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By Root 815 0

organism of which Austria had been at the heart. The Danube, navigable now from the Black Sea to southern Germany, ran through it. A huge Catherine wheel of railway lines revolved around it, linking up with other wheels around Budapest and Prague. In November 1918, the trade that carried food and raw materials into Austria and brought manufactured goods out stopped, as if, said a Vienna newspaper, by the blow of an ax. The coal and potatoes that once came from Bohemia and the beef and wheat from Hungary sat on the wrong side of new borders. Austria did not have the funds to buy them and its new neighbors were not inclined to be generous. Indeed, they were busy claiming their share of the imperial assets in Vienna: the works of art, the furniture, the collections of armor and scientific instruments, the books, the archives, even laboratories. The Italians chimed in with demands for works of art carried off to Vienna before Italy existed and the Belgians with a demand for a triptych taken by Maria Theresa.10

Alarming reports reached Paris about conditions in Austria: the countryside picked bare of its livestock; the empty shelves in the shops; the spread of tuberculosis; the men in ragged uniforms; the thousands of unemployed—125,000 in Vienna alone. Factories stood still and the trains and trams ran sporadically. The former commander-in-chief of the imperial armies ran a small tobacconist’s shop, and lesser officers shined shoes. Starving children begged in the streets and there were long queues outside the soup kitchens. Girls from good middle-class families sold themselves for food and clothing. When several police horses were killed in one of the frequent violent demonstrations, the flesh was stripped from their bones within minutes.

The Viennese coffeehouses were still open and their orchestras still played, but their customers drank coffee made from barley and kept their overcoats on. Shops and restaurants shut early to save fuel and theaters were only allowed to open one night a week. The streets were dirty and uncared-for. Windows were boarded up because there was no glass to repair them. The Habsburg palaces had been ransacked and Schonbrünn was now a home for abandoned children, while the Hofburg was rented out for private parties. “Their whole attitude,” said an American observer of the Viennese, “was very much like that of people who had suffered from some great natural calamity, such as a flood or famine. Their attitude and their arguments were very much like those of a delegation seeking help for the famine sufferers of India, and there was a complete assumption that we were free from resentment and filled with a sympathetic desire to put them on their feet.”11

In January 1919, William Beveridge, a British civil servant (and later the father of the welfare state), was sent from Paris to assess Austria’s needs. He warned that, without immediate relief, there was likely to be complete social collapse. Already the provinces were refusing to send food into Vienna. Vorarlberg, at the western tip of Austria, was agitating to join Switzerland. Other regions might well follow suit. The socialist government could do little and it had to share its power with a self-appointed people’s militia. The peacemakers knew what these signs meant. They did not want Austria going the way of Russia or, later, Hungary. At the end of March, soon after the communists took over in Hungary, the Allies lifted their blockade and supplied credits to the Austrian government. They also shipped in food and clothing. Austria became the fourth largest beneficiary of Allied aid, after Germany, Poland and Belgium. By the spring of 1919, as a prominent Viennese journalist told an American, the situation was very serious but not yet hopeless. That June an attempt by the communists to seize power by force was put down relatively easily.12

The Austrian treaty was far from ready when the invitation went out to the Austrians to send their delegates to Paris; but, as Wilson said, it was a good idea to show that the Allies supported the Austrian government.