They looked round and counted their cost--a million and a half dead. A multitude of maimed, and blind, and nerve-shocked men. A birth-rate that had sunk to zero. A staggering debt which they could not pay. A cost of living which mounted higher and ever higher. A sense of revolt among the soldiers who had come back, because their reward for four years of misery was no more than miserable. So it was in Italy, stricken by a more desperate poverty, disappointed by a lack of spoil, angry with a sense of “betrayal,” afraid of revolution, exultant when a mad poet seized the port of Fiume which had been denied to her by President Wilson and his conscience. Across the glittering waters of the Adriatic I went to Trieste and found it a dead port, with Italian officers in possession of its deserted docks and abandoned warehouses, and Austrians dying of typhus in the back streets, and starving to death in tenement houses. And then, across the new State of Jugo-Slavia cut out of the body of the old Austrian Empire now lying dismembered, I came to Vienna, which once I had known as the gayest capital of Europe, where charming people played the pleasant game of life, with music, and love, and laughter. In Vienna there was music still, but it played a _danse macabre_, a Dance of Death, which struck one with a sense of horror. The orchestras still fiddled in the restaurants; at night the opera house was crowded. In cafés bright with gilt and glass, in restaurants rich in marble walls, crowds of people listened to the waltzes of Strauss, ate smuggled food at monstrous prices, laughed, flirted, and drank. They were the profiteers of war, spending paper money with the knowledge that it had no value outside Vienna, no value here except in stacks, to buy warmth for their stomachs, a little warmth for their souls, while their stock of Kronen lasted. They were the vultures from Jugo-Slavia and Czecho-Slovakia come to feed on the corpse of Austria while it still had flesh on its bones, and while Austrian Kronen still had 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.