_May 3rd._
A wild night, like a witches’ Sabbath. The nightingale did not sing, the
only sound was the roar of the guns. The shells are still stacked on the
other side of the wall of my room, out there on the terrace, and if in
the dark a shell were to strike here, not one stone of the village would
be left on another. But there is so much misery nowadays that no one
troubles about such things.
Again the attack did not come off, and during the whole night the garden
was wringing its green hands. I was awakened early by excited voices,
all talking of the hopeless situation of the Proletarian army. The
Rumanians have occupied the bridge-heads at Szolnok and are marching on
Budapest. Béla Kun has fallen.
The rumours spread through the villages, and the peasant members of the
small Directorates, recruited by force, are saying with pallid lips: “I
cannot be blamed, I have only done what I was told. No harm can come to
me, I never wanted it.” The Communists of Szügy have suddenly become
very polite: the Red soldiers actually saluted us. “What is going to
happen?” I asked one of them, and as I did so a drunken voice shouted in
the yard: “Down with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!” The political
delegates to the front have vanished, and disorderly, ugly indiscipline
has taken hold of the men. Sergeant Isidor Grosz shouted his orders in
the village street in vain, no one paid the least attention to him. One
of the soldiers shouted at him: “Shut up! You left your battery, didn’t
you, comrade, when the Czechs were shelling us?” I remembered the story
of this Isidor Grosz. He went to see his fiancée, having written out a
pass for himself and forged his commander’s signature to it. When he
turned up again his commander brought him before a court martial. Then
the 32nd regiment of heavy artillery began to grumble, and Isidor Grosz
ran straight to Béla Kun to complain. The discipline in the Red army is
as loose as this everywhere, which explains the feeble resistance it is
making. Meanwhile Comrade Böhm, the Commander-in-Chief, declares that
Proletarian self-respect is everywhere victorious.
The door opened; Mrs. Beniczky looked round and then said in a whisper:
“The Counter-revolution has broken out in Balassagyarmat. People are
shouting in the street: “We never were Communists!” Our people have
seized a telegram: in it the Soviet Cabinet has disclosed the situation.
It has fallen.”
Steps came along the terrace. We looked round in alarm. It was Mrs.
Aladár Huszár.
What had happened in Balassagyarmat? And her husband? She made a sad
gesture, then said that I must go with her. The Czechs were attacking
and Balassagyarmat was preparing to receive them. They only want the
railway line. Szügy is not going to be occupied, so that if I remained
here I should still be in the Soviet Republic. We should have to hurry.
“So they have not fallen after all? And what about the
Counter-revolution?”
She told us hastily that a meeting had been held at the square in front
of the county hall. Captain Bajatz, who last winter had driven the
Czechs out of the town, announced from the balcony that the situation
was hopeless. “It is a military impossibility to hold the town.” An
officer then exclaimed: “Down with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!”
Whereupon Comrade Sugár, the political delegate, elbowed his way to the
front on the balcony and incited the people against the bourgeoisie and
the officers. “They must be extirpated! Spare neither women nor
children! It is they who have brought the Czechs down on us!” The
attitude of the crowd changed suddenly: fists were raised and bayonets
pointed towards the bourgeoisie. Blood flowed. Captain Bajatz fled: he
was last seen riding towards Kóvár, and as he reached the bridge the
Reds opened fire on him. That was the gratitude of Balassagyarmat for
his having saved it once. However, he spurred his horse and with two
other officers rode over to the Czech lines. Since then the other bank
of the Ipoly has livened up. And in the streets of the town the
Proletarians are clamouring for our death and shout that they are going
to kill the hostages if the Czechs enter. “The whole town is in an
uproar, and the railway barriers are guarded. Let us go!”
I was loth to go, and Mrs. Beniczky looked affected too. She said
nothing, but she must have wondered that I should leave her now, when it
was fear of a Czech bombardment that had driven me here.
“I must explain.... It was not because of the—of the bombardment that I
came here.”
“I knew that much, Elisabeth; it was not fear that brought you here. But
I did not question you, I just enjoyed having you.”
The assumed name suddenly became unbearable.
“Dear Mrs. Beniczky, I am not the person you think.”
She stepped back and looked at me in surprise. “But who are you then?”
Her eyes sparkled when I told her. “Goodness me! But then....” She
kissed me and her face showed clearly that she was anything but
displeased. “Mind you come back if things turn out otherwise than you
expect.” And she looked after us as long as her eyes could follow.
Most of the soldiers had removed the red ribbon from their caps and had
replaced it by a white flower. By nightfall whole troops of them were
going off. A bandylegged, unkempt young Jew was hurrying towards Mohora.
“There goes Béla Kun’s soldier!” the Reds shouted. They laughed and one
of them spat in the dust.
As we approached the town the country became more and more deserted. We
could hear the sound of rifles in the distance. The poplars along the
Ipoly were bent as though the weight of the leaden sky pressed them
down. Everything bowed to the wind, the dust raced along, and petals
were swept in showers from the fruit trees. When we had reached the
streets two soldiers, pale as death, came running past us. They glared
at us suspiciously, with frightened eyes. Others followed them, carrying
rifles and haversacks. They shouted excitedly at us:
“Into the houses. Nobody must remain in the streets.”
Another group came running along, dragging a little fair-haired
lieutenant with them. They were holding his hands, and pulling him along
so that he should not escape. They even implored him: they needed him.
Opposite some railings they knelt down, the raised stocks of their
rifles pressed against dead-white cheeks.
“The Czechs are here!”
We reached the house and banged the door behind us. Machine-guns rattled
and a gun roared, making the windows shake. Opposite, under the palings,
soldiers bent low and ran feverishly towards the barracks at the end of
the town.
“There they are, near the wood. They have crossed the Ipoly!”
No human being was now visible in the streets. The rattle of the
machine-guns continued, and the guns fired more rapidly, the shells
whining through the air above our heads and bursting in the vineyards
towards Szügy. A cloud rose wherever they struck the earth.
“The church spire of Kóvár has been hit, it’s disappeared altogether.”
On the main road some cows were rushing along in a wild stampede, the
heavy coat of the cow-herd swinging right and left as he ran. Everything
was dashing for shelter.
The street became darker and quieter, and the rifles alone broke the
silence of the night. The electric lights were out, the current had
failed.
Hours passed, then heavy fists were heard banging at some door. Armed
men clattered past our window and went on towards the prison. The
unsuccessful Counter-revolution had disclosed the honest people. Another
door banged in the next street: they were taking hostages. And in every
part of Hungary doors are banging like that to-night....
* * * * *
Balassagyarmat, _May 4th_.
We are still ascending our blood-covered Calvary; later on its stations
may show up clearly. There, at that corner, did they put the cross on
our shoulders, there did they smite our faces, there did they spit into
our eyes, there did we collapse under the cross, and nobody came to help
us to bear it. We had to rise and drag it further.
Yesterday we thought we had escaped. Yesterday the news came that the
Cabinet had fallen and that the Red armies were everywhere on the run.
To-day they have shunted the ill-success of their arms and the people’s
fury on to the bourgeoisie. The game of the Károlyi revolution is being
repeated. Instead of pogroms, let there be massacres of Christians. They
spoke of it at the market place: Számuelly is coming to restore order.
The lives of the fallen Red soldiers must be revenged.
Mobilisation!... The newspaper seems to be composed entirely of
exclamation marks. ‘To the factory workers!’ ‘Order!’ ‘Appeal!’
‘Decree!’
Comrade Pogány has sounded a tocsin of alarm: “The news from the front
is bad. Our defeat at the front means the return of the Dictatorship of
the Bourgeoisie, our victory means the conservation of the Dictatorship
of the Proletariat. Everything depends on organised labour. To-day the
position is this: the revolutionary Proletariat of Budapest can no
longer trust the front, on the contrary, it rests with the Proletariat
of Budapest to save the front by its revolutionary impetus. The
Dictatorship has reached its crisis....”
Only after this confession did the newspaper give a belated account of
the May festivities of the capital. The town in scarlet: hundreds of
thousands in the streets: an exodus to the woods: illuminations,
fireworks.... And the poor people who expected to be fed on the festive
occasion staggered back like madmen to the great incertitude, hungry,
and their eyes sore with the scarlet glare.
The deadly colour of the red madness was still on the walls of the
houses when at 2 p.m. the trembling Cabinet met in the great room of the
Town Hall. Meanwhile rain had begun to fall, and the thirty millions’
worth of red paper-cloth was soaked; red streamed down the houses, the
walls, the plaster statues, the pavement. Everything was painted red. It
is said that the town looked like a huge blood-covered slaughter-house.
And then the news spread that the Dictatorship had fallen.
The newspapers reported the details of the emergency meeting of the
Workers’ Council. Béla Kun shouted to the audience that “The masses of
the Red army are fleeing before the hireling armies of Imperialism.
Looking now,” he said with raised voice, “at Soviet Hungary, I remember
a story by Gorki. Gorki went to Paris in search of the spirit of
Revolution, seeking its aid for the struggling revolution of the Russian
Proletariat. He searched for the ancient Revolution, crowned with the
good Phrygian cap, he searched and inquired, and at last was led to a
hotel where he found a courtesan, a woman fallen more or less to the
level of a street prostitute, and he asked her not to give herself to
the Czar, but to help the Revolution. But the woman the Revolution had
turned into a courtesan gave herself none the less to the Czar; so Gorki
ends with these words: ‘I wanted to spit my bloody, purulent saliva into
her face.’”
That is the kind of thing Béla Kun remembers when he looks at ‘this
Soviet Hungary’ and he dares to say it to a race to whom Louis Kossuth
once said: “I prostrate myself before the greatness of the Nation.”
Kossuth prostrated himself while Béla Kun thinks of expectorating.
I read the report to the end: nobody seems to have risen to choke the
words in his throat. In his awful Ghetto-lingo Béla Kun went on:
“... It is not the Rumanians, it is our own troops who are a danger to
Budapest. We had to disarm the units which returned from the northern
part of the Tisza, so as to save at least their weapons for the
Proletariat. The morale of the troops is such that Budapest is
helplessly at the mercy of a Rumanian attack. The question arises,
comrades, shall we give up Budapest, or shall we fight for Budapest? I
have always told my comrades that I know neither morality nor
immorality. I know of only two things; those that are useful to
Proletarianism and those which endanger Proletarianism. And I declare
that it is dishonourable to tell the bourgeois the truth if this truth
is to be hurtful to the Proletariat. But, comrades, I will not deceive
the Proletariat. I will tell you that the workers’ battalions are
wanting in the fighting spirit which would entitle us to think of the
salvation of Budapest....”
Thus does this man speak of his own character, the man who in his
absolute power admits that: “We were a small group, in opposition to the
majority of working men, when we started the fight for the
Dictatorship.” And he reveals the terrible secret of his success:
Károlyi’s high treason. “I feel somehow that if the Dictatorship were to
perish now, it would perish only because it gained a bloodless victory.
It was too cheap, it was given us for nothing....”
In fact, it cost nothing except Judas’ money and perhaps the existence
of Hungary. For now Béla Kun has renounced the whole of Hungary and is
ready to satisfy any territorial demands the Czechs, Rumanians and Serbs
may raise, on condition that his power is left to him, and “Budapest,
where the protest against capitalism can make a stand.”
His is no longer a human thirst for power: it is an insatiable animal
greed, which allows the limbs of its prey to be torn off as long as it
can devour the heart. After having bartered away the land which the
nation has held for a thousand years in exchange for a single town, he
has telegraphed to our hungry neighbours, offering them the ancient soil
of the nation. And all he has to say to his comrades about this
unexampled deed is this: “It was not for our pleasure that we sent those
telegrams to the surrounding bourgeois states....”
A stranger soul has never used stranger language in Hungary.
[Illustration:
BÉLA KÚN GIVES AN ADDRESS IN KASSA.
]
While Béla Kun was declaiming: “I am not in despair ... I do not want to
make you despair, comrades ... you will never hear despondent words from
my lips.... I shall never give it up.... I say we won’t be
downhearted ... bad times, but not hopeless....” news was brought to the
assembly: the position in the field is not hopeless! The attitude of the
meeting altered at once. The orator became truculent once more.
“If possible we must defend the Dictatorship before Budapest, through
the Bakony, to Wiener Neustadt.... We must not resign our power!”
The Workers’ Council then adopted a resolution—that it is the duty of
organised labour “to defend to the last drop of blood the achievements
of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”
How this defence is to be conducted was revealed by a comrade called
Surek:
“Honoured Workers’ Council.... The bourgeoisie is grinning and rubbing
its hands everywhere. We must freeze this grin on its face! To-morrow we
must go to the factories and our first duty will be to exterminate the
bourgeoisie effectively, in the strictest sense of the word. We must
keep our pledge that when the Entente comes here it shall find nothing
but mountains of bourgeois corpses and a determined Proletariat. Enough
bourgeois must not be left alive to form a Government.”
In deference to foreign countries this speech was not reported in the
papers; but political agitators are spreading the words of Comrade
Surek.
Now and then a bowed female form passes the window, her face set towards
the prison, carrying food for some hostage. The observation post of the
Reds has been established on the prison roof, just above the hostages.
Let the Czechs shell it! Soldiers stop the women, inspect their baskets
and take whatever they fancy. Then they say, as a parting greeting:
“That is the last dinner you need bring! If the Czechs enter, we shall
hang the swine.”
* * * * *
_May 5th._
The bombardment has ceased and the town is creeping out of its holes.
But people pass each other stealthily, without exchanging words, as if
they dared no longer talk. And above the county hall the wind is toying
with the red flag. A blood-red shawl is floating in the spring breeze:
Szolnok has been retaken.
In the afternoon Gregory, the Huszárs’ coachman, came running
horror-stricken from the town: the Reds have declared that instead of
Aladár Huszár they are going to arrest his wife.
It was about ten o’clock when there was a knock at the door.
“Let me go,” I said to my friend. Are they coming for her, or has her
husband come back, or are they searching for me? The candle guttered in
the wind, and at the garden gate three men with fixed bayonets emerged
from the dark. They pushed me aside without saying a word and marched up
the stairs into the room. I ran and got in front of them.
“What do you want?”
They strode towards me menacingly and suddenly I found myself
surrounded. They looked round suspiciously, and the leader said roughly:
“Why is there a light in this house?”
I gave some explanation. One of the soldiers, a long, angry-faced man,
leant over me threateningly:
“This is no time to have lights burning. Just you look out! If we catch
you again we shall hang you on that lamp-post there, at the corner.”
When they went I felt as if a throttling hand had released my throat.
* * * * *
_May 6th._
I have been thinking of my mother all morning. This is her name day, and
I cannot be with her. Fate is continually pushing back the hands of the
clock that will strike the hour of our reunion.
The town is beflagged with red flags. What has happened? Szolnok? Or is
it some other victory?
The Powers of the Entente have ordered the Rumanians back, and now they
are standing waiting beyond the Tisza. Meanwhile we perish here.
Számuelly has no time to come here, luckily: he is restoring order in
the towns which put out white flags on the arrival of the Rumanians. Six
Hungarians were hanged on the 3rd of May. Mrs. Huszár received the news,
one of the victims being a relation of hers, Béla Batik, an only son the
war left to his mother. Számuelly sat in judgment over him. “Off you go
to the gallows!” said he, and he himself put the halter round his neck.
Then he lit a cigarette and clapped Batik on the shoulder saying: “It
will be all right, my hangman has the knack of it. Listen, you dog! I
grant you the time it takes me to smoke this cigarette. If you will tell
me meanwhile the names of your accomplices I will let you off.” He then
sat down on a chair and smoked while the other stood under the gallows
with the rope round his neck. The cigarette was finished. “Long live the
White army and Hungary!” Batik shouted, and Számuelly released the trap
with his own hand.
Bloodstains multiply everywhere. We now know the names of at least two
of the victims whose blood has been spilt on the chain bridge. They were
Alexander Hollán and his father. They had worked hard all their lives
and they were slaughtered by those who called themselves the leaders of
the ‘workers.’
It happened on the 27th of April. All over Budapest it was forbidden for
anybody to be in the streets after 10 p.m. The window blinds had to be
drawn and if a light was visible in a window the ‘Terror Boys’ fired at
it. Armed lorries were continually rushing about in the dark streets.
The town listened with bated breath: hostages were being taken. Motors
were racing up the castle hill: it was a hunt for human victims. When
these had been collected a car crossed over to Pest and stopped on the
bridge. The two Holláns were hustled out on to the lower quay. Probably
it was there that their captors intended to do the deed, but for some
unknown reason they ordered their victims back again into the car. They
started off but stopped again at the pillar and obliged the tortured men
to get off. The motor-car waited near by and those in it heard a violent
altercation going on in the dark. Shots were then fired and there
followed two splashes in the Danube.
Nobody has seen the two Holláns since. The story of the happenings was
told by Karátson, a Secretary of State and one of their fellow
prisoners. Then, one does not know how, the news filtered out and is
being whispered to-day behind the closed doors and windows of Budapest.
Many know it, only poor Alexander Hollán’s wife is in ignorance. The
Communists declare that her husband is in gaol, and at noon her little
grey shadow waits day after day amongst the other women at the prison
gate. She brings food and linen to her husband and sends messages, and
thanks the terrorists at the gate for transmitting them. Meanwhile the
Danube carries her dead gently towards the sea.
The prisons are crowded with hostages awaiting their fate. Death
perpetually hovers over them, for they are threatened daily with
execution and daily one or another of them is led off to the prison
yard. They blindfold him and fire over his head—for fun. The hangmen of
to-day greatly enjoy gloating over their victims’ fear. Yet to produce
terror is the delight of degraded souls. Hearsay reports hundreds who
are the innocent inhabitants of prisons, but names cannot be
ascertained. Yet we know there are Archduke Joseph Francis, Bishop Count
John Mikes, Alexander Wekerle, the former Prime Minister, the president
and the vice-president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, several
former Ministers, court dignitaries and members of parliament, generals,
lord lieutenants, landlords, and many others, among them the aged Count
Aurel Dessewffy, Lord Chief Justice, who was dragged by Red soldiers
from the side of his wife’s deathbed to be cast into prison. There is
the élite of the Hungarian nation, with many others whose names have not
reached me. Many unknown people, students, women, farmers,
manufacturers, even some workmen. They are all hostages—prisoners in
their own country—pawns for the lives of Béla Kun, Számuelly, Pogány,
Landler and other comrades.
* * * * *
_May 7th._
Now and then comes the sound of distant gunfire. Whence does the wind
bring it? The Reds have beaten the Czechs back all along the Ipoly. A
new poster has been stuck on the wall of the house opposite, it is an
appeal to the inhabitants of Balassagyarmat by Comrades Riechmann, the
political delegate, and Singer:
“Comrades! We have vowed on our ideals that if any among you who want to
restore the old order raise their sacrilegious hands against us, we
shall strike them down with our iron fists and smite them like a hammer
smites the anvil. What do they want? To bring back the old criminal
order? Do not attempt the impossible, because henceforth the slightest
attempt will mean paying with your lives, and we will deal with you as
with ordinary assassins who are a danger to human life. Behold your
heroes, sitting in gaol and waiting for the sentence of justice for
their vile, incredible treasons.... What does the country mean to the
bourgeois? You have seen how it created happiness and comfort for them,
while our share was misery.... And we declare to the bourgeoisie of the
whole world that we will not give up our town and our country, because
_now they are ours, it was we who defended them for fifty-two
months_.... Long live the World-Revolution! Long live Béla Kun!”
Comrades Singer and Riechmann! They cannot even write the Hungarian
language, and yet they dare to claim not only our country but its
defence during the war which they successfully shirked for fifty-two
months. Let them behold from their graves, those who have fallen on
distant battlefields, those whose feet were frozen in paper boots, those
whose wives hungered and shivered in the queue! Among my relations
fourteen followed the call. All of them were young. Eight of them will
never return. Do they behold these things from their graves?
At the end of October the disbanded soldiers came back from the
world-war clamouring for pogroms. In November they were already
demanding the blood of their own kin. The air was full of secret
promptings: ‘Everything shall be yours!’ Later on there came the shout:
‘Plunder the gentle folk!’ Those who first whispered saved thus their
fortunes and their lives. And the people chose as its leaders the owners
of the gin-shops and declared the landlords their foes. And Comrades
Singer and Riechmann declare to-day that our country is their country
and no longer ours. The leadership of the nation which was once
Széchényi’s, Kossuth’s, Deák’s and Tisza’s, is now theirs.
* * * * *
_May 8th._
Béla Kun has asked the Rumanians for an armistice. His offer expresses
deadly fear. If he can retain the rest of mutilated Hungary in his grip
he will renounce any territory, is ready for any sacrifice.
Madarescu, the commander of the Rumanian troops in Transylvania,
answered three days later. In his conditions he never mentions the
Soviet but always speaks of Hungary. He insists on the disarmament of
all Hungarian forces. He requires that the Hungarian Command shall
acquiesce in the execution of the ultimate conditions whatever they may
be. He requires the delivery of all arms, guns, ammunition, means of
transport, equipment and provisions. He demands all railway material and
armoured trains, and orders the return of all prisoners of war, hostages
and civilian population carried off by the retiring army. This
reparation is to be done without any obligation of reciprocity on
Rumania’s behalf. That is how Hungary is spoken to to-day! And the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which has helped the advance of the
Rumanians from the Maros and Szamos to the Tisza, may count this
humiliating tone among its achievements. It is we alone feel the pain.
When on the 1st of May the Rumanians crossed the Tisza, Béla Kun
prepared for flight. The families of the People’s Commissaries were
packing up. Big sums were smuggled out of the country. Then the
Rumanians were stopped by the Entente, so Béla Kun gained time. He
organised the workers’ battalions and to-day he answers Madarescu’s
armistice proposals by mobilisation. So we continue in agony.
New orders have been posted up in the streets of Budapest:
“To save the Proletarian Revolution we order the general mobilisation of
the Proletariat. Budapest will from this date be under martial law. We
appeal to the Proletariat to do its duty to the last.
The Revolutionary Cabinet.”
And the hated and persecuted middle classes are ordered to pay the blood
tax for the salvation of their executioners: “Every officer of the
reserve who is under forty-five years of age must report for active
service. Those who refuse to obey this order....” If the middle classes
do not obey, they are threatened with the Revolutionary Tribunal; the
Proletarians, however, if they enlist, “will receive in addition to
their pay the usual wages of workmen.”
No, it is not yet over, indeed it is beginning once more.
In Budapest the comrade Commissaries and their wives are reviewing the
troops, and the electrician Commander-in-Chief is starting in the royal
train from his Headquarters to inspect the troops in the provinces.
The Galician Neros are now quite at home in their bloody and fantastic
rôle. Their chronicle, ‘The People’s Voice’ which until lately has spent
all its energies in undermining authority and in attacking militarism,
now reports in rapture: “Comrade Böhm inspected the troops and expressed
his complete satisfaction at their appearance. After the review the
Commander-in-Chief travelled with his whole staff to the front, where he
inspected the advance line and received the reports of his generals.
Comrade Böhm has expressed his confidence....”
It is an old familiar text, only the name of Comrade Böhm has been
substituted for that of the Archduke. 1914 ... 1919!
Here in this place it is not very easy to hold a review, for the greater
part of the garrison has evaporated. The place of Captain Bajatz has
been filled by a local butcher’s assistant who commands the army from a
coffee house. Comrade Riechmann is the chief of the general staff.
[Illustration:
EUGENE SZANTO _alias_ SCHREIBER.
ASSISTANT COMMISSARY FOR WAR.
]
Towards evening the news spread that the Czechs are going to surround
Balassagyarmat to-night. A nightingale was singing in the moonlit
garden, and voices rose in the garden next door:
“If the Czechs do not come to-night it will be the end of the hostages.
The soldiers have been shouting all day under the prison walls ‘You are
going to die, you swine!’”
At that moment a cannon roared in the vineyards.
“Bless your sweet little throat,” exclaimed the voice of an old woman.
“Don’t bless it so loud or you will find yourself in prison.”
“But the nightingale!” stammered the old woman.
“Of course,” someone laughed; “I thought you referred to the Czech gun.”
Wild firing came from the Ipoly, and bullets whistled right and left. We
ran towards the house. Near the shed a bullet passed so close to me that
I felt the wind of it: it passed over my head and struck the wall like a
mad wasp. The shutters of the houses were closed rapidly, they give one
at any rate a feeling of shelter. Bullets continued to spatter on the
walls. Every now and then we rushed out, looked round in the moonlight,
and then rushed back again. All the while the wasps are buzzing round
the house.
* * * * *
_May 9th._
On the sunny side of the street, tired, ill-looking, prematurely aged
people came slowly from the direction of the prison. The hostages have
been released. The order came from Budapest:
“The Soviet takes hostages when danger is imminent. As the Soviet is at
present in no immediate danger, we order their provisional release.”
The wife of a railwayman came into the yard with eyes red with weeping.
The soldiers had deserted their post, so Comrade Riechmann and the
butcher’s commander ordered the railwaymen out. They at least love their
country, and last winter they opposed the Czechs. Now they have driven
them back again, having made forty prisoners. But thirty-eight
railwaymen are missing, and Comrade Böhm is going to credit
internationalism with this victory won by Hungarian nationalism.
A carriage rattled down the street. Nowadays whenever a carriage stops
anywhere all the windows and walls of the neighbourhood are on the
alert. We noticed that everybody was looking in our direction.
Gregory the coachman put his head through the door:
“Here they are!”
Detectives. I hid my notes in the sofa cushions and fled before them
from room to room. They requisitioned uniforms and field-glasses. They
also inspected the library and told us that the piano was public
property. Even sewing machines are taken by the Government, and it makes
no difference if the owner is a tailor. Thus are they killing home
industries. They took all the tobacco they could find, nor did
opera-glasses escape; “The army needs them. We give no receipt. These
things no longer belong to you, nothing belongs to you.” And they took
them. As they left they questioned the maid in the corridor:
“And where may your master be?”
I heard the girl reply mockingly, “In town!”
“Don’t play the fool!” the detective shouted, “we know he has run away.
We are searching the whole county for him.”
Again the girl chaffed them. “What an idea! How can he have run away?
They are pulling your leg. He comes home every night.”
“Well I never,” said the man to his companion, and they whispered among
themselves. The maid thought herself very clever and laughed
contentedly.
When they had left, Gregory the coachman came in.
“They said they will come back and watch for him every night.”
Mrs. Huszár advised me to go back to Szügy till this zeal blew over.
In the afternoon the sky became clouded. The fusilade died down. The
stuffy heat preceding a storm weighed heavily on us. In town they were
burying some soldiers, unfortunate victims of the Red war. The
passers-by stopped on the kerb and stared at the funeral, while the
procession passed slowly under red flags. A red cross was borne in front
of it, then came the coffins, draped in red, followed by two
vulgar-looking girls, in red dresses, carrying wreaths of red flowers
tied with red ribbons. Under the grey sky, on the grey road, death,
dressed in red, proceeded towards the cemetery. And among the green
fields, in verdant peace, the garden of Szügy was waiting for me.