I was again a wanderer in the land, and going from country to country
in Europe saw the disillusionment that had followed victory, and the
despair that had followed defeat, and the ravages that were bequeathed
by war to peace, not only in devastated earth and stricken towns, but
in the souls of men and women.
The victors had made great promises to their people, but for the most
part they were still unredeemed. They had promised them rich fruits
of victory to be paid out of the ruin of their enemies. But little
fruit of gold or treasure could be gathered from the utter bankruptcy
of Germany and Austria, whose factories stayed idle for lack of
raw material and whose money was waste paper in value of exchange.
“Reconstruction” was the watchword of statesmen, uttered as a kind of
magic spell, but when I went over the old battlefields in France I
found no sign of reconstruction, but only the vast belt of desolation
which in war I had seen swept by fire. No spell-word had built up
those towns and villages which had been blown into dust and ashes,
nor had given life to riven trees and earth choked and deadened by
high-explosives. Here and there poor families had crept back to the
place where their old homes had stood, grubbing in the ruins for some
relic of their former habitations and building wooden shanties in the
desert as frail shelters against the wind and the rain. In Ypres--the
City of Great Death--there were wooden _estaminets_ for the refreshment
of tourists who came from Paris to see the graveyard of youth, and
girls sold picture-postcards where boys of ours had gone marching up
the Menin Road under storms of shell-fire which took daily toll of
them. No French statesman by optimistic words could resurrect in a
little while the beauty that had been in Artois and Picardy and the
fields of Champagne.
On days of national thanksgiving the spirit of France was exalted by
the joy of victory. In Paris it was a feverish joy, wild-eyed, with
laughing ecstasy, with troops of dancing girls, and a carnival that
broke all bounds between Montmartre and Montparnasse. France had saved
herself from death. She had revenged herself for 1870 and the years
just passed. She had crushed the Enemy that had always been a brutal
menace across the frontier. She had her sword deep in the heart of
Germany, which lay bleeding at her feet. I who love France with a
kind of passion, and had seen during the years of war the agony and
the heroism of her people, did not begrudge them their ecstasy, and
it touched my spirit with its fire so that in France I could see and
understand the French point of view, of ruthlessness towards the beaten
foe. But I saw also what many people of France saw slowly but with a
sense of fear, that the Treaty made by Clémenceau did not make them
safe, except for a little while. This had not been, after all, “the war
to end war.” There was no guarantee of world-peace. Their frontiers
were not made impregnable against the time when the Germans might
grow strong again and come back for vengeance. They could not stand
alone, but must make new alliances, new secret treaties, new armies,
new armaments, because Hate survived, and the League of Nations was a
farce, as it had come from the table at Versailles.
They looked round and counted their cost--a million and a half dead.
A multitude of maimed, and blind, and nerve-shocked men. A birth-rate
that had sunk to zero. A staggering debt which they could not pay. A
cost of living which mounted higher and ever higher. A sense of revolt
among the soldiers who had come back, because their reward for four
years of misery was no more than miserable.
So it was in Italy, stricken by a more desperate poverty, disappointed
by a lack of spoil, angry with a sense of “betrayal,” afraid of
revolution, exultant when a mad poet seized the port of Fiume which had
been denied to her by President Wilson and his conscience.
Across the glittering waters of the Adriatic I went to Trieste and
found it a dead port, with Italian officers in possession of its
deserted docks and abandoned warehouses, and Austrians dying of typhus
in the back streets, and starving to death in tenement houses.
And then, across the new State of Jugo-Slavia cut out of the body of
the old Austrian Empire now lying dismembered, I came to Vienna, which
once I had known as the gayest capital of Europe, where charming people
played the pleasant game of life, with music, and love, and laughter.
In Vienna there was music still, but it played a _danse macabre_, a
Dance of Death, which struck one with a sense of horror. The orchestras
still fiddled in the restaurants; at night the opera house was crowded.
In cafés bright with gilt and glass, in restaurants rich in marble
walls, crowds of people listened to the waltzes of Strauss, ate
smuggled food at monstrous prices, laughed, flirted, and drank. They
were the profiteers of war, spending paper money with the knowledge
that it had no value outside Vienna, no value here except in stacks, to
buy warmth for their stomachs, a little warmth for their souls, while
their stock of Kronen lasted. They were the vultures from Jugo-Slavia
and Czecho-Slovakia come to feed on the corpse of Austria while it
still had flesh on its bones, and while Austrian Kronen still had
some kind of purchase power.... And outside, two million people were
starving slowly but very surely to death.
The children were starving quickly to death. Their coffins passed
me in the streets. Ten--twelve--fifteen--in one-half-hour between
San Stefan’s Church and the Favoritenstrasse. Small living skeletons
padded after one with naked feet, thrusting out little claw-like hands,
begging for charity. In the great hospital of Vienna children lay in
crowded wards, with twisted limbs and bulbous heads, diseased from
birth, because of their mother’s hunger, and a life without milk, and
any kind of fat.
Vienna, the capital of a great Empire, had been sentenced to death by
the Treaty of Peace which had so carved up her former territory that
she was cut off from all her natural resources and from all means of
industry, commerce and life.
It was Dr. Small, dear Daddy Small, who gave me an intimate knowledge
of what was happening in Vienna a year after Armistice, and it was
Eileen O’Connor who still further enlightened me by taking me into the
babies’ crèches, the _Kinderspital_ and the working people’s homes,
where disease and death found their victims. She took me to these
places until I sickened and said, “I can bear no more.”
Dr. Small had a small office in the _Kärtnerstrasse_, where Eileen
worked with him, and it was here that I found them both a day after
my arrival in Vienna. Eileen was on her knees, making a wood fire and
puffing it into a blaze for the purpose of boiling a tin kettle which
stood on a trivet, and after that, as I found, for making tea. Outside
there was a raw, horrible day, with a white mist in which those coffins
were going by, and with those barefoot children with pallid faces and
gaunt cheeks padding by one’s side, so that I was glad to see the
flames in the hearth and to hear the cheerful clink of tea-cups which
the doctor was getting out. Better still was I glad to see these two
good friends, so sane, so vital, so purposeful, as I found them, in a
world of gloom and neurosis.
The doctor told me of their work. It was life-saving, and increasing
in range of action. They had organised a number of feeding centres
in Vienna, and stores from which mothers could buy condensed milk
and cocoa, and margarine, at next to nothing, for their starving
babes. Austrian ladies were doing most of the actual work apart from
organisation at headquarters, and doing it devotedly. From America, and
from England, money was flowing in.
“The tide of thought is turning,” said the doctor. “Every dollar we
get, and every shilling, is a proof that the call of humanity is being
heard above the old war-cries.”
“And every dollar, and every shilling,” said Eileen, “is helping to
save the life of some poor woman or some little mite, who had no guilt
in the war, but suffered from its cruelty.”
“This job,” said the doctor, “suits my peculiar philosophy. I am not
out so much to save these babies’ lives----”
Here Eileen threatened to throw the teapot at his head.
“Because,” he added, “some of them would be better dead, and anyhow you
can’t save a nation by charity. But what I am out to do is to educate
the heart of the world above the baseness of the passions that caused
the massacre in Europe. We’re helping to do it by saving the children,
and by appealing to the chivalry of men and women across the old
frontiers. We’re killers of cruelty, Miss Eileen and I. We’re rather
puffed up with ourselves, ain’t we, my dear?”
He grinned at Eileen through his big spectacles, and I could see
that between this little American and that Irish girl there was an
understanding comradeship.
So he told me when she left the room a minute to get another tea-cup,
or wash one up.
“That girl!” he said. “Say, laddie, you couldn’t find a better head
in all Europe, including Hoover himself. She’s a Napoleon Bonaparte
without his blood-lust. She’s Horatio Nelson and Lord Northcliffe and
Nurse Cavell all rolled into one, to produce the organising genius
of Eileen O’Connor. Only, you would have to add a few saints like
Catherine of Sienna and Joan of Arc to allow for her spirituality. She
organises feeding-centres like you would write a column article. She
gets the confidence of Austrian women so that they would kiss her feet
if she’d allow it. She has a head for figures that fairly puts me to
shame, and as for her courage--well, I don’t mind telling you that I’ve
sworn to pack her back to England if she doesn’t keep clear of typhus
dens and other fever-stricken places. We can’t afford to lose her by
some dirty bug-bite.”
Eileen came into the room again with another tea-cup and saucer. I
counted those on the table and saw three already.
“Who is the other cup for?” I asked. “If you are expecting visitors
I’ll go, because I’m badly in need of a wash.”
“Don’t worry,” said Eileen. “We haven’t time to wash in Vienna, and
anyhow there’s no soap, for love or money. This is for Wickham, who is
no visitor but one of the staff.”
“Wickham?” I said. “Is Brand here?”
“Rather!” said Daddy Small. “He has been here a week, and is doing
good work. Looks after the supplies, and puts his heart into the job.”
As he spoke the door opened and Brand strode into the room, with rain
dripping from his waterproof coat which he took off and flung into a
corner before he turned to the table.
“Lord! a cup of tea is what I want!”
“And what you shall have, my dear,” said Eileen. “But don’t you know a
friend when you see him?”
“By Jove!”
He held my hand in a hard grip and patted me on the shoulder. Our
friendship was beyond the need of words.
So there we three who had seen many strange and tragic things in those
years of history were together again, in the city of Vienna, the city
of death, where the innocent were paying for the guilty but where
also, as Daddy Small said, there was going out a call to charity which
was being heard by the heart of the world above the old war-cries of
cruelty.
I stayed with them only a week. I had been long away from England and
had other work to do. But in that time I saw how these three friends,
and others in their service, were devoting themselves to the rescue
of human life. Partly, I think, for their own sake, though without
conscious selfishness, and with a passionate pity for those who
suffered. By this service they were healing their own souls, sorely
wounded in the war. That was so, certainly, with Wickham Brand, and a
little, I think, with Eileen O’Connor.
Brand was rescued in the nick of time by the doctor’s call to him.
Elsa’s death had struck him a heavy blow when his nerves were already
in rags and tatters. Now by active service in this work of humanity and
healing he was getting back to normality, getting serene, and steady.
I saw the change in him, revealed by the light in his eyes and by his
quietude of speech, and the old sense of humour, which for a while he
had lost.
“I see now,” he said one night, “that it’s no use fighting against the
injustice and brutality of life. I can’t remake the world, or change
the things that are written in history, or alter in any big way the
destiny of peoples. Stupidity, ignorance, barbarity, will continue
among the multitude. All that any of us can do is to tackle some good
job that lies at hand, and keep his own soul bright and fearless, if
there is any chance, and use his little intellect in his little circle
for kindness instead of cruelty. I find that chance here, and I am
grateful.”
The doctor had larger and bigger hopes, though his philosophy of life
was not much different from that of Brand’s.
“I want to fix up an intellectual company in this funny old universe,”
he said. “I want to establish an intellectual aristocracy on
international lines--the leaders of the New World. By intellectuals
I don’t mean highbrow fellows with letters after their names and
encyclopædias in their brain-pans. I mean men and women who by moral
character, kindness of heart, freedom from narrow hatreds, tolerance of
different creeds and races, and love of humanity, will unite in a free,
unfettered way, without a label or a league, to get a move on towards a
better system of human society. No Red Bolshevism, mind you, no heaven
by way of hell, but a striving for greater justice between classes and
nations, and for peace within the frontiers of Christendom, and beyond,
if possible. It’s getting back to the influence of the individual, the
leadership of multitudes by the power of the higher mind. I’m doing it
by penny postcards to all my friends. This work of ours in Vienna is a
good proof of their response. Let all the folk, with good hearts behind
their brains, start writing postcards to each other, with a plea for
brotherhood, charity, peace, and the New World would come.... You
laugh! Yes, I talk a little nonsense. It’s not so easy as that. But see
the idea? The leaders must keep in touch, and the herds will follow.”
I turned to Eileen, who was listening with a smile about her lips while
she pasted labels on to packets of cocoa.
“What’s your philosophy?” I asked.
She laughed in that deep voice of hers.
“I’ve none; only the old faith, and a little hope, and a heart that’s
bustin’ with love.”
Brand was adding up figures in a book of accounts, and smiled across at
the girl whom he had known since boyhood, when she had pulled his hair.
His wounds were healing.