Читать книгу The Iron Ration: Three Years in Warring Central Europe - George Abel Schreiner - Страница 10

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Three months had sufficed to enthrone the Kriegslieferant—war purveyor. He was ubiquitous and loud. His haying season was come. For a consumer he had a government that could not buy enough, and the things he sold he took from a public that was truly patriotic and willing to make sacrifices. It was a gay time. Gone were the days in which he had to worry over foreign markets, small profits, and large turnover. He dealt no longer with fractions of cents. Contracts for thousands did not interest him. At the Ministry of War he could pick up bits of business that figured with round millions.

I attended once a funeral that was presided over by an undertaker who believed in doing things on a large scale. The man in the coffin had always earned a large salary and the family had lived up to it. There was nothing left when he died. But the undertaker and the widow decided that the funeral should be a large one. It was, and when it was over and paid for the woman was obliged to appeal to her relatives for financial aid. The activity of the war purveyor was of the same quality.

The Berlin hotels were doing a land-office business. The Adlon, Bristol, Kaiserhof, and Esplanade hotels were crowded to the attic—with war purveyors. When his groups were not locked up in conference, he could be seen strutting about the halls and foyers with importance radiating from him like the light of an electric arc. In the dining-rooms his eating could be heard when his voice was not raised in vociferous ordering in the best drill-sergeant style. Managers and waiters alike danced attention upon him—the establishment, the city, the country were his.

"Wir machen's" ("We'll do it"), was his parole. The army might do its share, but in the end the war purveyor would win the war.

The express in which I was traveling from Osnabrück to Berlin had pulled up in the station of Hanover. The train was crowded and in my compartment sat three war purveyors, who seemed to be members of the same group, despite the fact that their conversation caused me to believe that they were holding anything from a million tons of hay to a thousand army transport-wagons. Business was good and the trio was in good humor, as was to be expected from men of such generous dimensions and with so many diamonds on the fleshy fingers of ill-kept hands. One of them was the conspicuous owner of a stick-pin crowned with a Kimberley that weighed five carats if not more. He was one of the happiest men I have ever laid eyes upon.

I was sitting next to the window, a place that had been surrendered to me because there was a draught from the window. But I can stand such discomfort much better than perfume on a fat man, and I didn't mind.

After a while my attention was attracted by a tall young woman in black on the platform. She was talking to somebody on my car, and surreptitious passes of her hand to her throat caused me to conclude that some great emotion had seized her. No doubt she was saying good-by to somebody.

I had seen that a thousand times before, so that it could not be mere and superficial curiosity that induced me to leave my seat for the purpose of seeing the other actor in this little drama. The woman was unusually handsome, and the manner in which she controlled her great emotion showed that she was a blue-blood of the best brand. I was anxious to learn what sort of man it was upon whom this woman bestowed so much of her devotion.

A tall officer was leaning against the half-open window in the next compartment. I could not see his face. But the cut of his back and shoulders and the silhouette of the head proclaimed his quality.

The two seemed to have no words. The woman was looking into the face of the man, and he, to judge by the fixed poise of his head, was looking into hers.

I had seen enough and returned to the compartment. Presently the conductor's cry of "Bitte, einsteigen!" ("Please! All aboard!") was heard. The woman stepped to the side of the car and raised her right hand, which the officer kissed. She said something which I could not hear. Then she set her lips again, while the muscles of her cheek and throat moved in agony. It was a parting dramatic—perhaps the last.

The train began to move. The war purveyor opposite me now saw the woman. He nudged his colleague and drew his attention to the object that had attracted him.

"A queen!" he said. "I wonder what she looks like in her boudoir. I am sorry that I did not see her before. Might have stayed over and seen her home."

"Would have been worth while," said the other. "I wonder whom she saw off."

"From the way she takes it I should say that it was somebody she cares for. Class, eh, what?"

The man rose from the seat and pressed his face against the window, though he could see no more of the woman in that manner than he had seen before.

I think that is the very extreme to which I ever saw hideously vulgar cynicism carried.

In a way I regretted that the war purveyor had not been given the chance to stay over. I am sure that he would have had reason to regret his enterprise.

A few days later I was on my way to Vienna, glad to get away from the loud-mouthed war purveyors at the German capital. The ilk was multiplying like flies in summer-time, and there was no place it had not invaded.

Though it was really not one of my affairs, the war purveyor had come to irritate me. I was able to identify him a mile off, and good-natured friends of mine seemed to have made it their purpose in life to introduce me to men who invariably turned out to have contracts with the government. Fact is that, while the war was great, the Kriegslieferant was greater. When I found it hard to see a high official, some kind friend would always suggest that I take the matter up with Herr Kommerzienrat So-and-so, whose influence was great with the authorities, seeing that he had just made a contract for ever so many millions.

And the "commercial counselor" would be willing, I knew. If he could introduce a foreign correspondent of some standing here and there, that would be water for his mill. The official in question might be interested in propaganda, and the war purveyor was bound to be. The inference was that the cause of Germany could be promoted in that manner. In some cases it was. Now and then the war purveyor would spend money on a dinner to foreign and native correspondents. His name would not appear in the despatches, but the Kriegslieferant saw to it that the authorities learned of his activities. After that the margin of profit on contract might go up.

For a man who had conceived a violent prejudice against war purveyors, Berlin was not a comfortable place.

I was either playing in bad luck or half the world had turned into war purveyors. At any rate, I had one of them as travel companion en route to Vienna. The man dealt in leather. He had a contract for the material of 120,000 pairs of army boots and was now going to Austria and Hungary for the purpose of buying it. He was a most interesting person. Before the war he had dealt in skins for gloves, but now he had taken to a related branch in order that he might "do his bit." The Fatherland, in its hour of need, depended upon the efforts of its sons. So far as he was concerned no stone would be left unturned to secure victory. He could be home attending to his regular business, instead of racing hither and thither in search of leather. But duty was duty.

I might have gotten the man to admit that he made a small profit on his patriotic endeavor. But that could serve no purpose. I feared, moreover, that this would needlessly prolong the conversation. When the war purveyor finally tired of my inattention, he took up his papers and I surveyed the country we were passing through.

For the finest rural pictures in Central Europe we must go to Austria. The houses of the peasants, in villages and on farms alike, had a very inviting appearance. I noticed that the walls had been newly whitewashed. There was fresh paint on the window shutters, and new tiles among the old showed that the people were keeping their roofs in good repair, which was more than the government was doing with the state edifice just then. Prosperity still laughed everywhere.

The train raced through small towns and villages. At the railroad crossings chubby youngsters off for school were being detained by the gateman. A buxom lass was chasing geese around a yard. Elsewhere a man was sawing wood, while a woman looked on. From the chimneys curled skyward the smoke of the hearth.

It was hard to believe that the country was at war. But the groups of men in uniform at the stations, and the recruits and reservists herded in by men-at-arms over the country roads, left no doubt as to that. If this had not been sufficient proof for me, there was the war purveyor.

In Austria, as well as in Germany, the fields had had the closest attention. And that attention was kind. Exploitation had no room in it. Though it was late in the season, I could still discern that plowing and fertilizing were most carefully done. The hedges and fences were in good repair. In vain did I look for the herald of slovenly farming—the rusty plow in the field, left where the animals had been taken from under the yoke. Orderliness was in evidence everywhere, and, therefore, human happiness could not be absent.

There was a great deal of crop traffic on the good roads, and the many water-mills seemed very busy. Potatoes and sugar-beets were being gathered to add their munificence to the great grain- and hay-stacks. I ran over in mind some population and farm-production statistics and concluded that Austria was indeed lucky in having so large a margin of food production over food consumption.

What I had settled to my own satisfaction on the train was seemingly confirmed at Vienna. Not even a trace of food shortness could I find there. There had been a slight increase in food prices, but this was a negligible quantity in times such as these.

The Vienna restaurants and cafés were serving wheat bread, butter, and cream as before. In a single place I identified as many as thirty-seven different varieties of cakes and pastry. Everybody was drinking coffee with whipped cream—Kaffee mit Obers—and nobody gave food conservation a thought. While the Berlin bills of fare had been generous, to say the least, those of Vienna were nothing short of wasteful. Even that of the well-known Hardman emporium on the Kärntner Ring, not an extravagant place by any means, enumerated no less than one hundred and forty-seven separate items à la carte.

I thought of the elephant steak and marveled at the imagination of some people. It seemed that in Austria such titbits were a long way off. A mêlée of Viennese cooking, Austrian wine, and Hungarian music would have left anybody under that impression.

But all is not gold that glitters!

At the hotel where I was staying, a small army of German food-buyers was lodged. From some of them I learned what food conditions in Germany might be a year hence. These men were familiar with the needs of their country, and thought it out of place to be optimistic. The drain on farm labor and the shortage of fertilizer were the things they feared most. They were buying right and left at almost any price, and others were doing the same thing in Hungary, I was informed.

These men were not strictly war purveyors. Most of them bought supplies for the regular channels of trade, but they were buying in a manner that was bound to lead to high prices. It was a question of getting quantities, and if these could not be had at one price they had to be bought at a higher.

Within two days I had established that the war purveyors at Vienna were more rapacious than those at Berlin. But I will say for them that they had better manners in public places. They were not so loud—a fact which helped them greatly in business, I think. Personally, I prefer the polished Shylock to the loutish glutton. It is a weakness that has cost me a little money now and then, but, like so many of our weaknesses, it goes to make up polite life.

Vienna's hotels were full of Kriegslieferanten. The portiers and waiters addressed them as "Baron" and "Graf" (count), and for this bestowal of letters-patent nobility were rewarded with truly regal tips. But there the matter ended.

I was holding converse with the portier of the Hotel Bristol when a war purveyor came up and wanted to know whether telegrams had arrived for him—the war purveyor never uses the mail.

"Nein, Herr Graf," replied the portier.

The war purveyor seemed inclined to blame the portier for this. After some remarks, alleging slovenliness on the part of somebody and everybody in so impersonal a manner that even I felt guilty, he turned away.

The portier—I had known him a day—seemed to place much confidence in me, despite the fact that so far he had not seen the color of my money.

"That fellow ought to be hung!" he said, as he looked at the revolving door that was spinning madly under the impulse which the wrathful war purveyor had given it. "He is a pig!"

"But how could a count be a pig?" I asked, playfully.

"He isn't a count at all," was the portier's remark. "You see, that is a habit we easy-going Viennese have. The fellow has engaged one of our best suites and the title of count goes with that. It may interest you to know that years ago the same suite was occupied by Prince Bismarck."

There is no reason why in tradition-loving and nobility-adoring Austria the title of count should not thereafter attach to any person occupying a suite of rooms so honored. For all that, it is a peculiar mentality that makes an honorary count an animal of uncleanly habits within the space of a few seconds.

The Grand Hotel was really the citadel of the Austro-Hungarian war purveyors. Every room was taken by them, and the splendid dining-room of the establishment was crammed with them during meal-hours. Dinner was a grandiose affair. The Kriegslieferanten were in dinner coats and bulging shirt-fronts, and the ladies wore all their jewels. Two of the war-purveyor couples were naturalized Americans, and one of them picked me up before I knew what had happened.

While I was in Vienna I was to be their guest. It seems that the man had made a contract with the Austrian Ministry of War for ever so many thousands of tons of canned meat. He thought that his friends "back home" might be interested in that, and that there was no better way of having the news broken to them than by means of a despatch to my service. There is no doubt whatever that being a war purveyor robs a man of his sense of proportions.

To see the Vienna war purveyor at his best it was necessary to wait until midnight and visit the haunts he frequented, such as the Femina, Trocadero, Chapeau Rouge, Café Capua, and Carlton cabarets. Vienna's demi-monde never knew such spenders. The memory of certain harebrained American tourists faded into nothingness. Champagne flowed in rivers, and the hothouses were unable to meet the demand for flowers—at last one shortage. The gipsy fiddlers took nothing less than five crowns, and the waiters called it a poor evening when the tips fell below what formerly they had been satisfied with in a month.

All of this came from the pockets of the public, and when these pockets began to show the bottom the government obligingly increased the currency by the products of the press. More money was needed by everybody. The morrow was hardly given a thought, and the sanest moment most people had was when they concluded that these were times in which it was well to let the evils of the day be sufficient thereof. One never knew when the Russians might spill over the Tartra and the Carpathians, in which case it would be all over. The light-heartedness which is so characteristic of the Austrians reached degrees that made the serious observer wonder. Après nous le déluge, was the motto of the times. So long as there was food enough, champagne to be had, and women to share these, the Russians could have the rest.

I speculated how long this could go on. The military situation could be handled by the Germans, and would be taken in hand by them sooner or later. That much I learned in Berlin. But the Germans were powerless in the Austro-Hungarian economic departments. Though the Dual Monarchy had been self-contained entirely in food matters before the war, it seemed certain that the squandering of resources that was going on could in the end have but one result—shortage in everything.

Despite that, Austrian government officials were highly optimistic. Starve out Austria and Hungary! Why, that was out of the question entirely—ausgeschlossen! At some statistical bureau on the Schwarzenbergstrasse I was given figures that were to show the impossibility of the Entente's design to reduce the country by hunger. These figures were imposing, I will admit, and after I had studied them I had the impression that famine was indeed a long way off. It seemed that the Stürgkh régime knew what it was doing, after all, as I had been told at the government offices. Everything would be well, even if the war should be long.

Two weeks later I was at the Galician front. Going there I passed through northern Hungary. The barns of that district were bursting. The crops had been good, I was told. Every siding was crowded with cars loaded with sugar-beets and potatoes, and out in the fields the sturdy women of the race, short-skirted and high-booted, were taking from the soil more beets and more potatoes. The harvesting of these crops had been delayed by the absence of the men, due to the mobilizations. By the time I reached Neu-Sandez in Galicia, then seat of the Austro-Hungarian general headquarters, I had fully convinced myself that the Entente's program of starvation was very much out of the question.

I found that the soldiers were well fed. The wheeled field kitchens were spreading appetizing smells over the countryside, and that their output was good was shown by the fine physical condition of the men.

Having established this much, and the Russians coming altogether too close, I had occasion a week later to visit Budapest. In that city everybody was eating without a thought of the future, and that eating was good, as will be attested by anybody who has ever sat down to a Budapestian lamb pörkölt, of which the American goulash is a sort of degenerate descendant. The only other thing worth mentioning is that the Astoria Hotel was the only place in town not entirely occupied by the war purveyors.

A trip through central and southern Hungary served merely to complete and confirm what I have already said here, and when later I took a look at Croatia, and the parts of Serbia known to-day as the Machwa, I began to realize why the Romans had thought these parts so necessary to them. Soil and climate here are the best any farmer could wish for. The districts are famous for their output in pork and prunes.

With the Russians firmly rooted in Galicia, and with the Austro-Hungarian troops driven out of Serbia, my usefulness as a war correspondent was temporarily at an end. I returned to Budapest and later visited Vienna and Berlin. The food situation was unchanged. Austria and Hungary were consuming as before, and Germany was buying right and left. The course of the German mark was still high, despite the first issuance of Loan-Treasury notes, supported as it was by the generous surrender of much gold by the German people. Purchasable stores were still plentiful throughout southeast Europe.

Despite that, the subject of food intruded everywhere. More concerned than it was willing to admit, the German government was gathering every morsel. Several neutral governments, among them the Dutch, Danish, Swiss, and Norwegian, had already declared partial embargoes on food, and these the German government had made up its mind to meet. It had in its hands the means to do this most effectively.

There was Holland, for instance. Her government had reduced the export of food to Germany to a veritable minimum even then, as I learned on a trip to The Hague in December. That was well enough, but not without consequences. Holland has in Limburg a single mine of lignite coal. The output is small and suited for little more than gas production. But the country had to get coal from somewhere, if her railroads were to run, the wheels of industry to turn; if the ships were to steam and the cities to be lighted and heated.

Much of the coal consumed in Holland in the past had been imported from Belgium. But that country was in the hands of the Germans. The British government had made the taking of bunker coal contingent upon conditions which the Dutch government thought unreasonable. The Dutch were between the devil and the deep blue sea. Coal they had to get, and Germany was the only country willing to supply that coal—provided there was a quid pro quo in kind. There was nothing to do but accept the terms of the Germans, which were coal for food.

The bartering which had preceded the making of these arrangements had been very close and stubborn. The Dutch government did not want to offend the British government. It could not afford, on the other hand, to earn the ill-will of the Germans. I had occasion to occupy myself with the case, and when my inquiry had been completed I had gained the impression that the German government had left nothing undone to get from the Dutch all the food that could be had. The insistency displayed and applied was such that it was difficult to reconcile with it the easy manner in which the subject of food had been discussed in Berlin. It seemed that the food and live-stock enumerations that had been made throughout the German Empire had given cause for anxiety.

In January of 1915 I was sent to the Balkans for the purpose of surveying the political situation there. While in transit to Roumania I had once more taken stock in Berlin. No great change in food-supply conditions could be noticed. The war-bread was there, of course. But those who did not care to eat it did not have to do so. In Vienna they lived as before, and in Budapest they boastfully pointed to their full boards.

But in Bucharest I once more ran into food actualities. Thousands of German commission-men were buying everything they could lay hands on, and with them co-operated hundreds of Austro-Hungarians who had long been residents of Roumania, and many of whom stood high on the grain exchange of Braila.

Accident caused me to put up at the Palace Hotel, which was the headquarters of the grain-buyers. In the lobby of the establishment thousands of tons of cereals changed hands every hour.

I evinced some interest in the trading in speaking to the man behind the desk.

"Yes, sir! All these men are German grain-dealers," explained the Balkanite portier to me. "This hotel is their headquarters. If you don't happen to sympathize with them, no harm will be done if you move to another hotel. There are many in town."

But I don't mind being spoken to frankly, and since I had no special interests in grain-dealers of any sort, there was no reason why I should move, especially since the portier had invited me to do that. By that time, also, I had traveled enough in Europe at war to know that discretion is always the better part of valor, and that being unperturbed was the best insurance against trouble. The German grain-dealers were doing a good business.

It was easy to buy, but not so easy to export. Premier Bratianu did not like the transactions that were going on, and had passed the word to the management of the Roumanian state railroads that the traffic was to move as slowly as possible. There are ways and means of overcoming that sort of instruction, and the German grain-dealers found them. Far be it from me to run here a full record of bribery in Bucharest. I may state, however, that money left deep scars on many a fairly good character in those days. The influence and persuasion of the chanteuses et danseuses of the cabarets on the Calea Victoriei played often a great rôle in cereal exports. I gained personal knowledge of a case in which a four-karat diamond secured the immediate release of eight thousand tons of wheat, and in that wheat was buried a large quantity of crude rubber, the slabs of which carried the name of a large automobile-tire manufacturer in Petrograd. Such things will happen when the ladies take a hand in war subsistence.

My special mission now was to study the political situation on the Balkan peninsula and finally end up somewhere in Turkey. I did both.

In Sofia the government was painfully neutral in those days. There was as yet no reason why the Germans should buy grain there, but contracts were being made for the next crop. Wool was also being bought, and many hides moved north into Germany and Austria-Hungary. But the deals were of an eminently respectable sort. Bribery was out of the question.

The trouble was that the shipments secured in Bulgaria never reached their destination unless bribes moved the trains. The Serbs held the central reaches of the Danube, which, in addition to this, was ice-bound just then, and all freight from Bulgaria, going north, had to be taken through Roumania. To get them into that country was simple enough, but to get them out took more cash, more diamonds, and considerable champagne. In a single month the price of that beverage in Bucharest jumped from eighteen to forty francs, and, as if to avenge themselves, the Germans began shortly to refill the shelves with "champus" made along the Rhine.

With Bulgaria explored and described, I set out for Turkey, where, at Constantinople, in July of that year, I ran into the first bread-line formed by people "who had the price."

The Ottoman capital gets its food-supplies normally over the waterways that give access to the city—the Bosphorus from the north and the Black Sea and the Dardanelles from the south and the Mediterranean. Both of these avenues of trade and traffic were now closed. The Russians kept the entrance to the Bosphorus well patrolled, and the French and British saw to it that nothing entered the Dardanelles, even if they themselves could not navigate the strait very far, as some eight months' stay with the Turkish armed forces at the Dardanelles and on Gallipoli made very plain to me.

The Anatolian Railroad, together with a few unimportant tap lines, was now the only means of reaching the agricultural districts of Asia Minor—the Konia Vilayet and the Cilician Plain, for instance. But the line is single-tracked and was just then very much overloaded with military transports. The result of this was that Constantinople ate up what stores there were, and then waited for more.

There was more, of course. The Ottoman Empire is an agricultural state, and would be more of one if the population could see its way clear to doing without the goat and the fat-tailed sheep. That its capital and only large city should be without breadstuff as early as July, 1915, was hard to believe, yet a fact.

In May of that year I had made a trip through Anatolia, Syria, and Arabia. By that time the crops in Asia Minor are well advanced and wheat is almost ripe. These crops were good, but, like the crops of the preceding season, which had not yet been moved, owing to the war, they were of little value to the people of Constantinople. They could not be had.

I hate estimates, and for that reason will not indulge in them here. But the fact is that from Eregli, in the Cappadocian Plain, to Eski-Shehir, on the Anatolian high plateau, I saw enough wheat rotting at the railroad stations to supply the Central Powers for two years. Not only was every shed filled with the grain, but the farmers who had come later were obliged to store theirs out in the open, where it lay without shelter of any sort. Rain and warmth had caused the grain on top to sprout lustily, while the inside of the heap was rotting. The railroad and the government promised relief day after day, but both were unable to bring it over the single track, which was given over, almost entirely, to military traffic.

Thus it came that the shops of the ekmekdjis in Constantinople were besieged by hungry thousands, the merest fraction of whom ever got the loaf which the ticket, issued by the police, promised. That was not all, however. Speculators and dealers soon discerned their chance of making money and were not slow in availing themselves of it. Prices rose until the poor could buy nothing but corn meal. A corner in olives added to the distress of the multitude, and the government, with that ineptness which is typical of government in Turkey, failed to do anything that had practical value. Though the Young Turks had for a while set their faces against corruption, many of the party leaders had relapsed, with the result that little was done to check the rapacity of the dealer who hoarded for purposes of speculation and price-boosting.

Yet those in the Constantinople bread-lines were modest in their normal demands. Turk and Levantine manage to get along well on a diet of bread and olives, with a little pilaff—a rice dish—and a small piece of meat, generally mutton, once a day thrown in. With a little coffee for the Turk, and a glass of red wine for the Levantine, this is a very agreeable bill of fare, and a good one, as any expert in dietetics will affirm.

I had occasion to discuss the food shortage in Turkey with Halideh Edib Hannym Effendi, Turkey's leading feminist and education promoter.

She assigned two causes. One of them was the lack of transportation, to which I have already referred as coming under my own observation. The other was found in the ineptness of the Ottoman government. She was of the opinion that there was enough food in the Bosphorus region, but that the speculators were holding it for higher prices. This, too, was nothing new to me. But it was interesting to hear a Turkish woman's opinion on this nefarious practice. To the misfortune of war the greedy were adding their lust for possession, and the men in Stamboul lacked the courage to say them nay. That men like Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey, who had taken upon themselves the responsibility of having Turkey enter the lists of the European War, were now afraid to put an end to food speculation, showed what grip the economic pirate may lay upon a community. What the Allied fleet and military forces at the Dardanelles and on Gallipoli had not accomplished the food sharks had done. Before them the leaders of the Young Turks had taken to cover.