Part 17

King Charles wanted to be impartial, and a few days later he inspected the dining-car attached to the train that was to take his brother Maximilian to Constantinople. In the kitchen of the car he found some rolls and some wheat flour. He had them removed.

"I know, Max, that you didn't order these things," he said to his brother. "The dining-car management has not yet come to understand that no favors must be shown anybody. If the steward of the car should by any chance buy flour in Bulgaria or Turkey, do me the favor to pitch him out of the window when the car is running, so that he will fall real hard. That is the only way in which we can make a dent into special eating privileges."

By the way, there was a time when the present Emperor-King of Austria-Hungary and his Empress-Queen had to live on a sort of sandwich income, and were glad when the monthly allowance from the archducal exchequer was increased a little when the present crown-prince was born.

But that is another story.

XV

THE WEAR AND TEAR OF WAR

It never rains but it pours.

It was so in Central Europe. Not alone had the production of food by the soil been hamstrung by the never-ending mobilizations of labor for military purposes, but the means of communication began to fail from the same cause.

If it takes a stitch in time to save nine in ordinary walks of life, it takes a stitch in time to save ninety, and often all, in railroading. The improperly ballasted tie means too great a strain in the fish-plate. It may also mean a fractured rail. Both may lead to costly train wrecks.

But the makeshifts employed in Central Europe averted much of this. Where the regular track gangs had been depleted by the mobilizations, women and Russian prisoners-of-war took their places. But the labor of these was not as good as that given by the old hands. There is a knack even in pushing crushed rock under a railroad tie. Under one tie too much may be placed and not enough under another, so that the very work that is to keep the rail-bed evenly supported may result in an entirely different state of affairs. Two ties lifted up too much by the ballasting may cause the entire rail to be unevenly supported, so that it would have been better to leave the work undone altogether.

Thus it came that all railroad traffic had to be reduced in speed. Expresses were discontinued on all lines except the trunk routes that were kept in fairly good condition for that very purpose. Passenger-trains ran 20 miles an hour instead of 40 and 45, and freight-trains had their schedules reduced to 12. That meant, of course, that with the same motive power and rolling stock about half the normal traffic could be maintained.

But that was not all. The maintenance departments of rolling stock and motive power had also been obliged to furnish their quota of men for service in the field. At first the several governments did not draw heavily on the mechanicians in the railroad service, but ultimately they had to do this. The repair work was done by men less fitted, and cleaning had to be left to the women and prisoners-of-war.

Soon the "flat" wheels were many on the air-braked passenger-cars. It came to be a blessing that the freight-trains were still being braked by hand, for otherwise freight traffic would have suffered more than it did.

I took some interest in railroading, and a rather superficial course in it at the military academy had made me acquainted with a few of its essentials. Close attention to the question in the fall of 1916 gave me the impression that it would not be long before the only thing of value of most Central European railroads would be the right of way and its embankments, bridges, cuts, and tunnels--the things known collectively as _Bahnkörper_--line body.

When I first made the acquaintance of Central Europe's railroads, I found them in a high state of efficiency. The rail-bed was good, the rolling stock showed the best of care--repairs were made in time, and paint was not stinted--and the motive power was of the very best. Efficiency had been aimed at and obtained. To be sure, there was nothing that could compare with the best railroading in the United States. The American train _de luxe_ was unknown. But if its comforts could not be had, the communities, on the other hand, did not have to bear the waste that comes from it. Passenger travel, moreover, on most lines, moved in so small a radius that the American "Limited" was not called for, though the speed of express-trains running between the principal cities was no mean performance at that.

It was not long before all this was to vanish. The shortage in labor began to be seriously felt. There were times, in fact, when the railroad schedules showed the initiated exactly what labor-supply conditions were. When an hour was added to the time of transit from Berlin to Vienna I knew that the pinch in labor was beginning to be badly felt. When one of the expresses running between the two capitals was taken off altogether, I surmised that things were in bad shape, and when ultimately the number of passenger-trains running between Vienna and Budapest was reduced from twelve each day to four, it was plain enough that railroading in Austria-Hungary was down to one-third of what it had been heretofore--lower than that, even, since the government tried to keep up as good a front as possible.

In Germany things were a little better, owing to the close husbanding of resources which had been done at the very outbreak of the war. But to Germany the railroads were also more essential than to Austria-Hungary, so that, by and large, there really was little difference.

The neatly kept freight-cars degenerated into weather-beaten boxes on wheels. The oil that would have been needed to paint them was now an article of food and was required also in the manufacture of certain explosives. So long as the car body would stand on the chassis it was not repaired. Wood being plentiful, it was thought better economy to replace the old body by a new one when finally it became dangerous to pull it about any longer.

It was the same with the passenger-cars. The immaculate cleanliness which I had learned to associate with them was replaced by the most slovenly sweeping. Dusting was hardly ever attempted. From the toilet-rooms disappeared soap and towel, and usually there was no water in the tank. The air-brakes acted with a jar, as the shoes gripped the flat surface of the wheels, and soon the little doll trains were an abomination, especially when, for the sake of economy, all draperies were removed from the doors and windows.

The motive power was in no better condition. The engines leaked at every steam and water joint, and to get within 60 per cent. of the normal efficiency for the amount of coal consumed was a remarkable performance. It meant that the engineer, who was getting an allowance on all coal saved, had to spend his free time repairing the "nag" he ran.

Constantly traveling from one capital to another, and from one front to the other, I was able to gauge the rapid deterioration of the railroads. To see in cold weather one of the locomotives hidden entirely in clouds of steam that was intended for the cylinders caused one to wonder how the thing moved at all. The closed-in passenger stations reminded me of laundries, so thick were the vapors of escaping steam.

Despite the reduction in running-time, wrecks multiplied alarmingly. It seemed difficult to keep anything on the rails at more than a snail's pace.

To the freight movement this was disastrous. Its volume had to be reduced to a quarter of what it had been. This caused great hardship, despite the fact that the distribution and consumption zones had put an end to all unnecessary trundling about of merchandise. In the winter the poor freight service led to the exposure of foodstuffs to the cold. It was nothing unusual to find that a whole train-load of potatoes had frozen in transit and become unfit for human consumption. Other shipments suffered similarly.

In countries that were forced to count on every crumb that was a great loss. It could not be overcome under the circumstances.

In the winter the lame railroads were unable to bring the needed quantities of coal into the population centers. This was especially true of the winter of 1916-17. Everybody having lived from hand to mouth throughout the summer, and the government having unwisely put a ban on the laying-in of fuel-supplies, there was little coal on hand when the cold weather came. Inside of three weeks the available stores were consumed. The insistent demand for fuel led to a rush upon the lines tapping the coal-fields. Congestion resulted, and when the tangle was worst heavy snows began to fall. The railroads failed utterly.

Electric street traction shared the fate of the railroads. To save fuel the service was limited to the absolutely necessary. Heretofore most lines had not permitted passengers to stand in the cars. Now standing was the rule. When one half of the rolling stock had been run into the ground, the other half was put on the streets, and that, too, was shortly ruined.

The traction-service corporations, private and municipal alike, had been shown scant mercy by the several governments when men were needed. Soon they were without the hands to keep their rolling stock in good repair. Most of the car manufacturers had meanwhile gone into the ammunition business, so that it was impossible to get new rolling stock. Further drafts on the employees of the systems led to the employment of women conductors, and, in some cases, drivers. While these women did their best, it could not be said that this was any too good on lines that were much frequented. Travel on the street cars became a trial. People who never before had walked did so now.

As was to be expected, the country roads were neglected. Soon the fine macadamized surfaces were full of holes, and after that it was a question of days usually when the road changed places with a ditch of deep mire. The farmer, bringing food to the railroad station or town, moved now about half of what was formerly a load. He was short of draft animals. Levy after levy was made by the military authorities. By the end of 1916 the farms in Central Europe had been deprived of half their horses.

It has been said that a man may be known by his clothing. That is not always true. There is no doubt, however, that a community may well be recognized by its means of transportation. Travel in every civilized country has proved that to my full satisfaction. I once met a man who insisted that if taken blindfolded from one country into another he would be able to tell among what people he found himself, or what sort of gentry they were, merely by traveling on their railroads. To which I would add that he could also very easily determine what sort of government they had, if he had an ear for all the "_Es ist Verboten_," "_C'est défendu_," and "It is not allowed" which usually grace the interiors of stations and car.

Travel was the hardest sort of labor in the Central European states. I was obliged to do much of it. And most of it I did standing. I have made the following all-afoot trips: Berlin-Bentheim, Berlin-Dresden, Berlin-Cologne, Vienna-Budapest, and Vienna-Trieste, and this at a time when the regular running-time had become 80 to 150 per cent. longer.

The means of communication of Central Europe had sunk to the level of the nag before the ragman's cart. The shay was not good-looking, either.

But the wear and tear of war did not affect the means of communication alone. Every building in Central Europe suffered heavily from it. Materials and labor for upkeep were hard to get at any time and were costly. Real property, moreover, suffered under the moratorium, while the constantly increasing taxes left little in the pocket of the owner to pay for repairs. As already stated, paint was hard to get. Exposed to the weather, the naked wood decayed. Nor were varnishes to be had for the protection of interior woodwork.

Many manufacturing plants had to be closed, first of all those which before the war had depended upon the foreign market. The entire doll industry, for instance, suspended work. In other branches of manufacture the closing-down was partial, as in the case of the textile-mills. Not alone had the buildings to be neglected in this instance, but a great deal of valuable machinery was abandoned to rust. As the stock of copper, tin, and brass declined the several governments requisitioned the metals of this sort that were found in idle plants and turned them over to the manufacturers of ammunition. While the owners were paid the price which these metals cost in the form of machinery parts and the like, the economic loss to the community was, nevertheless, heavy.

Farm implements and equipment also suffered much from inattention. Tens of thousands of horses perished at the fronts and almost every one of them meant a loss to some farm. The money that had been paid for them had usually been given back to the government in the form of taxes, so that now the farmer had lost his horse or horses in much the same manner as if some epidemic had been at work. Valuable draft and milk animals were requisitioned to provide meat for the armies. In certain districts the lack of vitriol had resulted in the destruction of vineyards and orchards.

To give a better picture of what this meant, I will cite the case of an acquaintance who is somewhat of a gentleman farmer near Coblentz, on the Rhine.

When the war broke out this man had in live stock: Five horses, eight cows, forty sheep, and a large stock of poultry. He also had several small vineyards and a fine apple orchard. In the winter of 1916-17 his stock had shrunk to two horses, two cows, no sheep, very little poultry, and no vineyard. The apple orchard was also dying from lack of Bordeaux mixture.

In January, 1917, I obtained some figures dealing with the wear and tear of war in the kingdom of Saxony. Applying them on a per-capita basis to all of the German Empire, I established that so far the war had caused deterioration amounting to $8,950,000,000, or $128 for each man, woman, and child. In Austria-Hungary the damage done was then estimated at $6,800,000,000.

These losses were due to absence from their proper spheres in the economic scheme of some 14,000,000 able-bodied men who had been mobilized for service in connection with the war. This vast army consumed at a frightful rate and produced very little now. To non-productive consumption had to be added the rapid deterioration due to all abandonment of upkeep. The Central states were living from hand to mouth and had no opportunity of engaging in that thorough maintenance which had been given so much attention before. All material progress had been arrested, and this meant that decay and rust got the upper hand.

XVI

THE ARMY TILLS

Men getting much physical exercise in the open air consume much more food than those confined. In cold weather such food must contain the heat which is usually supplied by fuel. All of which is true of the soldier in a greater degree. This, and the fact that in army subsistence, transportation and distribution are usually coupled with great difficulty, made it necessary for the Central Powers to provide their forces chiefly with food staples.

Before the war about 35 per cent. of the men mobilized had lived largely on cereals and vegetables. Little meat is consumed by the rural population of Central Europe. For the reasons already given, that diet had to make room for one composed of more concentrated and more heat-producing elements. Bread, meat, fats, and potatoes were its principal constituents. Beans, peas, and lentils were added as the supply permitted. In the winter larger quantities of animal fats were required to keep the men warm, and in times of great physical exertion the allowance of sugar had to be increased.

Since at first the army produced no food at all, the civil population had to produce what was needed. With, roughly, 42 per cent. of the soldiers coming from the food-producing classes, this was no small task, especially since the more fitted had been called to the colors.

The governments of Central Europe realized as early as in the spring of 1915 that the army would have to produce at least a share of the food it needed. Steps were taken to bring that about. The war had shown that cavalry was, for the time being, useless. On the other hand, it was not good military policy to disband the cavalry organizations and turn them into artillery and infantry. These troops might be needed again sooner or later. That being the case, it was decided to employ mounted troops in the production of food. Fully 65 per cent. of the men in that branch of the military establishments of Central Europe came from the farm and were familiar with the handling of horses. That element was put to work behind the fronts producing food.

No totals of this production have ever been published, to my knowledge, so that I can deal only with what I actually saw. I must state, however, that the result cannot have been negligible, though on the whole it was not what some enthusiasts have claimed for it.

I saw the first farming of this sort in Galicia. There some Austro-Hungarian cavalry organizations had tilled, roughly, sixty thousand acres, putting the fields under wheat, rye, oats, and potatoes. When I saw the crops they were in a fair state of prosperity, though I understand that later a drought damaged them much. The colonel in charge of the work told me that he expected to raise food enough for a division, which should not have been difficult, seeing that three acres ought to produce food enough for any man, even if tilled in a slovenly way.

Throughout Poland and the parts of Russia then occupied the Germans were doing the same thing. What the quality of their effort was I have no means of knowing, but if they are to be measured by what I saw in France, during the Somme offensive in 1916, the results obtained must have been very satisfying.

One of the organizations then lying in the Bapaume sector was the German Second Guards Substitute-Reserve Division-- _Garde-Ersatz-Reserve-Division_. I think that the palm for war economy must be due that organization. In my many trips to various fronts (I have been on every front in Central Europe, the Balkan, Turkey, and Asia) and during my long stays there I have never seen a crowd that had made itself so much at home in the enemy country.

The body in question had then under cultivation some sixteen hundred acres of very good soil, on which it was raising wheat, rye, barley, oats, beans, peas, lentils, sugar-beets, roots of various sorts, and potatoes. It had made hay enough for its own draft animals and had sold a large quantity to neighboring divisions.

At Gommecourt the division operated a well-equipped modern dairy, able to convert into butter and cheese the milk of about six hundred cows. Its output was large enough to supply the men in the trenches with all the butter and cheese they could reasonably expect. A large herd of pigs was kept by the division, and as General von Stein, the commander of the sector, now Prussian Minister of War, informed me at a table that offered the products of the division at a luncheon, the organization was then operating, somewhere near the actual firing-line, two water-mills, a large sugar-plant, and even a brewery. Coffee, salt, and a few other trifles were all the division received from the rear.

It was then the middle of August, so that I was able to see the results of what had been done by these soldier-farmers. I can state that soil was never put to better use. Cultivation had been efficiently carried out and the crops were exceedingly good.

One of the most vivid pictures I retain from that week in "Hell" shows several German soldiers plowing a field east of Bucquoi into which British shells were dropping at the time. The shells tore large craters in the plowed field, but with an indifference that was baffling the men continued their work. I have not yet been able to explain what was the purpose of this plowing in August, except to lay the knife at the root of the weeds; nor can I quite believe that this end justified exposing men and valuable animals. At any rate, the thing was done.

The case cited represents the maximum that was achieved in food production by any army organization, so far as I know. But that maximum was no mean thing. That division, at least, did not depend on the civil population for food.

Several trips through Serbia and Macedonia in the same year showed me what the German "economic" and occupation troops had done in those parts.

On the whole, the efforts at food production of the "economic" troops--organization of older men barely fit for service in the firing-line--had not been fortunate. The plan had been to put as much soil under crops as was possible. For this purpose traction plows had been brought along and whole country sites had been torn up. Though the soil of the valleys of Serbia is generally very rich, and the climate one of the best for farming, the crops raised in that year were far from good. Some held that it was due to the seed, which had been brought from Germany. Others were of the opinion that the plowing had been carelessly done, leaving too much leeway to the weeds. Be that as it may, the work of the economic companies was not a success.

The occupation troops did much better, however. Together with the Serbian women they had cultivated the fields on the intensive principle. Yields had been good, I was told.

In Macedonia the fields had also been put to use by the Germans, Austro-Hungarians, and Bulgars. The last named, familiar with the cultivation of the tobacco plant, were exchanging with the others tobacco for grain. Food production was also attempted by the Austro-Hungarians on the Isonzo front. But since they were fighting on their own territory in districts which still had their civil population, there was little opportunity, all the less since the soil of the Carso and Bainsizza plateaus, and the mountainous regions north of them, is not suited for agriculture on a large scale. Every _doline_--funnel-shaped depression--of the Carso had its garden, however, whence the army drew most of the vegetables it consumed.

The food that was being raised for the army never reached the interior, of course. If an organization produced more than what it consumed, and such cases were extremely rare, it sold the surplus to the army commissaries. It took men and time to cultivate the fields, and these could not always be spared, especially when the losses in men were beginning to be severely felt and when the opponent engaged in offensives. It had meanwhile become necessary to throw, several times a year, divisions from one front to another, and that, too, began to interfere with the scheme, since the men no longer took the interest in the crops they had taken when they were established in a position.

I spent considerable time with the Ninth German Army operating against the Roumanians late in the fall of 1916. Much booty in food fell into the hands of that organization, among it some eleven hundred thousand tons of wheat and other grains.