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In Vienna, Clark leads a simple, hardworking life. His wife Maurine is working on an occupation diary, and preparing to organize a U.S. wives' club. His daughter Ann, 19, and his son William, 20, are both in Austria. His pet cocker spaniel Pal is now famed through his master's bitter crack: "Here are the Russians with 150,000 troops and here I am with my cocker spaniel."
Clark is an indefatigable stroller; he likes to roam about the Vienna Woods, from where he can get a look at the city as a whole—at the neat patterns of villas in the U.S. zone, at the sooty, rambling factories in the Russian zone, and at the Danube that flows, a grey, swift dividing line, between the two.
The Danube is a traditional boundary: East has met West there before. The Avari, Huns, Magyars, Turks—all tried to break into Europe through the country which Charlemagne called his Ostmark (eastern frontier). Today again, legions from the East stand at the Danube, and again a battle is being waged for a bridgehead to Europe's heart.
Littler than Least. Vienna in the late spring of 1946 was a broken city. The baroque grandeur of its stone merely served as a backdrop for uncleared rubble, and the remnants of its once-blithe spirit were merely counterpoints to present hopelessness. Within the brief flash of 30 years, Vienna had in turn been the gay and gilded center of an empire, the outsized capital of a bankrupt rump republic, a subordinate, provincial town in Nazi Germany, and the cringing wartime scene of bombings, street fighting, burning, looting.
Ever since the middle of the war, the Viennese have felt hunger. Today, Vienna's once brimming Naschmarkt is closed down except for an occasional cabbage or flower counter, and Viennese eat about as much in one day as an American eats for breakfast. The weekly ration (except for heavy workers) consists of one loaf of bread, two ounces of dried meat, three ounces of fat, a cup and a half of flour, a cup and a half of dried peas and five ounces of sugar. Many Viennese know that they would not be eating at all this month if it had not been for Clark's efforts, but, as traditional Raunzer (gripers), they are now telling each other that the grammar rules on "little" ought to be amended to "little, less, least, UNRRA."
The Viennese are drably dressed these days, for there are no textiles anywhere in Austria; on the black market a pair of men's shoes costs $200, and a pair of silk stockings $25. Vienna's health is poor, with 1,000 new TB cases each month and a heavy VD rate.
"Dear Old Spire." On his strolls through the city, Clark might walk through parks in which bank clerks now plant vegetable gardens, though many parks had already been used for another purpose: the burying of Red Army dead. The Hotel Sacher, which had witnessed much of the monarchy's history and more of its amours, is now a British officers' club. In the Kärntner Strasse (Vienna's Fifth Avenue) the stores are gaping and shattered; at the Cathedral of St. Stephen, Nazi artillery and flames have left the foreparts of the choir and the high altar exposed to the sky. But its 500-year-old spire still rises above Vienna in slender majesty. Viennese, this spring, revived an old song: "Dear old spire of St. Stephen's, you will pull through this one too."