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I had glimpses of these dark, unhappy things in Austrian life when I went about Vienna meeting old friends and making new ones. Outwardly in the streets all was well. The people looked fairly well-to-do and were nicely dressed. The restaurants were well filled. Happy families of children were playing in the public gardens. There were many foreign visitors, including the American legionaries who invaded the city for several days.

But in closed rooms or at quiet tables I heard much talk about the dangers encompassing this country which my friend, with whom I had walked through the autumn woods, had called the last outpost of civilisation in Europe, in danger of having its soul killed by Germany.

I sat at a table at a pleasant dinner party where they were all Austrians. There was a lot of laughter because one of them—a young professor—had great gifts of humour and an actor’s way of dramatising life’s comedy. Among the guests were two elderly men who had served in public offices when Vienna was the capital of a great Empire. One of them, the most distinguished, the most charming, had been much in England, and had known most of our distinguished men before the war. After dinner he took me on one side and spoke seriously.

“We can only watch and wait,” he said. “Austria is in the danger zone of tremendous forces working in this era of history and ideas. I don’t believe much in the influence or power of individual politicians or individual minds. They can do very little against these deep racial and traditional forces which are on the move. Hitler himself is only a symbol of racial urges. He seems to control, but he is controlled by the moving hand of fate. Germany must expand. Within the German race there is this urge and necessity. These causes of conflict lie much deeper than the words of politicians or the willpower of leaders. They go back into the distant past—into the roots of racial history.”

Another man spoke to me about the world situation and Austria’s place in it.

“From a material point of view,” he said, “some form of union with Germany is forced upon Austria. We must have markets. We must have trade. All these quotas are paralysing. Our commercial agreement with Italy has broken down. In any case the Italian support of Austrian independence was illusory and humiliating. We are, after all, blood relations of the German folk. It is inevitable in my opinion that we must join with them in any adventure which the dark future has in store for Europe. How can we defend ourselves? Perhaps the best we can hope is to keep our special character and gifts in a friendly union with the German race. All the same I am apprehensive. Europe is seething with unrest. History will be made very quickly and perhaps unpleasantly. The pot is beginning to boil again.”

“England and France will defend our independence,” said one of the ladies.

I did not disillusion her. I found it difficult to tell her at that table that England certainly, and probably France, would be desperately reluctant to take military action, plunging, perhaps, the whole of Europe into war, in order to prevent Austrian union with Germany against the will, perhaps, of a majority in Austria, or, at least, a very formidable minority, and at a time when former supporters of Collective Security had scattered into other camps. Public opinion in Great Britain would hesitate, and even refuse, to plunge into that adventure which might be the signal for another world war. France might be inclined to enforce such a separation, believing that the Austrian union with Germany would mean the encirclement of Czechoslovakia, the last ally, as they had been taught to think, of the democratic bloc with France and Russia and Great Britain.

My sympathy went out to these Austrians who had a consciousness of something precious in their people’s character and spirit which would be ironed out by Nazi discipline. They found it hard to work to a timetable. They were sensitive and individualistic. They were artists of life. They had a culture of their own, not so much racial as due to many strains of foreign influence in history. They were once, according to the fairy-tale they have made about themselves, the people of romance and song. Love in Vienna was not quite the same as love in Berlin! Did not all the gilded youth of Europe go to Vienna for their pleasure when the flower-girls on the Ring threw bouquets into their barouches as they drove with pretty ladies? Was not Vienna the meeting-place of art, elegance, beauty, charm, enchantment? They had lost a lot of that which belongs now to a dead world. They were shabby-genteel. Their aristocracy was poverty-stricken, but some rags of it remained, some memories, some touch of its magic. One cannot kill—or can one?—the soul of a people.

I heard a passionate denunciation of the possibility of union with Germany at a tea-table in Vienna where I sat with pleasant people whom I had known before and was glad to meet again. One of them was a charming lady who had a satirical way of speech, and the gift of laughter, and the piquant face of one of those Austrian women whose portraits still hang in the Hofburg. She had brought out an album of photographs, and among them was a snapshot of Adolf Hitler in his younger days, in Tyrolean costume, with short breeches and jacket.

“He had chubby knees then!” exclaimed the Austrian lady with a little secret laugh. “How gentle he looks, does he not? You would not think he could kill a flea or persecute a Jew—would you?”

Our hostess at the tea-table was a remarkable woman with a handsome face, and in her body and mind are an immense driving energy.

Presently, because of that photograph of the young Hitler, perhaps, she began to talk about the tragedy which would overtake Austria if it were to be under German domination.

“The worst thing in life,” said the pretty lady, “is cruelty. I can pardon everything but cruelty.”

“No!” said the other. “You are wrong. The worst evil of humanity is the destruction of the soul. That is what is happening in Germany. They suppress free intelligence. They are attacking and defeating the old ideals of scholarship, culture, intellectual achievement, enquiry into the meaning and mysteries of life which were the best qualities of the German mind. They do not believe any more in intelligence. They believe in brute instinct, physical strength, blind obedience to dictatorship. What are they doing to the younger mind, put into labour camps where they can be disciplined? They are poisoning the mind of youth, by a false and vicious propaganda. They are teaching these young boys to despise all that is free and divine. They are training them intensively in ideas of intolerance, and cruelty. They are inciting them against Jews—those poor helpless people who cannot defend themselves. They are teaching them to hate Christianity. They are denying all the qualities which belong to the civilised mind. They do not hesitate to teach obscenity to these young minds. I have a filthy book here—an attack on the Jews—written and illustrated for young readers. It is full of indecent suggestions. It is an obscene book. What then will happen in Austria if these German Nazis take possession of us, and if our own Nazis—those brainless young men—adopt the same system and discipline? We shall be dragooned. There will be no more fine thought in Austria. Our youth will be brutalised. Our soul will be destroyed.”

She spoke like that for what seemed like twenty minutes in a great outpouring of emotion, indignation and intellectual rage.

“Will you not have another little cake?” asked the pretty lady when a deep silence followed this flood of words.

One talked always in Vienna over tables on which there was food and drink, though not often over the tea-cups unless one’s friends were very well to do, because tea in Austria cost over forty shillings a pound. Vienna indeed was a costly city. There were so many duties, so many tariffs, so many quotas, that any imported articles were expensive even for a foreigner with French or English money.

It was over a luncheon table that I had a conversation with two Austrian friends who belong to the old order of things. The husband, now getting on in years, was like a little old English gentleman of the early Victorian period, or perhaps even earlier, with very courtly manners. For had he not been at the Imperial Court of Austria? Had he not held high offices when all the fashion of Europe was centred in Vienna? In the old days he knew England well and had heard the chimes of midnight in Piccadilly and Pall Mall. Even now as he walked about Vienna—after lunch I walked with him—people here and there doffed their hats to him. We walked into the National Library, although it was after hours, and the librarian was delighted to show us that magnificent building in Baroque where some of the greatest treasures of the world in ancient manuscripts and old books are nobly housed.

“Many scholars used to come here to study from all parts of the world,” said my distinguished friend. “Now few of them come. Vienna has lost its ancient glory except perhaps for its reputation in medicine.”

It was at lunch that we talked about the world situation and its bearing upon Austria. He believed in Adolf Hitler and the Anschluss with Germany. He had a remarkable theory of history based on biology. “The human body,” he said, as far as I could make out, “is made up of innumerable cells, each one of which has a will, a purpose, a life of its own. A race is an extension of those cells. The individual is like one of the cells, in its purpose and life. The race is a collection of individuals, as the individual is a collection of cells. The groups which form a race may be separated by artificial divisions but they have a natural affinity. They seek to join each other. There is in them the same life history. It is inevitable therefore that Austria will one day cleave to Germany.”

I talked mostly to his own lady. She thought precisely the opposite on almost everything, and the conversation of this husband and wife seemed to me to symbolise the division of opinion which makes conflict in the mind of Austria itself.

“Adolf Hitler,” she told me, “is not a man any longer. He is a God! That of course is very dangerous to all of us. He is conscious of his own divinity, and every day when he is at Berchtesgaden he stands for an hour on a wooden platform where pilgrims from all parts of Germany gather to see him. When there are three thousand of them they are allowed to go along the road and to gather at the Führer on his platform. They take little bits of soil from the bank as a holy relic. That is where Hitler has arrived. He is a mystic who believes that he is divinely inspired. ‘I walk,’ he said once, ‘with the certainty of a somnambulist.’ He follows a star like other dangerous men before him. But from all one hears he is a man of good character and simple living.”

I tried to be optimistic about the future and told her that in my most earnest belief the peace of Europe depended upon friendly relations between the German and British peoples.

“Then there will be no peace!” she answered. “Your interests are hopelessly divided. Germany wants what you have—your colonies. Her present rulers know that you are becoming weakened and that you cannot fight on all fronts where now your Empire is challenged. You are even scared of Mussolini!”

She was very contemptuous of Signor Mussolini and his Italians.

“He can’t make soldiers out of them,” she said. “And he is in an awful mess in Abyssinia. He has no control of that country. His men daren’t move into many districts where they would be cut to pieces.”

“What is going to happen here?” I asked this Austrian lady who expressed her ideas with a frankness and firmness which I found impressive, though on many points I disagreed with her.

She looked into my eyes with a smile in which there was, I thought, a kind of amusement, because she knew so much and had no more time to tell it.

“It is all written,” she answered. “We are moving very quickly to new conflicts of men and minds. Humanity does not stand still.”

“This has been a delightful conversation,” she told me when we parted.

I had found it rather disturbing.

I had other conversations in Vienna which I found disturbing. For these people seemed to be waiting for something to happen—something which they could avoid because of tremendous forces moving round them and about them twenty years after their downfall as an Empire, and their dark agony.

They seemed to be waiting for something to happen. It happened in February of 1938 when Dr. Schuschnigg, their Chancellor, was invited to Berchtesgaden by Herr Hitler and had a ten hours’ conversation with him, leading to a new pact between Austria and Germany. It was a pact, agreed to under threats, which surrendered the independence of Austria. Austria died as a separate State and as a spiritual heritage.