I have seen much comment on the increase of sexual laxness in the
Central European states, owing to the influence of the war. Those who
have written and spoken on the subject have, as a rule, proclaimed
themselves handicapped by either prejudice or ignorance--two things
which are really one.
Much breath and ink has been wasted on certain steps taken by the
several German and Austro-Hungarian governments for the legitimization
of natural offspring by giving the mother the right to set the prefix
_Frau_--Mrs.--before her maiden name. I have also run across the
perfectly silly statement that the Central European governments, in
allowing such women the war subsistence and pension of the legitimate
widow and children, were purposely fostering that sort of illicit
relations between men and women for the purpose of repeopling their
states. On that point not much breath need be wasted, for the very good
reason that each child is indeed welcome just now in Central Europe, and
that the government's least duty is to take care of the woman and child
who might ultimately have been the wife and legitimate offspring of the
man who lost his life in the trenches. Sex problems are the inevitable
result of all wars in which many men lose life and health. I may also
say that in other belligerent countries this problem has as yet not been
dealt with half so intelligently and thoroughly.
Monogamy and polygamy are usually economic results rather than purely
social institutions. A stay of nine months in Turkey showed me that
polygamy in that country is disappearing fast, because the Turk is no
longer able to support more than one wife. In the entire Bosphorus
district, in which Constantinople lies and of which it is the center,
there were in 1915 but seventeen Moslem households in which could be
found the limit of four legitimate wives. Of the entire population of
the district only seven per thousand Turks had more than one wife, so
that, on the whole, legalized polygamy made a better showing in sex
morality than what we of the Occident can boast of, seeing that
prostitution is unknown among the Turks.
That the war increased illicit sexual intercourse in Central Europe is
true, nor was that increase a small one. It did not take on the
proportions, however, which have been given to it, or which under the
circumstances might have been looked for.
In the first place, many of the slender social threads that restrain sex
impulse in the modern state snapped under the strain of the war. Their
place was taken by something that was closely related to the Spartan
system of marriage. Free selection was practised by women whose husbands
were at the front. The men did the same thing. The water on the
divorce-mill took on a mighty spurt--evidence that this looseness did
not always find the consent of the other party, though often his or her
conduct may not have been any better.
This is a case in which generalization is not permissible. The good
stood beside the bad and indifferent, and reference to the subject might
be dispensed with entirely were it not that public subsistence is
closely related to sex morality.
War takes from his home and family the man. Though the governments made
some provision for those left behind, the allowance given them was never
large enough to keep them as well as they had been kept by the labor of
the head of the family. So long as the cost of living did not greatly
increase, the efforts of the wife and older children met the situation,
but all endeavor of that sort became futile when the price of food and
other necessities increased twofold and even more. When that moment came
the tempter had an easy time of it. From the family had also been taken
much of the restraint which makes for social orderliness. The man was
away from home; the young wife had seen better times. Other men came
into her path, and nature is not in all cases as loyal to the marriage
vows as we would believe. In many cases the mother, now unassisted by
the authority of the father, was unable to keep her daughters and sons
in check.
War has a most detrimental effect upon the mind of the juvenile. The
romance of soldiering unleashes in the adolescent male every quality
which social regulation has curbed in the past, while the young woman
usually discards the common sense of her advisers for the sickly
sentimentalism which brass buttons on clothing cut on military lines is
apt to rouse in the female mind. Soon the social fabric is rent in many
places and governmental efforts at mending are hardly ever successful.
We have of this an indication in the remarkable increase in juvenile
delinquency which marked the course of the European War. In thousands of
cases the boys of good families became thieves and burglars. Even
highway robbery was not beyond them, and, odd as it may seem, nearly
every murder committed in the Central states in the last three years had
a lone woman of wealth for a victim and some young degenerate, male or
female, as perpetrator. In the cases that came to my notice the father
or husband was at the front.
But apart from these more or less spontaneous failings of young men and
women, there was the category of offenses in which external influence
was the _causa movens_. Desperate need caused many to steal and
embezzle; it caused many women to divest themselves of that self-respect
which is decency and the glory of the _fille honnête_.
Nothing can be so cynical as the laws of social administration. That was
shown on every hand by the war, but especially did it become apparent in
the gratification of the sexual appetite by that class which has nothing
but money. While the father and husband was at the front, fighting for
the state, and heaping the wealth of the community into the coffers of a
rapacious industrial and commercial class, his daughter and wife were
often corrupted by that very wealth. Nor was it always bitter want that
promoted the lust of the wealthy profligate. The war had shaken the
social structure to its very foundations. So great was the pressure of
anxiety that the human mind began to crave for relief in abandonment,
and once this had been tasted the subject would often become a confirmed
"good-time" fiend.
There was a certain war purveyor of whom it was said that he seduced a
virgin once a week. The class he drew upon was the lowest. Most of his
victims were factory-girls, and, such being the case, nobody thought
much of it at a time when calamity had roused in all the worst qualities
that may be wakened in the struggle for self-preservation. It was a case
of the devil take the hindmost, and his Satanic Majesty did not overlook
his chance.
For a few days these girls would be the paramours of their masters.
When, finally, they saw themselves cast off in favor of a prettier face,
they would for a while frequent cafés where they would meet the officers
on leave and small fry of civilians, and not long after that they did
business on the street with a government license and certificate showing
that they were being inspected by the authorities in the interest of
public health.
That was the usual career of one of these war victims. But the thing did
not end there. The thousands who had grown rich on war contracts and
food speculation began to tire of the very uninteresting sport of
ruining factory-girls and shop-women. They reached out into those social
classes in which refinement made a raid so much more delectable. To
physical debauch had to be added moral and mental orgy. Taste had been
stimulated to a degree where it demanded that social destruction should
accompany lustful extravagance. And that only the woman of the better
class could give. The gourmand became an epicure. Times favored him.
What proportions this state of affairs reached may be illustrated by the
"personal" advertisements carried at one time by one of Vienna's
foremost newspapers, the _Tagblatt_. Throughout the week that paper
would carry from forty to ninety inches, single column, of personal
ads., each of them requesting a woman, seen here or there, to enter into
correspondence with the advertiser for "strictly honorable" purposes. On
Sundays the same paper would carry as much as two whole pages of that
sort of advertising. Soon the time came when often as much as a quarter
of these ads. would be inserted by women who disguised a heartrending
appeal to some wretch in whatever manner they could.
Emperor Charles deserves the highest credit for finally putting his foot
down on that practice. The "personals" in the _Tagblatt_ began to
irritate him, and one day he let it become known to the management of
the publication that further insertion of that sort of matter would lead
to the heavy hand of the censors being felt. That helped. After that the
_Tagblatt_ ran only matrimonial advertising. Yet even that was not
wholly innocuous. The daughter of a colonel was corrupted by means of
it. I am glad to say that the old soldier took the law in his own hand.
He looked up the man who had seduced the young woman and shot him dead
in his tracks. The government had good sense enough to dispose of the
case by having the colonel make a report.
To my own attention came, in Budapest, the case of a fourteen-year-old
girl who had been sold by her own mother to a rich manufacturer. The
woman had advertised in a Budapest newspaper that did business along the
lines of the Vienna _Tagblatt_. The girl knew nothing of it, of course.
There was a sequel in court, and during the testimony the woman said
that she had sold her daughter to the manufacturer in order to get the
money she needed to keep herself and her other children. Josephus
mentions in his _Wars of the Jews_ how a woman of Jerusalem killed, then
cooked and ate, her own child, because the robbers had taken everything
from her, and, rather than see the child starve, she killed it. He also
mentions that the robbers left the house horror-struck. The war purveyor
and food shark did not always have that much feeling left in them.
Poor little Margit! When my attention was drawn to her she was a
waitress in a café in Budapest, and her patrons used to give her an
extra _filler_ or two in order that she might not have to do on her own
account what she had been obliged to suffer at the behest of her raven
mother. As I heard the story, the manufacturer got off with a fine, and
the mother of Margit was just then sorting rags in a cellar, with
tuberculosis wasting her lungs.
Society at war is a most peculiar animal--it is anarchy without the
safeguards of that anarchy which fires the mind of the idealist; for
that system and its free love would make the buying of woman impossible.
But there were sorts of sexual looseness that were not quite so sordid,
which at least had the excuse of having natural causes as their
background. Rendered irresponsible by sexual desire and the monotony of
a poverty-stricken existence, many of the younger women whose husbands
were in the army started liaisons, _Verhältnisse_, as they are called in
German, with such men as were available. It speaks well for the openness
of mind of some husbands that they did not resent this. I happen to know
of a case in which a man at the front charged a friend to visit his
wife. After I learned of this I came to understand that progress, called
civilization, is indeed a very odd thing. The Spartans when at war used
to do the same thing, and it was the practice of commanders to send
home young men of physical perfection in order that the women should
beget well-developed children. The offspring was later known as
_partheniæ_--of the virgin born. But the laws of the Spartans favored an
intelligent application of this principle, while in Central Europe no
regulation of that sort could be attempted.
An effort was made by the several governments to check this tendency
toward social dissolution. For the first time in many years the police
raided hotels. Now and then offenders were heavily fined. But
authorities which in the interest of public health had licensed certain
women were prone to be open-minded to practices due to the war. It was
realized that the times were such that latitude had to be given; in the
end it was felt that just now it did not matter how children were born.
The state began to assume what had formerly been the duty of the father
and proceeded with more vigor than ever against the malpractice of
physicians. One of them, convicted on the charge of abortion, was given
a two-year sentence of penal servitude.
It cannot be said, however, that the woman who had made up her mind to
remain a loyal wife or innocent was not given ample protection. The
state was interested in the production of children, but had little
patience with illicit sexual intercourse that did not result in this.
There is the theory that the child whose father does not take some
loving interest in the mother is not of as much value as that which has
been born in the "wedlock" of love. With that in view, the government
took what precaution there was possible. The profligate and _roué_ were
given a great deal of attention, though little good came of this, since
the times favored them entirely too much. But there is no doubt that the
eyes of the law saw where they could see.
Food-lines were as a rule attended by policemen, whose duty it was to
maintain order and keep off the human hyenas who were in the habit of
loitering about these lines for the purpose of picking out women. That
was well enough. But the policeman could not see these women home, nor
prevent the man from surveying the crowd, making his selection, and
later forcing his attentions upon the woman.
With the need for food and clothing always pressing, the ground was
generally well prepared, and the public was inclined to be lenient in
such matters anyway--as "war" publics have a knack of doing.
I had scraped up acquaintances with a number of policemen in the
district in which I lived. Most of them I had met in connection with my
investigation of food-line matters. They were all very fine fellows, and
red blood rather than red tape was in their veins. The suffering of the
women in the food-lines had made these men more human than is usual in
their business.
"Another one of them has gone to the bad," said one of the policemen to
me one day, as he pointed out to me discreetly a rather pretty young
woman who had come for her ration of potatoes. "A fellow, who seems
rather well-to-do, has been trailing her to and from this store for
almost two weeks. I had my eye on him, and would have nabbed him quick
enough had he ever spoken to the woman while in the line. Well, three
days ago I saw the two of them together in the Schwarzenberg Café. The
damage is done now, I suppose. You will notice that she has on a new
pair of shoes. She must have paid for them at least one hundred and ten
crowns."
I suggested that the shoes were not necessarily proof that the woman had
done wrong.
"Under the circumstances they are," said the policeman. "Yesterday I
managed to talk to the woman. She is the wife of a reservist who is now
on the Italian front. The government gives her a subsistence of one
hundred and twenty crowns a month. She has no other means. With two
little children to take care of, that allowance wouldn't pay for shoes
of that sort. It's too bad. She is the second one in this food-line this
month who has done that."
Shortly afterward I learned of the case of a woman who had sold herself
in order to provide food and fuel for her two children. She was the
widow of a reserve officer who had fallen in Galicia. Her own pension
amounted to one hundred and ten crowns a month, and for the support of
the children she was allowed another one hundred crowns, I believe. The
sum was entirely too small to keep the three, being the equivalent of,
roughly, twenty-seven dollars, depreciation of the Austro-Hungarian
currency considered. At that time life in Vienna was as costly as it is
normally in the United States. While her husband had been alive the
woman had led a very comfortable life. She had kept a servant and lived
in a good apartment in the Third Municipal District. The thing that
struck me in her case was that she had not taken the step before. It is
extremely difficult to be virtuous on twenty-seven dollars a month when
one has not known need before.
The many cases of that sort which I could cite would merely repeat
themselves. I will make mention, however, of one which is due to what
may be termed the psychology of the mass in war. In this instance it was
not want that was responsible. Aggregates involved in war seem to sense
instinctively that the violence of arms may draw in its wake social
dissolution. The pathology of society is affected by that in much the
same manner as is evident in other organisms when a change is imminent
or pending. A period of relaxation sets in, which in the case of the
human aggregate manifests itself in sexual looseness.
In various parts of Serbia I had had occasion to notice that the women
gave themselves readily to the invading soldiers. In the Austrian
capital I ran into the same thing, though there was at that time no
danger of invasion.
Time lying heavy on my hands when I was not at a front, or occupied with
some political situation in one of the Central European seats of
government, I decided to pass some of it by taking piano lessons. I
made the necessary arrangements with a master of the instrument near the
Kärntner Ring. On the three half-hours a week which I took from the
_maestro_ I was preceded on two by a pretty young woman greatly gifted
musically. Her parents were well off, so that it was not a question of
getting a "good time" in the only manner possible.
After a while the young woman failed to appear for her lessons. The
_Tonmeister_ wanted to know the reason for this. Confused and
conflicting answers being all he received, he made up his mind that
something was wrong. The poor old man had dealt with nothing but music
all his life, and was delightfully ignorant of the ways of the world. He
asked my advice. Should he inform the parents of the student?
After I had ascertained that his responsibility as teacher was not
weighted by friendship or even acquaintance with the girl's family, I
suggested that he confine himself to his proper province by notifying
the student that failure in the future to put in appearance at her hour
would result in a report of that and past delinquencies to the parents.
A very emotional interview between teacher and student resulted. By this
time the girl had realized the folly of her conduct and seemed truly
repentant. Being much attached to the old teacher, she made a clean
breast of it. Her excuse was most interesting.
"You see, dear master," she said, "these are war times. I thought that
it wouldn't matter much. If the Russians came to Vienna it might happen
anyway."
There is used in the German army a word that comprises every
rule of sex conduct to which the soldier is subject, or ought to
be--_Manneszucht_--the moral discipline of the man. Infraction of this
rule is severely punished in all cases, though the ordinary soldier may
under it cohabit with a woman by her consent. To the officer this
privilege is not given, however, it being assumed that as the instrument
of military discipline he must be proof against many demands of nature
and be in full control of himself at all times. The German officer who
would violate a woman in an occupied territory fares badly, and the code
forbids that he enter into liaison with a woman of the enemy. Nor may he
visit the army brothels which now and then are established by the
authorities.
I do not mean to infer that the German army officer always and
invariably adheres to these rules. But he does this generally. The
abstinence thus practised reflects itself in that unqualified devotion
to duty for which the German officer is deservedly famous. It tends to
make of him, for military purposes, a sort of superman. He comes to
regard the curb he sets upon himself as entitling him to despise the
weaklings who satisfy their desires. In the course of time he extended
the fine contempt that comes from this to his allied brothers-in-arms in
Austria and Hungary, who were deplorably lax in that respect, despite
the regulations.
Though I do not especially deal with the latter subject, I must mention
it here as a preamble to a certain experience I had one night in
Trieste. The experience, on the other hand, showed to what extent war
may influence the conduct of men whose station and opportunities might
cause one to believe that they were above surrendering to sexual
laxness.
In the "Hall" of the Hotel Excelsior of Trieste were sitting at café
tables some sixty Austro-Hungarian officers from the Isonzo front who on
that day had been furloughed from the trenches for a certain purpose. At
the tables sat also a fourscore of women who for the time being were the
sweethearts of the officers. High revelry was on. The windows of the
room, with all others along the Trieste water-front, had been well
blinded, so that no beam of light fell into the inky blackness without
through which a fierce _borea_--northern wind--was just then driving a
veritable deluge.
The room was well heated and lighted. I had on that very day walked off
a sector on the Carso plateau, and found a most pleasant contrast
between the cold and muddy trenches and the "Hall." It was exceedingly
snug in the place. And there was the inevitable gipsy music.
Across the bay, from Montfalcone, came the sound of an Italian night
drumfire, and in the room popped the bottle of Paluguay champagne--the
French products being just then hard to get.
There were three other war correspondents in the party. An Austrian
general-staff man was in charge. The officer was of the strait-laced
sort and did not sanction the conduct of his colleagues. But then he was
at headquarters at Adelsberg and could go to Vienna almost as often as
he liked. The others were poor devils who had been sitting in the Carso
trenches for months and had now come to Trieste to have a good time,
even if that meant that next morning the pay of several months would be
in the pocket of the hotel manager and in the hands of some good-looking
Italo-Croat woman.
It was not long before we had at our table some of the "ladies." One of
the war correspondents had taken it upon himself to provide us with
company. From that company I learned what the frame of mind of the
officers was. After all, that attitude was simple enough. Each day might
be the last, and why not enjoy life to-day when to-morrow there might be
a burial without coffin, without anything except the regrets of
comrades? What was etiquette under such circumstances? The champagne
helped them to forget, and the women, though their conversation might be
discouragingly banal, were, after all, members of the other sex. One of
the women was able to take a very intelligent survey of the situation.
She was capable of sensing real sympathy for these men. I learned that
she had lost her husband in the war. It was the same old story. She had
found the small pension for herself and the allowance for her boy
entirely insufficient, was not minded to do poorly paid hard work, and
had concluded that it was easy for the well-to-do to be decent. The poor
had to do the best they could in these days of high prices.
Out on the Carso the bombardment progressed, satisfactorily, I presume,
as the next official _communiqué_ of the Italian government would say.
The champagne bottles continued to pop. Men and women drank to one
another's good health, the former oblivious, for the time being, that
this might be the last good time they would ever enjoy.
It strikes me that not much fault can be found with this, so long as we
are human enough to allow those whom we are about to execute for the
commission of some crime to choose their last breakfast--or is it
supper? To be detailed into the advanced trenches was generally no
better than to be sentenced to death.
Only those who have been constantly threatened by the dangers of war can
realize what state of mind these men were in. Nothing mattered any more,
and, nothing being really important, the pleasures of the flesh were
everything. It was so with the little music student I have mentioned. I
could not reach a harsh judgment in either case, despite the picture of
Prussian _Manneszucht_ before my eyes. At the same time, I am not
ignorant of the fact that sleek communities living in peace and plenty
cannot be expected to understand the moral disintegration which the
dangers of war had wrought in this instance.
I made the acquaintance of similar conditions in Berlin and other cities
of the Central states. Being a matter-of-fact individual, I cannot say
that they shocked me. The relations of cause and effect cannot be
explained away, much as we may wish to do it. With some fourteen million
men taken away from their families, whose sole support they were in the
vast majority of cases, nothing else was to be expected. It speaks well
for mankind in general that the resulting conditions were not worse. The
responsibility involved falls rather upon those who brought on the war
than upon the men and women who transgressed.
And that responsibility was not shirked in the Central states. Before
the war broke out there had already been held very liberal views on
illegitimacy. The children of Hagar were no longer ostracized by the
public, as, for instance, they are in the United States and other
countries where social "justice" is still visited upon those whose
misfortune it is to have been born out of wedlock. In Germany and
Austria-Hungary it was held that a man is a man for all that.
Small wonder, then, that during the winter of 1916, when the crop of
"war" babies was unusually large--formed, in fact, more than 10 per
cent. of the increase in population--the several Central European
governments should decide to give such children and their mothers the
allowances provided for the wives and widows of soldiers and their
children. The German state governments, that of Prussia excepted,
also abolished the "illegitimate" birth certificate and gave
the unwed soldier wife or widow the right to use the designation
_Frau_--Mistress--instead of, as heretofore, _Fräulein_, or Miss.
This measure was a fine example of humaneness, seeing that otherwise
many thousands of mothers of "war" babies would have been obliged to go
through life with the stigma of illegitimacy branding both woman and
child. It is somewhat typical of Prussia that its government should be
willing to support illegitimate "war" babies and their mothers and yet
deny them the comforts of social recognition, when their number was no
less than two hundred thousand.
There came up, in connection with this legislation, the question of
whether the offspring of unmarried women whose paramours were not in the
military service should receive the same liberal treatment. A great deal
of opposition was voiced by the clergy and other conservative elements.
It was argued that extension of this benefit to all would encourage a
general recourse to free love.
But the legislators and governments were less short-sighted. The
legitimizing acts were so framed that they included all children, no
matter who their fathers were. It was held that it would be absurd to
expect the millions of women whom the war had robbed of their husbands,
or the chance of getting one, to lead a life of celibacy. Nature would
assert itself, and if the subject was not now dealt with in a rational
manner, it would have to be disposed of later when conditions might be
less favorable.
There were certain examples to be recalled. At the conclusion of the
Thirty Years' War the South German states, being the hardest hit in
losses of male population, adopted laws according to which any man with
the necessary means could legitimately admit into his house as many
women as he cared to support. Though well-intentioned, the law shared
every defect which emergency legislation is apt to be afflicted with.
The men able to support more than one wife were generally advanced in
years, so that the very condition which the state had hoped to meet gave
rise to chaos. It had not been the intention to afford the pleasures of
the seraglio to the wealthy, but to take the best possible account of a
social emergency.
This was borne in mind when the Central states governments dealt with a
similar condition in 1916, the factors of which were these: There had
been killed in action, crippled for life, and incapacitated by disease
nearly five million men who had gone to the fronts in the very prime of
life. That meant a serious loss to a community--considering Germany and
Austria-Hungary a single unit in this respect--which then had
approximately twenty million women in the state of puberty. Reduced to
statistics, the situation was that there were only four men of
marriageable age for every five women. It was estimated at the time that
before the war was over these odds would go to three to five. Recent
casualty statistics show that this stage has been nearly reached.
I must make reference here to the fact that the normal and healthy woman
finds life with the physically impaired man a torture. A good many cases
of that sort have come to my attention. One of them is so typical of all
others that I will give its details.
At a certain Berlin drawing-room I made the acquaintance of a charming
young woman of the better class. I may say that she is a writer of
considerable merit.
A few months before the outbreak of the war she had married a
professional man of quality. When the mobilization came he was drafted
as an officer of the reserve.
For months at a time the two did not see each other, and when finally
the man returned home for good one leg had been amputated at the knee
and the other a little above the ankle. The woman did what most women
would do under the circumstances. She received the man with open arms
and nursed him back to complete recovery.
Soon it was evident that all was not well with the relations of the two.
The woman tried to forget that her husband was a cripple for life. But
the harder she tried the more grew a feeling of repulsion for the man.
Finally, she decided to live alone.
It would be very simple to label the woman a heartless creature. But it
would be quite as unjust. The foes of even that small portion of
realism which the most logical of us are able to identify may be
inclined to take the stand that sex has little to do with what is called
love. And yet in the healthy race it forms the social _force majeure_.
It is not for me to decide whether the woman in question did well in
leaving the man. After all, that is her own affair--so much more her own
affair since the man, as yet not reconciled to his great misfortune,
began to plague her with most vicious outbreaks of jealousy, when as yet
he had no reason for it.
The man is to be pitied by all, and unless he is able to calm his mind
with the solace that comes from philosophical temperament, it would have
been far better were he among the dead. He may in the end find another
mate; but, seen from the angle of natural law, it must be doubted that
the pity, which would have to be the great factor in such a love, would
in any degree be as valuable as the sexual instinct which caused the
other woman to go her own ways. Idealism and practice are always two
different things. The former is the star that guides the craft, while
practice is the storm-tossed sea.
More than fifty thousand Russian prisoners-of-war petitioned the
Austrian government to be admitted to citizenship in the country that
held them captive. Many of these men had been sent into the rural
districts to assist the farmers. Others were busy around the cities.
They had come to be reconciled with their lot, had acquired a fair
working knowledge of the language, and association with the women had
led to the usual results. The crop of "war" babies increased.
The Russians were willing to marry these women, but under the law could
not do so. Hence the petition for admission to the usual civil rights.
The Austrian government recognized the situation, but in the absence of
the necessary legislative authority could do nothing to admit the
Russian to Austrian _Staatsangehörigkeit_. Yet it was eager to do that.
The new blood was needed.
Travel about the country has often brought to my attention that in
certain districts intermarriage for centuries had led to degeneration.
Goiter, one of the first signals of warning that new blood must be
infused in the race, was prevalent. Scientists had drawn attention to
this long before the war. But there was nothing that could be done.
The Russian prisoners-of-war came to serve as the solution of the
problem. Their offspring were unusually robust, and some cranium
measurements that were made showed that the children were of the best
type mentally.
A state which was losing men at a frightful rate every day could not be
expected to view this increase in population with alarm. So long as the
mothers were Austrian all was well from the political point of view,
since it is the mother usually who rears the patriot. The Russians,
moreover, soon grew fond of the institutions of Austria, and gave return
to their own people hardly any thought. Conversation with many of them
demonstrated that, on the contrary, they were not anxious to go home.
Russia was then still the absolute autocracy, and these men were not
minded to exchange the liberal government of Austria for the despotism
they knew.
I may state here that the Austrian government, serving in this instance
as the example of all others in Central Europe, had done its level best
to promote this very thing. On several trips to prison camps I visited
the schools in which the Russian prisoners were being taught German.
Thousands of the men were thus given their first chance to read and
write, and to the more intelligent was apparent the irony of fate that
caused them to read and write German instead of their own language. No
more deliberate attempt to win friends could have been devised and
executed. Small wonder that on one occasion a Russian working detachment
employed in road-making on the Italian front rushed to the assistance of
the Austrians who were being overwhelmed, and cut down the last of their
allies with their spades and picks.
To what extent Russian blood has been infused in the rural population of
Austria and Hungary is at present entirely a matter of conjecture. The
same applies to Germany, though I must state that in this case the
number cannot be so great.
Dreary as the picture is, it is not without its brighter spots. The
mixture of blood which has occurred in many of these countries will
improve the human stock. And who would care to gainsay that governments
are not in the habit of looking at populations from that angle--the
angle of stock? None will admit it, of course, they may not even be
conscious of the fact that they hold this view. But so long as
governments are interested more in quantity than in quality of
propagation they cannot easily clear themselves of the suspicion. I am
not at all sure that it is not better thus.
I have so far treated the post-bellum aspect of sex morality entirely
from the position of the man. Women will ask the question: What do the
women think of it?
That depends somewhat on conditions and circumstances.
"When one is forty, one is satisfied with being _madame_," said a
Hungarian lady to me once, when the subject had been discussed. She
meant that the woman of forty was content with being the head of a
household.
Such an attitude takes a breadth of view altogether unknown in the
Anglo-Saxon world. I found it often in Central Europe, especially in
Austria, where one day were pointed out to me two couples who not so
very long before had changed mates by mutual consent on the part of all
four concerned. One of the husbands is a rich banker, and the other, his
best friend by the way, is also well off. The double pair go to the same
café, sit at the same table, and their friends think nothing of it. They
are regularly divorced and married, of course.
While elsewhere in Central Europe the same easy view is not taken, it
is a fact, nevertheless, that nowhere much puritanical strait-lacedness
is to be encountered. I happen to know a certain successful diplomat who
closed both eyes to his wife's infatuation for a young naval officer.
The wife was young and her husband was past middle age. Rather than lose
the woman and have a scandal besides, the diplomatist applied to himself
what he had so often applied to others--the deception there is in
self-restraint.
The three of them got along well together. Often I was the fourth at
table. While the diplomatist and I would smoke our cigars and sip our
coffee, the two would sit side by side on the ottoman and hold intimate
converse. But in Europe it is considered tactless to speak of such
matters.
There will be heartache, of course. Many a good woman will find herself
displaced by a younger one. But that will not be without some
compensation. The husband who would desert his mate because the charms
of youth have flown may not be worth keeping. It may even be an act of
mercy that he has rekindled his affection at some other shrine. The
forsaken wife may have grown very weary herself of the life conjugal.
In Protestant Germany the readjustment will be easier than in Catholic
Austria and Hungary. In the latter countries much double-living will
result, and that means that more women will have to sacrifice more
self-respect. That is the worst part of it.
But, again, the _légère_ views of Central Europe come into play. So long
as the man has sense enough to keep his "war" wife in the background,
nobody will take offense, and the legal wife may not mind. Officially,
the paramour will not exist. As soon as she has children she will be a
"Mrs." in her own right, and I suppose that many will not wait that long
before changing "_Fräulein_" into "_Frau_."
There is no doubt that the condition is unjust to two women at the same
time. But there seems to be no escape from it. Ministers of the gospel
have already roundly condemned what seeming sanction the government has
given to illicit intercourse. But these good men are theorists, while
the government is practical--practical for the reason that a great
social problem has to be met in the best manner possible. It is far
better to give the thing such aspects of decency as is possible rather
than to encourage the growth of the social evil into proportions that
might for all time impair the health of the race. Students of the social
evil generally agree, throughout Europe at least, that its prime causes
are economic. Communities in which the man, by reason of small income,
is not able to establish a household early in life have not only the
greatest number of loose women, but also the greatest number of
free-living bachelors.
The problem, then, has an economic side. In the instance here under
scrutiny, the economic side is that more women than ever before must
earn their own living in Central Europe to-day. The women will readily
do that, so long as society will not entirely deny them the company of
the man or place upon such company the stigma that generally attaches to
it. Without such privileges many of these women--nature decrees
ironically that they should be physically the best of the race--would
take to vice in such numbers that society would lose more by being
ungenerous than by taking a common-sense view of the problem it has to
face.
But logic in such matters is no balm of Gilead. The young married woman
will be able to compete with the "surplus"; the older ones, I fear, will
not. To them the war will be the thing of the hour, long after the grass
has grown over the trenches, long after the work of reconstruction shall
have healed the economic wounds.
There will be many who can truly say, "I lost my husband in the war."
And the worst of it is that they will not be able to say this with the
tenderness that was in the heart at the departure for the field of
battle.