_May 23rd._
I had hurried in vain. The Directorate has come back, so I have to
remain in my Red prison. The battle last night caused many casualties,
and the towns near the front are bewailing their dead. Everything that
is Hungarian sorrows. The wheel of Fate is turning in blood, slowly,
terribly. It is turned by the Powers, but it is our blood.
Noon came, then afternoon, again the enchanting hour of sunset on the
banks of the Ipoly. The sun stands on the hills above the bank and pulls
at the golden net which he cast over the valley in the morning. Like a
fisherman he pulls the light, glittering net over the fields and crops.
The net glides on, fast, without a sound. Now and then its gold is
arrested for an instant by a shrub, by the verdure of a poplar, by the
aspen of the river banks. Then the net glides on, and the trees, the
crops, the water, the meadows, grow dark. The net has reached the
horizon. For an instant, like a golden line, it lingers on the blue
crest of the hills, then suddenly it dips into the west on the other
side and is gone.
I love this light: it has touched the steeples of our churches, the
thresholds of our cottages, from one end to the other of our country.
For a thousand years it has come to us with dawn, over Transylvania,
over the Carpathians, the Great Plain, over the waters of the Tisza and
the Danube, over the fields of Banat, over the Carso, over the blue,
salt bay of Fiume, over all our ancient, humiliated counties, over Buda
and Pest, over Pressburg and Trencsén. All that has been torn asunder is
united again in its net. But the catch of the great fisher is scanty
now: he carries naught but another Hungarian day, a day of anguish, of
blood, and of tears.
Only occasional rifle shots sounded round the house now; the town was
going to rest. The electric light went out early to-night, so Mrs.
Huszár and I sat facing each other by candle-light.
Shells screeched through the air above the roof. What is happening to
our country? For days we have had no newspapers. Tribunals of Terror sit
at night. Racing motors spread death and Béla Kun speaks of plans for
tens of years.
The clock on the wall has stopped; goodness knows how long we have been
sitting like this. Better to do something than sit and think, so I
fetched my patience cards. Tiny cards, the coloured toys of an old
world. Crowned kings, ermine cloaked, powdered little queens, haughty
young knights, they all look as if in their vanity they were leaning
over a mirror to see their reflection. When I left home my mother packed
these cards in my bag, and they have become my only luxury. Whenever I
look at them they tell me something gently, in whispers, of my home.
Soothers of worries, prophets, fortune-tellers! We laid the cards slowly
out on the table, collected them, started anew. How thin my hands have
grown....
Over the roof, high up, another shell whines. Then a splintering crash.
Now the other side answers....
“The Reds....”
“That one came from the Czechs.”
Silence.
“There’s another Red.”
We spoke mechanically, for by now we had got to know the voices of the
guns. Meanwhile the little queens and kings on the table came and went
by the light of the candle.
“The Czechs....”
Three weeks! For three weeks it has been like this. Yesterday, to-day,
to-morrow—it is always the same. There are no longer nights and days:
there is nothing but monotonous, continuous explosions.
What if it is to be always like this? What if this is to continue for
ever! The very air seemed to shudder. From the opposite side of the
table a pair of wide-open, fixed eyes stared at me.
“The Czechs....”
Machine-guns were rattling somewhere near the Ipoly, and the dogs
barked. Another bullet struck the wall.
“The Reds....”
Again the windows shook with the detonation. At the end of the room the
door opened by itself, making room for hopeless despair, which entered
and sat down to keep us company.
* * * * *
_May 24th–25th._
If after the bloody battles of the war the victorious generals had
occupied our country their conquest would have put an end to the
slaughter. But Hungary was occupied without fighting by twenty-four
Jews. The state of war has become permanent, the slaughter continues,
and—worst of all misfortunes—for months there have been continuous
executions. Sentence of death is everywhere. Some take a long time to
realise it, but it is there none the less.
Dreadful news reaches us from Budapest: the city is starving; and in
answer to this, Béla Kun declared at a meeting of the Workers’ Council:
“There are enough supplies to prevent the Proletariat of Budapest from
going hungry.” He forbore to speak of the inhabitants of the city, only
of the privileged Proletarians, which for him means the Jewish
intellectuals and, possibly, those who profess to be Red Proletarians.
They will not go hungry. If Hungarians do ... Béla Kun shrugs his
shoulders.
The cruel ingenuity of the People’s Commissaries is inexhaustible.
Whatever they do not dare to do themselves is done by the Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Council, and as a silent means for wholesale executions food
tickets have been introduced. The inhabitants are divided into classes,
one class receives bread, the other is denied it. Those who receive red
tickets—the workmen performing manual labour, Red soldiers and all the
Red élite—will still be able to eat their fill. The recipients of blue
tickets—officials, teachers, widows, pensioners—may continue hungry.
Those who receive no food tickets will have to die of starvation. Thus
it is possible to carry out executions merely by the use of coloured
scraps of paper.
“_The classification of the head of the household will apply to all
those members of the family who live with him._” This order reveals the
intended extermination of a class: the children of the Hungarian
educated classes are to be exterminated with their parents. The
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which carries its class war into
everything, even into its administration of justice, its ‘First Reader’
and the nursery schools, uses daily bread as a weapon of war. Never has
cruelty been displayed with such cynicism. Not only does the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat make a distinction between adults, but
it extends its favouritism to the children. It distributes food with
discrimination, the children of the ruling class enjoying a preference.
Let the miserable little ones who had the misfortune to be born in the
grey, modest homes of officials or other intellectuals instead of having
seen the light of the world as offspring of labourers or Red soldiers,
let those poor little children starve and perish. Since Herod nothing so
wantonly cruel has been known in human history.
* * * * *
_May 26th–29th._
For two months the blood-reeking news has been coming. At first we shook
our heads incredulously. Rubbish! Visions of a distracted mind. Terror
inspires mad tales. Then the news died down, and now, all of a sudden,
it has returned with proofs and names.
It was at the beginning of April that I heard that a sailor in Budapest
was recruiting a band of terrorists among freed convicts and Russian
Jews. Next we heard that these people had occupied the palaces of Counts
Batthyány and Hunyady. On the first of May they hung out a huge sign
over the palaces: THE LENIN BOYS, and ever since then they have been
known by that name. The Lenin Boys, armed to the teeth, clad in leather
coats, appear at night in the streets of Budapest or in those provincial
towns where the miserable population dares to show signs of
dissatisfaction. The other day they carried off the organisers of the
Counter-revolution, Colonel Dormándy and Victor Horváth, who are said to
have been tortured atrociously. They were tied up in the cellars of the
Batthyány palace, burning cigars were stuffed into their mouths, water
was forced in enormous quantities down their throats, and nails were
driven under their finger-nails. Whether they still live no one knows;
there are others too. Last week we heard that a counter-revolution had
been attempted at Makó and that the former President of the House of
Commons, Louis Naváy, had been killed. We could not believe it: all his
life he had been an advanced Liberal who had fought for universal
suffrage, and he was a gentle scholar and philanthropist; moreover after
the Revolution began he retired from all public affairs.
[Illustration:
1. EUGENE VARGA _alias_ WEISSFELD.
]
[Illustration:
3. DR. HELEN PECZKAI.
]
[Illustration:
2. ALEXANDER NYÁRI.
]
[Illustration:
4. JOSEPH GAJDOS.
]
(_For an account of these Terrorists, see the_ APPENDIX.)
But the news persisted: the terrorists had gone down to Makó to take
hostages and amongst others they had arrested Louis Naváy, his nephew
Iván and the mayor of the town, and had taken them by rail to Budapest.
When the train stopped at the station the terrorists shouted into the
compartment where the prisoners were: “Let the Counts and Barons step
forward!” Nobody moved, then a man who as an orphan had been brought up
by the kindness of the Návays shouted: “This one’s a Right Honourable
and that one’s an Honourable, take these.” The Lenin Boys dragged them
from the train and forced them to dig their graves at the bottom of the
embankment. There was no time for a tribunal, so they fired at them
without any preliminaries, stabbed them repeatedly with their bayonets,
and crammed them into the half-dug graves. One of them was not quite
dead when they were buried, and his poor protruding hand waved feebly
for a time. The picture of it haunted me for many nights. It was
impossible! Incredible! But the news was repeated and proved to be true.
Other news followed.
A young ensign named Nicholas Dobsa, eighteen years old, suddenly
disappeared in Budapest. He was asked by the Terror Boys for his
identity papers, and he laughed. He said nothing, just laughed. Poor
boy, he disappeared behind the door of the Batthyány palace never to
reappear. Others disappeared too, and more pools of blood were found in
secluded places. Many other violent deaths were reported, though rumour
could not give the names.
Meanwhile Számuelly’s special train is on the move all the time, and
wherever it stops there are executions. It started at Szoboszló, a long
distance from here, and the news came to us by an eye witness, Antony
Szatmáry, a railway man. It happened on the 23rd of April, when the Red
front was at Debreczen. During the morning a hussar suddenly stepped out
of the ranks and shouted: “Let us run, the Rumanians are coming!” So the
International Battalion started off at once. The remnants of the army
fled on the last train to Szoboszló, and my informant, Szatmáry, was
pressed in to act as stoker. An armoured train, advancing cautiously,
met them, and a black-haired, red-nosed young man leant out of the
window: “What news, comrade?” “We are the last to leave,” the stoker
answered.
The young man was Számuelly, and when he stopped at Szoboszló he was mad
with rage. He ordered the station master to be flogged, as well as some
workmen, and when his train reached the signal-box and saw that a white
flag had been hoisted on the church spire he ordered the train back and
ran into the town with his terrorists, accompanied by a fair-haired,
blue-eyed woman on horseback. He arrested three men at random, Körner a
mill-owner, Joseph Tokay a police officer, and Ladislaus Fekete the
mayor, and had them hanged on trees in front of a chemist’s shop. “Be
quick!” he said, and cleaned his nails while the execution was being
carried out. Then he boarded his train again and went on. In Kaba he had
the curate, the notary and the magistrate hurriedly tortured, and moved
on again, because the Rumanians were coming. Thence he went to Szolnok,
where he took hostages and had them hanged. One hundred and fifty were
executed. They were all Hungarians—and Christians....
Steps approached the house and Mrs. Huszár exclaimed in alarm: “The
parson!”
The Reformed minister, Sebastian Kovács, looked frightfully thin in his
black coat. His face was ashen and fresh furrows played round his mouth.
He spoke pantingly, as if he had been running hard, and turned to me.
“God protected you that you did not come with me. When I reached the
Ipoly both Reds and Czechs came rushing towards me. I had no choice, so
ran into the river and threw myself into the water, which was simply
swept around me by bullets. The Reds fired volleys after me.”
That was the history of the journey I should have had to share.
“You would undoubtedly have been shot or arrested,” the minister went
on. “The Czechs wanted to intern me, and the Reds were hunting for me.
For three days I hid among the crops before I dared to come home. I hear
that a Czech shell struck the church; we had arms hidden under the
roof.”
Bullets were again whistling in the street. The minister shuddered and
looked anxiously round, then he smiled, embarrassed: “Since then my
nerves won’t stand it. I had rather too much of it.” He sat down almost
in a state of collapse, and although he was a young man he looked very
old.
* * * * *
_May 30th–31st._
The banks of the river were unusually silent this evening. Just as it
was getting dark the soldiers rolled a hogshead into the museum
garden—the museum serves as a barracks. We heard one of them saying
under our window that there was going to be a distribution of rum. What
does that mean?
The patrol passed. Then the strains of a Gypsy band filtered through the
night. Silence followed. It must have been about two in the morning when
a voice mingled with my dreams. I woke, but could not at once grasp its
meaning.
[Illustration:
“SZÁMUELLY ... TOOK HOSTAGES AND HAD THEM HANGED.”
]
“Attack....”
“Who?”
“The Reds!...”
That was not what we had hoped for! For an instant my heart stopped
beating. Doors were carefully opened and closed. The little girl came
into the room and sleepily dragged her pillow behind her, like a white
ant carrying a load too heavy for it. She lay down on the couch and fell
asleep.
Wild firing was going on, so we opened the window. Suddenly the rifle
shots seemed to come much nearer. The dawn was full of explosions and
the deadly arpeggios of the machine-guns ran into one another, their
staccato notes running in endless sequence up and down the banks of the
Ipoly. Someone was playing the dance of death in the grey light. Shells
passed so rapidly over the roof that it was impossible to tell which
side fired them, and stray bullets thudded against the walls of the
houses. Not a soul was visible. The house shook and every sound echoed
through it as it does when one is under the arch of a bridge.
This went on for several hours: the vague grey objects regained their
outlines, and things assumed their natural colours. The golden sun shone
on green trees and on the brown tiles of the roofs. The artillery went
on firing, but the rattle of the machine-guns seemed to get further and
further away. The fight was now beyond the Ipoly, somewhere among the
vineyards. It was not the other bank that had come to break down our
prison, it was our prison that had spread to the other side.
A young boy doubled up on a bicycle passed under our window. “The Reds
have crossed the river!” he shouted. “The Czechs are running along the
whole line.” People began to appear from the houses and a peasant girl
stepped aimlessly into the middle of the street. The vineyards became
silent; the Red guns alone went on firing and there was no answer from
the other side. But it was not the silence of the living; it was the
silence of death. Under the tension the dam which kept the Red waves in
bound has broken, and the wave has spread and flowed over little
hamlets, villages, and castles, hitherto untouched. God help the people
on the other bank, for they are all Hungarians and their share is
suffering and death. The victory remains with Trotsky’s agents. The long
road of homelessness has become longer in front of me, stretching into
the unknown, even beyond the frontiers.
Presently the guns on our bank stopped firing too and on the main road
little figures, bent under heavy loads, could be seen approaching. When
they got nearer I saw that they were soldiers—the victorious Reds
returning from the villages on the other bank among the vineyards, laden
heavily with loot. They had captured the entire camp of the fleeing
Czechs and brought bundles of rice, matches, tobacco, sacks of dried
prunes, barrels of rum, wine and honey. A Jewish front delegate had even
obtained a carriage, which he had loaded high with plunder, and the
soldiers roared with laughter as he drove down the street. Let Béla Kun
run after the Czechs himself if he wants to! They were very merry and
some of them very unsteady on their feet.
About noon, however, their merriment was unexpectedly interrupted.
Firing broke out suddenly and machine-guns rattled in the vineyards. A
soldier without his cap and his face white with fright rushed towards
the Museum garden. “The Czechs have come back!” he shouted, and his
voice rang down the street. “They’re in the vineyards again and have
captured our people!”
The Czechs had, in fact, returned to the vineyards and caught sixty Reds
pilfering there. The buglers sounded the alarm in vain: the Red army was
busy cooking rice and drinking rum. Some Proletarian women, who had had
no share in the booty, stood there, arms akimbo, and scolded the
soldiers: “Of course when there’s a distribution of meat or of milk
you’re always in the front row. Then you shout that you are Reds and
steal the milk from the kiddies’ mouths. But when it is a question of
driving away the Czechs you run home with what you have stolen. You let
them take the hill.”
Most of the soldiers were drunk, in fact they had got tipsy before the
attack began, for while they were falling in Gypsies played to them and
rum was distributed.
“Mental degradation by means of alcohol was one of the weapons of the
bourgeois,” shouts the Red press. “Alcohol is the Proletariat’s greatest
foe,” is posted by the Communists on all the walls. Yet the Dictatorship
of the Proletariat makes the class-conscious Red army drunk whenever it
wants to drive it to face unnecessary death.
* * * * *
_May 31st._
What hast thou done, Michael Károlyi?
When morning came the Czechs had stealthily, quietly evaporated from the
hills, fleeing before a miserable handful of Reds. They are the same
Czechs who five months ago descended from the mountains of Zólyom and
took undisputed possession of Pressburg and Kassa, impregnable Komárom,
a third of our country. How they would have run if they had had to face
the hussars of Limanova and the territorials of Gorlice! But Károlyi’s
minister of war did not want to see any soldiers, the same Linder who
recently, at a review, exclaimed to comrades Böhm, Pogány and Landler in
front of their armed servants: “You see we had to break up the old army
to create this.”
Two towns and all the heights above them have been taken by the Reds,
who have captured machine-guns and two heavy guns. The Czechs were
surprised in their sleep and fled half-naked, all the prisoners being
taken in their night clothes. Peasants’ carts laden with Czech uniforms
and boots rattled over the bridges all night. I could not sleep: I
thought of the people on the other bank of the Ipoly, whom I do not know
and yet for whom I fear. When they wake they will find the train of the
plunderers which brings the awful Red epidemic of tyranny and terrorist
tribunals. And when it comes back it will carry away hostages....
The clock struck. Half-past one.... A long train whistle; buffers
knocking together; coupling-chains clanging in the dark. Fetters and
skeleton keys....
May the Lord have mercy on us all!
* * * * *
_June 1st._
A drum is being beaten in the village and the sound echoes from street
to street. The Revolutionary Cabinet has decreed general conscription,
and a small minority of alien race disposes of the nation’s blood by
simple decree. I shuddered. Henceforth they are going to force everybody
to take up arms for them against himself.
An aeroplane flew over us. “An Italian machine,” said someone in front
of the house. The airman was reconnoitring the Ipoly valley—eyes from
another world looking down on us, indifferently, without sympathy. To
him we appear only as black spots, swarming ants. Does he know that the
ants are suffering, that the ant-hill has been kicked to pieces and that
strange vermin have invaded it? He flew on—a dragonfly passing across
the prisoner’s window.
The catafalque of the fallen Red soldiers has been erected in front of
the county hall; red flowers, a red cross. (Why the cross?) Red shrouds
showed under the lids of the red coffins. Only the little son of
Stefanovic was not among them—the only child of a counter-revolutionary
railway man. He was the best pupil of his school, a fervent little
patriot, but was called up and had to go. He was wounded under the
vineyards and implored the soldiers in vain to take him back to
Balassagyarmat. They had no time—they were carrying rice. So the boy
dragged himself to a field of oats and when the Czechs came back they
found him and clubbed him to death with the butts of their rifles—“the
little red vermin.” His parents brought the corpse back, and the
Directorate sent them a red coffin. “That is enough,” said his father,
“he shall never be buried with such tomfoolery.”
Among the dead Reds there are many little Stefanovics. Passers-by stop
reverently at their graves, for they hated the Directorship of the
Proletariat and loved their country.
Two soldiers came into the yard, two sad-faced boys, and asked for red
flowers and red ribbons for their comrades. Out there, unmarked graves;
in here, propaganda funerals.
In front of the county hall Comrade Singer pronounced the valedictory
discourse:
“We take leave of you with the promise that we will fight with merciless
hatred against the bourgeoisie, and, should we perish, the very blades
of grass will continue the fight, animated by our hatred.”
In the cemetery the minister spoke:
“My brethren in the Lord, standing at these open graves, let your last
word be that of love....”
In these two speeches Christ and those who had crucified him met.
* * * * *
_June 2nd._
Sometimes the candle flares up before it goes out. So with the news
to-day. In this morning’s paper we read: “Szeged is in the hands of
the counter-revolutionaries. The opposition Government has removed
from Arad to Szeged and is in communication with the Hungarian
counter-revolutionaries of Vienna. Western Hungary is organising and
in Szeged Hungarian White Guards are being formed under French
protection....”
[Illustration:
ALEXANDER SZABADOS _alias_ SINGER.
ASSISTANT COMMISSARY FOR FOOD.
]
It is actually in the Red papers! Have the Entente Powers stopped the
Rumanians on the banks of the Tisza to give us a chance of saving
ourselves by our own efforts? That would at least be human justice. A
nation, deadly humiliated, could thus regain its self-respect. If only
this were the case! Then we could bless our two months’ sufferings. Not
Rumanians but Hungarians would retake Budapest from the Red tyrant.
I noticed this morning that the soles of my boots were worn through.
What a shock! What shall I do if they give way? We had frozen, black
potatoes for supper and when we rose from the table Mrs. Huszár told a
story about some bread and butter. The little girl began to cry: she was
hungry after her supper and wanted some bread and butter.
Torn boots, black potatoes, what do they matter? There are Hungarian
soldiers in Szeged!