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“Austria is the last outpost of civilisation in Europe,” said a friend of mine who walked with me down from the Kahlenberg—that enchanting hill outside the city of Vienna which presently we could see far away below. It was on a day when there was still an Austrian State.

We walked down a track with woods on one side of us. They still bore their autumn foliage, though it was getting late in the year and the leaves looked like crinkled gold in the bright sunlight of this Austrian scene. The sky was so blue that even “the beautiful blue Danube,” which is almost always green!—it lay like a coiled snake in the plain—was, I swear, touched by that divine colour.

“These people once saved Europe from the Turks,” said my friend who has lived in Austria for several years and knows and loves the country and its people.

Yes, I remembered that. It was a very lucky escape for Europe who hadn’t worried much about that threat almost at the gates of Vienna, in 1683.

We walked further, towards the Leopoldsberg, letting our eyes enjoy the glint and glory of that autumn foliage, still massed upon the branches but thinning as each breath of wind carried away the crinkled leaves.

“If Germany takes Austria,” said my friend gloomily, “they will kill its soul.”

“I hope that won’t happen,” I answered earnestly, knowing something of the soul of the Austrian people and loving their music, their art, their manners, their villages and churches, and their restaurants where the orchestras play enchantingly; and Vienna itself, still a fairy-tale in the mind of the world as one sees in the playhouses and the picture palaces. Romance is always at home in Vienna, is it not? Vienna nights! Waltzes in Vienna! Any title with that name lures the queues of romance-hungry folk from mean streets, where life is drab, to the box-office windows.

I had seen the soul of Vienna when romance had fled and there was darkness in its streets at night for lack of fuel to light the lamps; and when through the darkness wandered thin and pallid men and women who were hungry. I had stood in the dark stone forest of St. Stefan’s Church when women were on their knees before an old picture of a Mother and Child, “the Madonna of the Hungry Child” faintly illumined by candlelight, praying that some miracle might bring food to a child of theirs, at that time when Vienna was a stricken city after the world war. More than sixty per cent of its children were weak with hunger for lack of milk and fats. But the miracle had happened. Food came to the city—sent by those who had made war against them. The first lamps of charity had been lit in the human heart after four years of murderous war. Rescue came from the “Save the Children” Fund. The League of Nations did something to save the life of Austria, though probably that is forgotten now when the League lies in a state of coma.

The children of Vienna became healthy again. One sees no trace of those bad times in the physique of the young Austrians who were in their babyhood then. Nature is very strong when it gets a chance of life.

The Viennese have a special character in the world. They are more like the Irish than the Irish. They, truly, are “the play-boys of the Western world.” For they must have music and they love laughter and they don’t take life seriously even when it is serious. At least they hate to take life seriously, though during the last twenty years there have been times in Vienna and in other places in Austria when even laughter fled. Death was just round the corner, or not even as far away as that, but in what had been the living brains of Austrian children and young boys who called themselves men.

There was no laughter in the Goethehaus or the model dwellings out at Floridsdorf, that working-class suburb of Vienna, when I went there in March of 1934 and talked to groups of people in rooms ventilated by shell-holes and by rifle-and machine-gun bullets, after a bombardment by orders of a young sportsman named Prince Starhemberg.

But I remember hours in Vienna when I heard the laughter of young people in the Prater—that eternal circus—and when I dined in little restaurants down the Kärtnerstrasse—that highway of pleasure (for those who can afford it) after business hours. It is quite true that for many of the Viennese life without music is a poor thing. Shop-girls will stint and scrape out of their wages to buy a cheap seat for the Opera. To them music is part of the melody of life.

I was in a railway train on the way to Vienna from Berlin and fell into conversation with a dark-eyed man who told me something about his life. He was very poor, he told me. Sometimes he was anxious even for the nourishment of his wife and child.

Presently he asked me a question which did not seem to have much reference to the subject of our talk.

“Does it please you to hear good music?”

“Always!” I told him.

He could offer me, he said, good music if I cared to visit his apartment the following afternoon.

I called on him at the appointed hour and was introduced to a dark-eyed lady who was his wife, and to two young men who were his friends. The apartment was poorly furnished, except for one piece which was a piano. Other people drifted in. Each one carried an instrument—a violin or ’cello. Someone played the piano. He played the music of Ravel. It raised an argument. The pianist vacated his seat to someone else who wanted to argue with musical demonstration. Presently one of the violinists played, magnificently. The man with the ’cello had something to say in his deeper notes. For two hours or more these people—all strangers to me—talked to each other in music. They laughed with music. They argued with music. They wept with music. I sat listening and watching their faces, and saw how their eyes lighted up now and again by enthusiasm or by some mystical enjoyment of rhythm or tone beyond my range.

Some of these people had tragic faces. They had suffered. They knew the worst of life as well as good moments like this. They had the artistic temperament in which there is always self-inflicted agony even when life is not too hard. They were all Austrian Jews. When I left them the dark-eyed wife who had been my hostess held up a baby like the Infant Jesus by Murillo and I touched its cheek with my lips, remembering with pity the age-long persecution of this race.

The political situation in Vienna had changed since my last visit. The Heimwehr—those Fascist militia commanded by Prince Starhemberg—had been disbanded. Prince Starhemberg himself, that swashbuckling young man of whom I heard strange stories not to be repeated, had retired surely to one of his castles, giving way to a new Chancellor with the name of Schuschnigg which would have rejoiced the soul of Thackeray.

Dr. Schuschnigg was an able and serious man who concealed an iron hand in a velvet glove, but knew that peace and order in Austria and the safety of its frontiers could only be held precariously from month to month. Underneath the appearance of peace Austria was a cauldron of passion, fear, and political rivalries. The international kaleidoscope had changed its pattern lately and Austrian independence was in greater jeopardy. For the sake of the Berlin-Rome axis Signor Mussolini had abandoned his pledge to protect it from the German embrace. It was known that not a second time would he move Italian troops for that purpose, as they were moved up to the Austrian frontier during the insurrection which caused the murder of Dr. Dollfuss.

Mussolini had been the friend of that little man, the Pocket Dictator as he was called because of his tiny figure. He had expressed the deepest sympathy with Frau Dollfuss and her children whom he had invited to Italy. When he went from Rome to meet Hitler after the announcement of this new alliance, a message was brought to him which, according to the story I heard, put for a moment a sombre look in his eyes.

“Frau Dollfuss,” said the message, “remembers Signor Mussolini’s friendship with her husband and his past kindness to herself and to her fatherless children.”

It was a reminder that Il Duce had changed his political views and his friendships.

Now, I was told, there was a rising tide in favour of union with Germany, and great numbers of young men in Austria were eager to join up with the German Nazis and adopt their methods and ideas. On the other hand Dr. Schuschnigg and his government at the time of my visit were still resisting this movement and arresting Germans who crossed the frontier with masses of propaganda for distribution in Austrian towns and villages. And always in Vienna and other cities there existed an underworld of Social Democracy, embittered, and unreconciled. Thousands of them were put into concentration camps at the time of the bombardment of the tenement houses in 1934. Thousands of them were dismissed from their jobs in the municipality of Vienna and all its public offices.

“What has happened to them now?” I asked a friend of mine in Vienna whose sympathies leaned heavily towards these people.

“Most of them were liberated,” he told me. “Many of them were reinstated. Dr. Schuschnigg declared a truce and tried to win over the workers. But there is still a lot of espionage and there are many arrests followed by imprisonment without trial. It all goes on!”

Only a day or two previously this friend of mine had been visited by a young man belonging to the old Social Democratic Party who had been imprisoned for a year without any evidence being brought against him. He had been in solitary confinement for a month. He had been questioned repeatedly, and exasperated the secret police by refusing to fall into any of their traps. In his prison were many young Austrians of the Nazi persuasion, who made more trouble than the Social Democrats. There were amusing episodes, ludicrous incidents, but, after all, as this young man said, it is not amusing to have one’s life wasted for a year, or to sit in a cell staring at a blank wall in horrible solitude for thirty days and nights. He had done nothing to deserve this torture apart from his belief in democracy, which is now a crime in his country and others. It is, of course, a dangerous creed!