[Illustration: _Scene Along the Danube._]
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.
[Illustration: _Funeral of Franz Josef. The Emperor and Crown Prince of
Austria in the Foreground._]
[Illustration: _Viennese Vegetable Woman._]
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.
[Illustration: _Collecting Books, Papers and Tobacco for the Hungarian
Soldiers._]
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.
[Illustration: _Wholesale Cabbage Market in Vienna._]
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.
[Illustration: _Waiting for Soup at a Viennese Soup-Kitchen._]
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.
[Illustration: _Sick Hungarian Soldiers Receiving Gifts in Vienna._]
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.