ns, except German
Austria, the smallest, weakest, and most afflicted one of them all, were
cut off from it and all were cut off from each other. The final
political boundaries were not yet fixed, to be sure, but actual military
frontiers were already established with all their limitations on
inter-communication and their disregard of personal needs. Shut up
within their frontiers these regions found themselves varyingly with or
without money--if they had any it was of ever-decreasing purchasing
power--with or without food, fuel, and raw materials for industry; and
with lesser or larger numbers of locomotives and railway cars, mostly
lesser. But of everything the distribution bore no calculated relation
to the needs of the industry and commerce or even to the actual
necessities of the people for the preservation of health and life.

Vienna, itself, "_die lustige schoene Stadt Wien_" was, as it still is
today and for long will be, the saddest great capital in Europe. Reduced
from its position of being the governing, spending, and singing and
dancing capital of an empire of fifty-five million people--it never was
a producing capital--to be the capital of a small, helpless nation of
scant seven million people concentrated in a region unable to meet even
their needs of food and coal--Vienna represents the pathetic extreme of
the cataclysmic results of War.

But if the situation was most complex and hopeless in the south, it was
far from simple or hopeful in the north. Poland, the smaller Baltic
states and Finland were all in desperate plight and their new
governments were all aghast at the magnitude of the problem before them.
To add to the difficulties of general disorganization of peoples, lack
of the necessities of life, and helplessness of governments, there was
ever continuing war. Armistice meant something real on the West and
Austro-Italian fronts, but it meant little to Eastern Europe. There was
a score of very lively little wars going on at once over there: Poland
alone was fighting with four different adversaries, one at each corner
of her land.

But the climax of the situation was reached in the realization by all
immediately concerned that something saving had to be done at once, or
the whole thing would become literal anarchy, with red and howling death
rampant over all. Bolshevik Russia, just over the Eastern borders, was
not only a vivid reality to these countries, but it was constantly
threatening to come