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.