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travel without a passport. Had railway traffic with Russia been maintained?
    Vienna buzzed with the wildest rumours. Czech forces were planning to occupy the capital and the whole of Lower Austria. The Emperor had been arrested by revolutionary troops while trying to cross the Hungarian border. Wöllersdorf and Wiener Neustadt were in flames. A demented army driver raced through the streets in his car, urging people to go home and lock their doors. Fourteen thousand Serbs and Russians from the Siegmundsherberg POW camp were marching on Vienna, he yelled. Anyone in possession of firearms was to report to police headquarters.
    The established facts were no less alarming. An assemblage of officers and other ranks had elected a nine-man soviet "to do away with the hidebound bureaucracy and regimentation, cowardice and malevolence of the ruling classes". A captain in the Stockerau Rifles proposed the formation of a Red Guard but was shouted down; a corporal who couched the same demand in stronger language was applauded and hoisted shoulder-high. Gangs of coal-heavers and deserters looting warehouses and wagons at the Nordbahn freight yard seized an entire military supply train. Two hundred convicts took advantage of the general confusion to break out of Wöllersdorf Prison, and jewellers boarded up their window displays in a trice. A Czech battalion about to be disarmed at the Brigittenau marshalling yard offered resistance and attacked the station guard with hand grenades and machine-guns.
    Tobacco and army blankets, knapsacks and shoe leather, cleaning materials and mess tins - all these commodities, of which unlimited supplies were obtainable from discharged soldiers, went down in price. By contrast, the cost of a small loaf of bread soared to fifteen kronen. The Food Office announced that the meat ration of a quarter-pound of meat per head per week could not be sustained because Czechoslovakia had imposed a ban on the export of foodstuffs. In street and tavern, people sang new words to an old tune:
    Who's to govern the poor Viennese
    now that Austria's down on her knees?
    The Czechs know how best
    to feather their nest,
    and to hell with the poor Viennese!
    Bogus military police patrols stopped soldiers and relieved them of their food and personal belongings, and gunfights broke out when they clashed with detachments of the Vienna garrison. It was nonetheless possible to discern isolated signs of an undiminished will to survive and faith in the future. A film poster advertising "The Princess of Berania, a Hymn to Love and Sorrow" rubbed shoulders with an official announcement stating that the nth Class Lottery would be in no way affected by "recent events", and newsboys still hawked special editions containing communiques from the Western Front: "Brisk artillery fire on both banks of the Meuse. Strong American forces have been brought to a standstill in the woods north of Boval."
    Dr Emperger was busy sorting through his civilian wardrobe when Vit¬torin called on him. Dinner jacket, morning coat, fashionable pin-striped trousers, neckties, coloured shirts, an overcoat, a short fur sports jacket, and a brocaded silk waistcoat lay strewn around in picturesque confusion on the sofa and chairs. The room was filled with a penetrating stench of camphor and naphthalene. Arrayed on the desk in order of battle were oxfords, riding boots, pumps, lace-up boots, and galoshes.
    Emperger greeted his former fellow prisoner of war with a badly crumpled officer's cap in his hand.
    'Take a look at that!" he said. "There's gratitude for you. Two years in the trenches, two years in Siberia, and yesterday they repaid me by cutting the rosette off my cap. Callow youths, apprentices, budding clerks. Ah well, good riddance, no use crying over spilt milk. Have a seat, Vit¬torin - if you can find one, that is. You can see the state of this place. What shall I do with my greatcoat and uniform tunic? Do you think a costumier's would buy them off me?