My Secret Service: Vienna, Sophia, Constantinople, Nish, Belgrade, Asia Minor, etc.Man who dined with the Kaiser
History
My Secret Service: Vienna, Sophia, Constantinople, Nish, Belgrade, Asia Minor, etc.
Man who dined with the Kaiser
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives; World War, 1914-1918 -- Secret service
The German method is also to keep the wounded away from the big
towns as much as possible. The smaller villages are used for Red
Cross stations. When in Frankfurt on one of my former trips I one
day remarked to an old woman, a farmer’s wife with whom I got into
conversation, that I could not understand why there were so few
wounded in a large town such as Frankfurt. “Come and have a look at our
village,” she answered, “we have them in our houses.” I accordingly
went to Andernach, which was the name of the village. She gave me
coffee and war bread, and treated me very kindly. There were six
wounded soldiers in her house, and I learned that there was hardly a
village on the slopes of the Rhine where wounded soldiers were not
billeted to benefit by the invigorating air of the Rhineland hills,
having first been treated in the hospitals. I was told by one of the
wounded soldiers that in a hospital about half-an-hour’s run from
Cologne 180 soldiers were lying disabled.
The Austrian authorities have their own particular methods; they
arrange, for instance, that only a third of the convalescent soldiers
shall be allowed out at the same time. Thus, if there are three hundred
wounded in a hospital who are able to walk, only one hundred are
permitted out at the same time for fresh air and exercise.
The number of blind soldiers is amazing. It was one of the most
terrible sights I saw. Before Italy participated in the war the total
number of Austrian soldiers who had lost their sight was 10,000, now it
is 80,000. I was informed of this by Dr. Robert Otto Steiner, the head
of the largest hospital in Vienna, probably the largest in the world,
the Wiener Allgemeines Krankenhaus, which has 8,000 beds, and 3,000
being occupied by men who have lost their sight.
The reason for this terrible number of blind soldiers is that in the
mountains the troops cannot dig adequate trenches, and the Italian
shells burst against the mountains and send showers of rock-fragments
in all directions. It was with a mournful expression that Dr. Steiner
told me of the 70,000 Austrians blinded within six months. I asked
him what was to happen to these poor fellows after the war, and he
confessed that they presented a problem which seemed beyond the power
of any Government to solve. Whether or not a monument be erected to the
Kaiser in the Sieges-Allée, there will be throughout Europe thousands
of living monuments to his “greatness” in the shape of the blind, the
mad, and the paralysed, who will breathe curses upon the name German
Militarism that has robbed them of nearly all save life itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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