Napoleon had a poor opinion of the hungry soldier. But it is not only
the man-at-arms who travels on his belly--the nation at war does the
same.
I have found that patriotism at a groaning table in a warm room, and
with some other pleasant prospects added, is indeed a fine thing. The
amateur strategist and politician is never in finer mettle than when his
belt presses more or less upon a grateful stomach and when the mind has
been exhilarated by a good bottle of wine and is then being tickled by a
respectable Havana.
But I have also sat of nights--rainy nights at that--in the trenches and
listened to what the men at the front had to say. They, too, were
reasonably optimistic when the stomach was at peace. Of course, these
men had their cares. Most of them were married and had in the past
supported their families with the proceeds of their labor. Now the
governments were feeding these families--after a fashion. What that
fashion was the men came to hear in letters from home. It made them
dissatisfied and often angry.
I sat one night in the bombproof of an advanced position on the Sveta
Maria, near Tolmein. My host was an Austrian captain whose ancestry had
come from Scotland. A certain Banfield had thought it well to enter the
Austro-Hungarian naval service many years ago, and the captain was one
of his descendants.
Captain Banfield was as "sore" as the proverbial wet hen. He hadn't been
home in some fourteen months, and at home things were not well. His wife
was having a hard time of it trying to keep the kiddies alive, while the
good Scotchman was keeping vigil on the Isonzo.
That Scotchman, by the way, had a reputation in the Austrian army for
being a terrible _Draufgänger_, which means that when occasion came he
was rather hard on the Italians. He would have been just as ruthless
with the profiteers had he been able to get at them. Most
uncomplimentary things were said by him of the food sharks and the
government which did not lay them low.
But what Captain Banfield had to complain of I had heard a thousand
times. His was not the only officer's wife who had to do the best she
could to get along. Nor was that class worse off than any other. After
all, the governments did their best by it. The real hardships fell upon
the dependents of the common soldier.
I had made in Berlin the acquaintance of a woman who before the war had
been in very comfortable circumstances. Though a mechanical engineer of
standing, her husband had not been able to qualify for service as an
officer. He was in charge of some motor trucks in an army supply column
as a non-commissioned officer. The little allowance made by the
government for the wife and her four children did not go very far.
But the woman was a good manager. She moved from the expensive flat they
had lived in before the mobilization. The quarters she found in the
vicinity of the Stettiner railroad station were not highly desirable.
But her genius made them so.
The income question was more difficult to solve. A less resourceful
woman would have never solved it. But this one did. She found work in a
laundry, checking up the incoming and outgoing bundles. Somebody had to
suffer, however. In this case the children. They were small and had to
be left to themselves a great deal.