Part 8

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.