To-day even the refreshment room is invaded by an insufferable stench, and there are vermin creeping on the walls. The bread given to the wounded is uneatable, and the tea is just slop-water. There is no fire in the stove, and the cold is biting; even during the war the place was never so miserable as it is now. There are fewer wounded, and the place is filled with able-bodied soldiers passing through the town. They come from distant battle-fields, ragged and dirty, and often they only get here to learn that there is no home for them to go to. Nowhere! Serbians, Roumanians and Czechs have occupied the ancient homes of Hungarian peasants.
A Transylvanian Hussar sat on a bench and cursed loudly, sobbing now and then like a child. An old peasant from the Banat, a wounded old soldier, knelt there with tears pouring from his eyes. He was a descendant of those Saxons who had settled in Hungary six hundred years ago, and he exclaimed in his archaic German: “The Serbians have come to us! Oh, our poor country, poor country!” and the sergeant of the medical corps in his red-cockaded cap swore loudly at him.
Then a woman came through the door, dragging two little children by the hand. She asked for bread, they had been three days without food. “I shall go to Károlyi,” she cried, “he shall see that justice is done! My husband is an official in the Banat. The Serbians have arrested him. They beat him till he fainted and then locked him up. There are many like that. Those who do not swear allegiance to them are cudgelled and locked up. All the Hungarian administration has disappeared.... The police have been disarmed too. Then they requisition and don’t pay. There are no newspapers—they are confiscated. They call us ‘dogs of Hungarians’ and say that our land is now in Serbia. There is no post—all the letters addressed to Hungarians are opened, and if they contain money it is taken.”
A soldier came close up and listened with open mouth.
“Do you come from the Banat?” the woman asked. “Then don’t you go home! The Serbians are enlisting our men and taking them to forced labour. Nobody comes back from that.”
The man looked at her for a while vacantly, then muttered helplessly: “But surely, now there is peace....”
Night began to fall. The big chandelier hung unlighted from the ceiling of the dirty hall, save for an isolated side-branch here and there, which scattered an ugly patchy glare in the twilight. On a bench a blind soldier lay on his back; he smiled continually in a queer way, as if the smile were frozen on his face, and his cap was tilted over his sightless eyes.
“You hail from the Great Plain?” I asked him.
“I come from Szalonta ...” he grumbled sleepily.
And I imagined the poor young fellow, in the stifling summer heat of the Plain, stretched at the foot of a stack for his mid-day rest, shading his eyes from the glaring rays of the sun with his little round hat. But now no sunshine will ever hurt his eyes again, and the soil of a thousand Hungarian harvests is being torn from us. Poor fellow! Does he know that he has sacrificed his young eyes for nought?