Vienna, April

A report of German plotting in Belgrade forwarded by our delegation in Paris reached me yesterday. It came without an expression of belief or skepticism, merely registering a rumor to the effect that German agents in Yugoslavia, particularly in Croatia, are planning to supplant the pro-ally, Regent Alexander, by his elder brother, Prince George. For some months now, as was well known, George had been under restraint, practically under arrest, in a country house near Nish.

Apparently the young man¹ is quite mad and after he had, in an outburst of passion, murdered one of his aides, he was placed in the safe seclusion out of which it is feared that the Germans are trying to entice him for some dark purpose.

I did not have much confidence in the yarn and yet as the Germans were very active in making trouble in Vienna, they might well be doing their stuff in the White City on the Save also. While I was deliberating what to do, “Jimmy” Logan, formerly of the Army and now in charge of the Food Administration in southeastern Europe, came in. He was leaving for Serbia in the morning with a train laden with supplies and medical stores for the typhus-stricken Serbs. Would I go with him? And I accepted even before he told me that he would have a private car and the right of way. I concluded it would be interesting, though depressing, to see Belgrade again, although now in ruins, and I would have an opportunity to smoke out the Prince George story. In any event, I would escape the importunities of the new government and the great lords who, almost on bended knees, were beseeching me to take up residence in their palaces and hoist over them our protective flag.

Certainly we traveled in luxury and comfort that far surpassed anything that had been provided for the mission of the Right Honorable Lieutenant General Jan Christiaan Smuts, and now there were only two of us to loll about in the private car. It was decorated with the Hapsburg arms and other reminders of the great tribe that had ruled for so many centuries over what had been until quite recently Felix Austria. And on the panels there were several reproductions of the famous Ville d’Este near Rome.

“I forgot to tell you,” explained Logan, “this is, or rather was, the private car of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, who in some way was descended from Beatrice d’Este, or Isabella, her also famous sister. In that historic villa near Rome he spent his honeymoon, and it was in this car that with his lady he traveled to the shambles at Sarajevo. In our little sitting room their coffins were placed side by side on trestles on the journey that brought them back to Vienna. The Austrian railway people think the car is haunted, or at least unlucky, and they were very glad to turn it over to the Food Administration. We find it most useful in transporting medical supplies and the less bulky foods to where they are needed. Odd, isn’t it? The car that carried that unlucky pair to their death, to where the avalanche of war and all its attending horrors started, helps us to alleviate some of the suffering and the epidemics that have followed in its train. Poetic justice, don’t you think so?”

We traveled all day through a beautiful country, very different from the monotonous, if fertile, plains of Hungary over which I had traveled so often before on my journeys to Serbia and to Turkey beyond. With Bela Kun and his Communist cohorts controlling Budapest, the Magyar capital is boycotted by all the railways and there is some justification for this attitude. Logan tells me that the Smuts train is the only one that put into Budapest during the last two months and escaped confiscation at the hands of the Soviet!

The country we traveled through was not only new to me, it was most attractive. It looked like western Maryland and the upper reaches of the Potomac. For a moment we stopped at Zagreb, better known to me as Agram, and then we ran along the beautiful Save River, dotted with its crenellated castles, now for the most part deserted, and many of them in ruins.

* * *

I confess I did not greatly enjoy the unusual luxury of the ImperialRoyal train. Inured as I am to scenes of massacre and mass murder, the present atmosphere redolent of this personal tragedy depressed me. Often during the night I heard the last words of the dying archduke, who did not know the fate that had also befallen his wife, “Sophie! Sophie! Watch over the Kinder.” Unmoved I had walked over the battlefields of Verdun with its half million dead, many unburied with still protruding, beseeching arms, and with but a passing shudder I had seen the bodies of hundreds of the “hot-country men” who had, at the field of La Victoria in Venezuela, been cut to pieces by the cutlasses of Castro’s Andinos. These things were horrible and, as I think, disgraceful to our civilization, but they were too horrible to grasp. On the other hand, it will be long before I shall forget the face of the little quartermaster captain who was mashed flat as a pancake on the Boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle in Paris twenty feet from where I stood, by the overturning of a lumber truck. And there is another dead soldier who travels with me, whose face I shall long see, although years have passed and millions have died, many of whom I have known and not a few of whom I knew intimately. It was on the East Front in March 1915. We were halted by a patrol outside of Memel where the street fighting between the Russians and the advancing Germans continued. Orders came from the High Command we were not to go down into the city where fighting continued, and in below-zero weather we stood until midnight on the brow of a hill where a few hours before a Russian battery had been stormed with heavy losses by a Landwehr battalion. We left our cars and ran up and down to keep from freezing, but gradually fatigue and the cold were bearing us down. The wind from the Baltic increased in intensity, and it seemed as if we would be frozen to death, and indeed some of us rather welcomed this escape from suffering. Then someone had a bright, if ghoulish, idea. All around the battery lay the frozen, stiff corpses of the men who, pulsating with life and vigor, had stormed it but a few hours before. Our chauffeurs picked up the dead and piled them together into a stockade and physically, at least, for the rest of the night we were protected from the icy blast, but one, a middle-aged sergeant with a great black beard, faced the corner into which I crawled. He greatly resembled the crude picture of Stonewall Jackson that presided over my nursery in the days when I first began to listen to war tales. The dead sergeant and I, alive perhaps because of the protection which his sturdy body afforded, lay side by side throughout that long night, and so a personal contact was established which still persists and so it will be, I fear, with my trip in the car which carried the archducal pair to the romantic honeymoon in Italy and to their death in Sarajevo. Of course I can do nothing about it and I should try to forget them, but still I know that for a long time I shall hear those piteous words of entreaty: “Soohie! Sophie! Watch over the Kinder.”