Part 9

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.