16 June 1920.
Vienna.
This ancient European city was no longer what it once had been in its days of prosperity.
The streets lay desolate; shops that had once bustled with noise and activity were now cold and lonely. Passersby hurried along in masks, unwilling to linger in conversation.
The number of military police in Vienna was also visibly higher than usual, tasked with keeping the city functioning. Beyond epidemic prevention, they were charged with containing any small-scale rioting that might erupt in the urban districts and monitoring outsiders.
Every so often one could see houses sealed with white strips, marking them as sites of potential danger; anyone approaching would be driven away by uniformed patrolmen.
Most of these houses were isolation zones for severe cases, and thus were under special scrutiny.
For Austria-Hungary, this old-established European great power, the Empire had entered yet another era of calamity after 1914.
