“Under the sign of the ration card”, queue in front of a bakery in Thaliastrasse in Vienna’s 16th district, April 1915, photograph

The exultation that erupted – most of all gripping the intellectual and academic classes and also the middle-class milieu –was rapidly overshadowed by the reality of the mechanised war. As the first statistics of losses were announced even the frenetic, jubilant shouts of many volunteers marching off to war faded into a sad echo.