In Austria there was utter hopelessness, and the health of the people
was breaking down. The Reparations Commission, under Sir William Goode,
established to exact indemnities, saw the folly of such action and
became a Relief Mission to save the life of those people, the most
charming and brilliant and civilised in Central Europe, before they
sank under the doom pronounced upon them by a Treaty of Peace which had
left them with the capital city of a great Empire from which the Empire
had been lopped. I went into the Austrian hospitals, homes, babies’
crèches, and children’s clinics, and saw little Austrian children so
weak from under-nourishment that they could not sit up in bed and
crippled with rickets. Children of three and four had no solid bone in
their bodies, but only gristle. Where their arms were crossed at night
there were deep sunken hollows. Sixty-eight per cent. of the Austrian
children were in a state of semi-starvation in the year that followed
war.