 Reich joined the Austro @-@ Hungarian Army during the First World War , serving from 1915 to 1918 , for the last two years as a lieutenant at the Italian front with 40 men under his command . When the war ended he headed for Vienna , enrolling in law at the University of Vienna , but found it dull and switched to medicine after the first semester . He arrived with nothing in a city with little to offer ; the overthrow of the Austria @-@ Hungarian empire a few weeks earlier had left the newly formed Republic of German @-@ Austria in the grip of famine . Reich lived on soup , oats and dried fruit from the university canteen , and shared an unheated room with his brother and another undergraduate , wearing his coat and gloves indoors to stave off the cold . He fell in love with another medical student , Lia Laszky , with whom he was dissecting a corpse , but it was largely unrequited . 
