An icy wind was blowing when my mother and I came home through the unfriendly streets, and volleys were being fired in the direction of one of the barracks. We went out and came back amidst the clatter of firearms, and between the two journeys there was the picture of my sister’s home, the usual room, the dwarf pine tree, with spluttering, bad candles, and, on the table, covered with white linen, the children’s presents. They at least enjoyed it. The little boy thought that his brother’s patched up rocking horse was new, and that everything was lovely. Poor children of a poor age, it is as well that they don’t know what our Christmasses were like!... A hundred candles, a noble, grand fir tree reaching up to the ceiling. The smell of pure wax mingling with the perfume of the fir, fresh from the Vág valley, and every wish of the year was satisfied under that tree. Beyond that, I saw another tree, then another, and another, many more.... Burning candles and green fir trees carried me back into the years of the past: an avenue of shining Christmas trees, the end of which is so far away that in the depth of its perspective I can see myself quite small. There, far away, I was a child, like those who now count me among the old. Then all the old folk were still with me, the dear old ones who stand between us and death when we start life. There are many of them, many defending rows, so that we cannot see the end of the road.... As we advance, one after another they disappear. My two grandmothers, my father.... One defending row after the other has fallen out, and now only my mother and Uncle Géza, her brother, stand in front of me.... I am coming to the front myself; like the others before me, I am hiding the end of the road from the children who are growing up....
When childhood has passed, the festivities of Christmas are always damped by the quiet sadness of memories. And this year it is not only the past of individuals but the past of our country, our people that haunts us. How lovely Christmas used to be.... Hungary’s Christmas! So naturally lovely that we did not know....
Christmas bells! When they called to midnight mass their clanging mingled with the rattle of machine-guns.
December 25th-30th.
In the good old times the last week of the year used to be one uninterrupted holiday. This year it is only a horrible part of the desperate road we have to tread. The news spreads from one to the other: to-morrow—the day after to-morrow—on New Year’s Eve at the latest—there is going to be great slaughter in the town. Everything one sees is cruel, rough and repellent. I have hidden from it these last few days, and, near my mother, in the peace of my home, once more I have had time to think.
The Government speaks of elections, and promises this sham legal confirmation of its power for January, as the Entente refuses to deal with it under present conditions. Meanwhile the Social Democrats are trying to win over the villages, so the reform of the land-laws is again to the fore. They have always been a poisonous wound in Hungarian life, and should have been altered, justly, soberly, many a year ago. Previous governments have postponed it unscrupulously; the present government wants to use it as a firebrand. Buza Barna, the Minister for Agriculture, has promised so much land to those who want it that he wouldn’t be able to find it even if he were to divide up all the entailed and private estates; and he has promised it for such an early date that it is technically impossible to deal with the matter in time.
The intention is obvious. After the Russian pattern, they want to gain the peaceful peasants’ adherence to their revolutionary principles. So they promise land to everybody. This lying promise has spread with evil results: following the example of the workers in the towns, the agricultural labourers have now stopped work. They expect to till their own plots in the spring, so why should they work for others now? No autumn sowing is being done, and while the country is starving, maize, potatoes, beetroot, swedes and vegetables worth millions remain in the fields unharvested. Agitators visit the villages, inciting the people against private property and landlords, and appealing to the servants and labourers to take possession of the land.
As the Budapest Soldiers’ Council rules over the military administration of the government by means of its government delegates, so the Budapest Workers’ Council lords it over the civil administration through its Socialist ministers. The leaders of the Soldiers’ and the Workers’ Councils are all of the foreign race, and they never tire of advancing their intentions of spoliation, wrapped in the utopian dreams of Bolshevism. The Workers’ Council at its last meeting in the New Town Hall settled the fate of land reform by simply overthrowing it, by declaring that the land was common property—that all private property must cease. Then they settled the question of taxes in a manner that effectually rendered any further discussion unnecessary. They proposed a hundred per cent. tax on all property—i.e. confiscation.