“Good, you have come at last; just repair my machine!” the girl-clerks said to him when they saw him in the passages of the War Office. “I am the Minister of War,” Böhm answered proudly, and sat down at Bartha’s desk. Already he calls himself Hungary’s Minister of War. Károlyi still masks him, but the game is obvious. When Károlyi formed his government on the 1st of November he started with five Jewish Ministers, but as he was afraid of public opinion he confessed to three only: Jászi, Garami and Kunfi, while in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Diener-Dénes, and in the Ministry of Finance Paul Szende were hidden behind his own name.
They advance with frightful rapidity. The powers of destruction are putting into practice with ruthless logic the pronouncement of Kunfi to the National Assembly on the day the republic was proclaimed under the cupola of the House of Parliament: “After the institutions we shall have to change men; we must put into every place in this country men who are inspired by the spirit of our new revolutionary ideas.”
It is clear now who these are, for the military and civilian administrations are already filled with people who used to work behind the counters of shops or banks, or in editorial offices, and used to mock at the unpractical Hungarian intellectuals who struggled for starvation wages in the public offices. Now they are taking their places, getting sudden rises in their salaries, and pursuing a racial policy such as, alas! the Hungarian race has never been able to pursue.
“We are wiping out a thousand years,” is their cry, and they find fault with all the old institutions; but so far as they themselves are concerned, no criticism is allowed.
WILLIAM BÖHM.
TYPEWRITER AGENT. PEOPLE’S COMMISSARY FOR (1) HOME AFFAIRS; (2) WAR OFFICE. LATER A COMMANDER OF THE RED ARMY, AND FINALLY ‘AMBASSADOR’ AT VIENNA.
“Do you know, we have now come to this,” a tradesman said to me in his shop, looking round cautiously as he spoke, “that it is counter-revolution to push a Galician Jew by accident in the street.”
Now that we have retired from everything, and Hungary’s social life has been swallowed up in the nation’s poverty and mourning, the twin-type of the war-millionaire, the revolution-millionaire, begins to play his part. A new kind of public invades the restaurants, the theatres and the places of amusement: plays, written by its writers, are played to full houses; people in gabardines occupy the stalls, while in the boxes orthodox Jewish women in wigs chatter in Yiddish, and in the interval eat garlic-scented sausages in the beautiful, noble foyer of the Royal Opera, and throw greasy paper bags about.
In the restaurants of the Ritz and Hungaria Hotels a new type of guests eat exclusively with their knives; their mentality is shown by the fact that the other day when a few French officers left a restaurant, they ordered the gipsy band to play the ‘Marseillaise,’ and rose to their feet. One of the officers turned back and said: “Sale nation....”