Seite - 661 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Writing on the Wall 661 ing the delivery quotas. Nonetheless, the number of cattle, eggs and other agricultural products to be relinquished was precisely specified. Shoes were in particularly short supply, and wool was also a very rare commodity. Wool remnants were collected in order to knit new woollen garments. City dwellers went on foraging trips to the sur- rounding countryside. Women from Prague exchanged clothes, shoes and even hair for a sack of potatoes. The other side of the coin, as it were, was the sight of war profiteers and speculators, the greed for profits and the excessive lifestyle of not so very few priv- ileged individuals. Soothsayers enjoyed a boom.1499 In the Imperial and Royal War Ministry in Vienna, a ‘Scientific Committee for the War Economy’ was established in April 1916. However, its purpose was primarily to gather data and to analyse the war economy, and not to provide relief. This was already impossible due to the fact that within the committee, whose members included Otto Neurath and Othmar Spann, opinions regarding the causes and measures conflicted dramatically. Following his release from prisoner of war captivity by the Russians, the intention was that Otto Bauer should become a member. At the beginning of November 1916, the British learned from Vienna that the crisis was worsening.1500 The queues in front of the shops were growing longer and longer. Regular control checks were made in order to prevent ‘foraging’, and the punishments were intended to sting. Butchers who sold something at any time other than during the three days on which meat was permitted to be sold were just as severely punished as their customers. In Hungary, too, two meat-free days and one fat-free day had already been decreed. The sale of bread and baked goods in cafés and restaurants was forbidden. Beer cost three times as much as it had done before the war. The price of food was around 178 per cent of what it had been in 1914. To make matters worse, the harvest had not been as good as had originally been predicted after all. In Bohemia, separate ration cards for potatoes also had to be issued. There were food demonstrations, and shop windows were broken. The shortage economy was also reflected by the fact that soap had almost entirely disappeared, and what was available had become very expen- sive. There was simply no more fat left in order to produce soap. The people going hungry in Austria cursed the monopolists, the Hungarians, the aristocrats, the Rothschilds, and others. Foreign diplomats sent their families to Swit- zerland. At the end of the day, one only had to read the newspapers to learn the extent of the suffering and of the starvation in particular. For the Austrian half of the Empire, the situation could be summarised as follows : in 1915 and 1916, Galicia, to which a third of the agricultural land of Cisleithania belonged, and where a quarter of Austria’s grain was harvested during peacetime, had as good as disappeared as a source of supply. It had become a battlefield, the population had fled, and the fields in the surrounding vicinity were sequestered as a means of satisfying the needs of the army. There were also deficits in other areas, particularly as a result of the shortfall in farmers and helpers, the lack of