the German police. The men here had a dreadful time with my name. All Germans find my name a difficult one. One soldier here just insisted that my name was "Auley" without the "Mc," but finally another soldier gave him a poke and said that "Mc" was a title and that I was of royal blood.

Everybody who didn't have a German or an Austrian pass had to undress, and as soon as I got into the searching-room, I gave the woman who was to search me, the letter out of my stocking. She took it and gave it to some one. My heart was in my mouth, for I had no idea what they would do, and I knew if they did anything to me it would be my own fault for not following directions.

I got a very good searching, and I had to take off all my clothes, only when she told me to take off my shoes and I commenced to unlace one boot she said never mind that one, to take off the other one. I had hardly gotten dressed before there was a knock at the door of the dressing-room and some one said I was wanted. I put on my hat and went out, and there planked in front of the door with both legs spread out and a long sword at his side, was a good-looking little Saxon officer aged about twenty years.

He had a fierce look on his face as he demanded, "Why didn't you give this up in the other room?"

"I couldn't," I answered, "it was in my stocking. You couldn't expect me to take it out of my stocking before all those men, could you?"

Then we both laughed and I said, "I hope you will give it to me again."

"Of course I will," he answered.

I went with him to the commanding officer, but that man would not give me back the letter. I didn't care, I was so glad I hadn't been arrested. When we came back from Vienna, I was the only one of our party that had to undress. I never noticed it, but there was some kind of a mark on my pass, and as soon as the official saw it I had to undress. But this time I had nothing in my stocking. When they searched my trunk they took away from me all the post cards and photos of Vienna I had, and didn't give them back.

After leaving Tetschen, the train runs for hours through Bohemia. It does not touch at Prague but at a number of small picturesque towns such as Kolin and Znaim. The country is extensively cultivated and very fertile. The train was supposed to be an express train but it stopped at every little way-station.

At one station, a very beautifully dressed lady with a little girl got on the train. I thought that she must be the wife of some high official and I was surprised at her lovely clothes away out there in Bohemia. She sat next to me, and in a short time she began talking to the woman who sat across from her and who kept asking over and over if any one in the coupé knew when we got to Deutschbrod. The beautifully-dressed lady said that she knew for she was going there. And then she told the whole coupé about the place.

To my surprise she said that she was the wife of the apothecary at the Barracks at Deutschbrod. The Barracks is a city built since the war on the hills above the town. It was built by the Austrian government and is the home of the refugees of East Galicia whose homes were destroyed by the Russians. Most of these _Flüchtlinge_, as the Germans call them, are Polish and Russian Jews, but they have also two hundred Italians from near Görz.

The wife of the apothecary, who was a Hungarian woman, said that the refugees had everything they needed and that everything was free--clothes, food, wine, beer, doctor's service and medicine. She said that unless there was some contagious disease in the camp the people were allowed perfect freedom to go and come as they pleased. Most of the inmates have their own gardens and raise their own chickens.

It was dark when we came to the place, but the apothecary's wife pointed it out on a distant hill. It was like a great city, one mass of electric lights sparkling in the darkness. When I came back from Vienna I had a good look at it. It was a hillside town made up of new frame houses, mostly small houses laid out in regular rows separated by straight streets.

After Deutschbrod was passed, our compartment was empty except for a young Jewish woman who had been sitting quietly in the corner. After a while she leaned over to us and said, "You speak English. I can see it that you are Americans. I was once in New York." And then she told us that she was a refugee from East Galicia.

"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.

VIENNA IN WAR TIME.

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.

For some time there has been a bread card in Vienna, and at the time of my visit, November 1916, the government was just beginning to take the food question in hand, and a few weeks before Christmas a coffee and a sugar card were issued. But the Austrians have not the gift for organization which the Germans have, and I heard that even six months later the food distribution was in a very poor state. I talked to many Austrians, and they all told me that they were anxious to have the entire German food card system established in Austria.

Austria is a great agricultural and wheat-raising country, and yet when I was there, there was very little bread in Vienna. The beautiful white Viennese bread had entirely disappeared, and a soggy brown stuff had taken its place. There was one kind called "Anker Bread" that was still very good, and the people stood in line to get it. And all this was not because flour was scarce but because of its poor distribution.

None of the restaurants are allowed to serve bread, even if you have a bread card you cannot get it, and the only place a stranger can get bread in Vienna is for breakfast at his hotel. People who eat in restaurants carry their bread with them, and generals and all sorts of high officials have little packages of bread concealed in their pockets which they slyly pull out at the table.

All the white flour is baked into cakes, and the Viennese cakes are as white and as wonderful as in their palmiest days. But the price! In a café a piece of cake of two thin layers costs one crown twenty-five hellers, about a quarter in our money.

In most German cities one person gets about a pound of meat a week, but in Vienna there is no meat card and you can buy as much meat as you like if you can afford to buy it. Every meat shop in Vienna is hanging full of meat--sausage, ham, pork, beef, chickens and geese. I went through the great Viennese market which is squares and squares long. Everywhere meat, meat, meat. I had forgotten that there was so much meat in the world. Stall after stall just loaded down with hams, but no bacon. Mostly young pigs. But no one was buying, only looking--like Till Eulenspiegel, as though the smell was enough. The hams were from one dollar to one dollar and sixty cents a pound, and the beef was even higher. Sausage was not so expensive, and geese were cheaper than in Germany.

I had never seen such an abundance of everything. Acres and acres of cabbages piled up as high as a house--great, hard-looking heads of a fresh green color. Then barrels and barrels of apples. Not such good apples as we have in America, but at such a fancy price! For thirty-two cents we got six little dried-up apples that we could hardly eat.

From the apple market we went to the onion market. Can you imagine a square as big as Union Square in New York where nothing but onions are sold? Well, they have that in Vienna. And the most wonderful onions! Small white ones, small red ones, big yellow ones and green ones! Onion peelings flew around everywhere, and do you know that they really smelled sweet? But the old women in back of the stalls did not look sweet, but as though they had stood among onions so long that they had become dried-up onions themselves.

They had no potatoes in the market, but the restaurants seemed to have plenty of them. Cheese was just beginning to be scarce, and one person could buy only a quarter of a pound at a time. We collected cheese to take back to Berlin with us, and we took turns going into the shops and buying a piece so that the clerks would not know that we were together. We collected a good many pounds and we got them safely over the frontier.

Eating in a restaurant in Vienna in war time is the most expensive thing of which I know. Small meat or deer orders were from eighty cents upward, and no potatoes go with this order. In Germany, you can get a piece of meat, two potatoes and a vegetable for thirty-two cents.

There seems to be plenty of milk and sugar in Vienna, but it is forbidden for any café to serve milk in coffee between the hours of two and seven o'clock, when every Viennese goes to a café to drink coffee. This restriction saves many gallons of milk. The coffee is real coffee and very good. You can have as many eggs as you like, very nicely cooked at fifteen cents an egg. Sugar is not served on the trains between Berlin and Vienna, but in a café they give you three lumps with a cup of coffee. Saccharine is served with tea.

The war has been very hard on the Austrians, and distress shows itself in the faces of the people you meet on the streets. They do not come of the sturdy stock that the Germans come from. They have always been a very religious people, and the war has made them more religious than ever, and now they are always burning candles before their favorite altar or saint's picture. The sacred picture in the Church of St. Stephen is always lighted by dozens of candles, and there is never a moment when the church is opened that some one is not kneeling before this picture, children, soldiers and old women with their empty market baskets. For the Catholic Viennese this picture is the center of everything, and in the war this inanimate object has played a big part. They pray to it to help the men in battle, to care for the wounded and to bless the souls of the dead. Centuries ago this picture was stolen by the Turks or some other kind of Pagan, and it is said that the eyes of the picture shed real tears until it was brought back and placed in a Christian church again. It stands on the ground on an easel, and people are allowed to touch the wire over it.

Small change is very scarce in Vienna, and they have torn the two-crown paper bills in two, and each half is good for a crown. They also use stamps for change as they do in Germany. Now they are making crowns and half-crowns of paper.

This winter is going to be terrible for the poor of Vienna, for last winter was bad enough. I really wonder what the people will do to get along.

SOLDIERS OF VIENNA.

I had been in Vienna, and each time I had thought that the most wonderful and exquisite things were the Viennese officers. They have always seemed to me like dainty paper dolls which had just stepped out of a fashion plate. I had imagined that in war time they would look less spick and span--but no indeed, they looked just the same, real war having made no difference.

The Austrian officer is of only one type. He is very tall, very slender and very graceful, and he is mostly rather dark than light. He has a small head and face, a straight nose, curved lips and a short but square chin. He may have eyes of any color, but he is clean shaven--a mustache is no longer the fashion. His nails are polished and his manners are delightful. He is generally well educated and very clever. But he does not look substantial. He seems to have no inner power.

The uniform of the Austrian army from the commonest soldiers to the highest official is away ahead of the German uniforms. The German uniforms have the tendency to make the men look wide and squatty, and the ugly little stiff flat caps of the Germans only emphasize this fact. The Austrian uniform on the other hand makes the men look tall and slender. The belt of the coat is high, and this makes the legs look longer, and the straight cap adds more to the height.

Most of the officers' coats are of field-gray color, but not all as in Germany. The artillery men, for instance, wear a coat of dark reddish brown that is very stunning in color. The Hussars wear a short gray coat of very heavy cloth and black trousers. Around their neck they wear a fur collar and over the fur a heavy gold braid is tied. Other officers wear white broadcloth uniforms, and although Vienna is by no means a clean city these white suits are always spotless. Most of the officers wear white kid gloves and their boots shine like a mirror. The streets of Vienna are full of these officers. One wonders who is at the front.

Nearly all the Austrian officers and many of the Viennese policemen wear corsets, and you can see the corsets displayed in the men's furnishings windows. They are not as long as a woman's corset and are generally made of fancy silk, yellow and black--the Austrian colors--preferred. All the officers wear such long swords that they drag on the ground.

They do not have shoulder straps to denote rank as they have in Germany, but stars on the collar are used instead. A single star made out of any kind of cloth denotes a common soldier; two stars an _Unteroffizier_, or a corporal; three stars a _Feldwebel_, or a sergeant; a silver star means a _Leutnant_, or a lieutenant; two silver stars an _Oberleutnant_, or a first lieutenant; three silver stars means a _Hauptmann_, or a captain; one gold star means a _Major_, and so on up the list.

All the uniforms are very practical and very well made. The overcoats of the common soldiers are lined all the way down, and the gray caps are not stiff but are made out of a soft cloth. The legs are bound in strips of heavy cloth which wind round and round.

All the common soldiers have their hats stuck full of fancy pins of all kinds, and the soldiers from Tyrol have _Edelweiss_ pins stuck in their hats, for that is the flower of the mountains. The Viennese Red Cross girls also wear many pins. They wear a gray suit and a hat that is trimmed with bright red and is very becoming.

If Vienna is full of officers the country around is full of common soldiers. I saw them from the train windows. Some of them were farming, others were fishing, and still others were walking along the country roads, perhaps going home on a furlough.

One day I went to the Central Cemetery in Vienna where Mozart, Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Johann Strauss and Brahms lie buried in a little plot of ground. Just before you come to the cemetery there is a barracks. It had only a barbed wire fence around it and we could see into the place. It was made up of small frame houses and looked like a western mining town that had sprung up in a single night. Before the door of a house near the fence a soldier was doing a good-sized washing. He seemed to be very much worried for fear he was not getting the things clean. I am sure he was rubbing everything full of holes. When he saw us watching him, he first wiped the perspiration from his brow, then he laughed. "_Sehr schwer_," (very hard), he said sighing.

The Central Cemetery is so large that nearly every one who dies in Vienna is buried in it. When a funeral comes in at the gate the bells are tolled, and the funerals came in one after another the day I was there. The hearses of the soldiers were draped with the Austrian flag. People follow the hearse walking. An old woman dressed in black and with a black shawl tied over her head was holding on to the back of one of these soldier hearses. It seemed as though she could not bear to be parted from her dead. She was not weeping but had a strange grim look on her face, a face in which all hope was gone.