HUNGER IN AUSTRIA

Waikato Times, Volume 88, Issue 13449, 30 March 1917, Page 2

HUNGER IN AUSTRIA

REVELATIONS IN LETTERS. In a long article, the Corriere delta Sera gives a picture of Austria and the Austrian army as depicted in a large number of letters and documents captured in the Austrian positions. The wife of an infantry officer wrote to her husband. "We are short of everything in Vienna. We. have no flour, no bread, no fat, and hardly know how lo cook for want of materials. We have !o wait hours and hours to obtain anything, and those who do not come early got nothing. Life is not worth living." Another woman's letter, dated October 6th, says: "Amalia and I were obliged to wait to-day from G a.m. till 10 a.m. to get a few pounds of potatoes. We have had no lights fox a week, and are obliged to go to bed at six and get up early in order to secure something to eat." The Corriere della Sera points out that the crested notepaper used by fashionable ladies bears no witness to the difficulty of living. The contrast between the letters of middle-class and wealthy women is vivid and enlightening. The war has hardly touched the material comfort of the upper classes in Austria, but among the poor the cry of hunger is heard. Yet the wealthy , are still bent on getting all the pleasure they can. Another officer's wife wrote that she intended to visit Gratz at the end of October, but "there has been serious disorder; the cafes and confectioners have not a pane of glass left, and the jewellers' shops have been looted. The firemen turned their hose on the rioters, but the women cut the hose, and a state of seige has been declared. You can imagine, the state of the country." Some captured official documents show that the army pays 2s ild per lb for mutton, 2s 8d for a soz tin of preserved meat, £8 for a barrel of herrings, 5s 3d per lb for chocolate, and 4s a pound for onions. One army order explains that economy is necessary because of the scarcity of labour and raw material, and says: "Recently the loss of imports from Germany has been specially felt." Hence Germany is no longer able to help her ally so lavishly as before. The word "hunger" recurs in hundreds of letters written in the trenches. An n.c.o. wrote: "Yesterday we had very little to eat. We went to the supply station, but they gave us only a little biscuit. It is always so." Another soldier's letter runs: "They give us hunger, and hunger, and nothing but hunger." The Italian paper comments: "Not a word of optimism appears in all the mass of documents which the fortune of war has bestowed on us, and if any reference is made to patriotism it is in an ironical tone."