Watchful Four Powers Rub Nervous Shoulders in Vienna

This is the second installment of a report written by a travelling CRIMSON editor from Vienna, where heports that the Viennese have a resigned attitude" towards the burdens of a four-power occupation.

The Russians keep completely to themselves, seldom conversing even with each other in public, and no one else tries talking to them. The M. P. in front of the Bristol, a U.S. military hotel, summed it up. He loked down at the heavily armed guards in front of the Russian Hotel Grand, down the block, and said: "We don't bother them and they don't bother us."

By and large, the M.P. is right. A serious incident between East and West has not occurred for four months, when a Russian machine-gunned an American soldier to death. Their are many minor frictions, however. This week a British soldier was detained several hours one night by the Russians until recovered by his own M.P.'s. He had allegedly trespassed on Russian territory by getting off a trolley one stop too late.

As a defensible military outpost, Vienna is hopeless. The U.S. has about 1,500 troops here, Great Britain about a 1,000, and France about the same. The Russians undoubtedly have more than the combined Western total in the city alone, to say nothing of what is in the rest of of the Austro-Russian zone and in Czechoslovakia 25 miles away.

The Viennese themselves have a resigned attitude towards the four-power occupation. Their history is full of similar periods of anxiety, when the Turks beseiged the city centuries ago and when Napoleon occupied it in the last century. But then the foreign soldiers came and went.

Meanwhile the people must repair the destruction wrought by war, including rebuilding their famous opera house