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
