There is great excitement in town: the workmen are taking up a threatening attitude towards the managements of the factories. The Ganz engineering works were surrounded this morning by armed men, the managers were dismissed, and new ones appointed—under the control of the shop-stewards.
When I reached the bottom of the hill I had to wait a long time for a tram. Only one man was waiting besides me at the stopping-place. He wore a checkered pork-butcher’s cap and a ragged, dirty uniform, and in his button hole he displayed the Socialist emblem, the red man with a hammer. The stopping-place was at a lonely spot, and I felt uncomfortable, for the man kept on looking at me.
I thought it as well to know with whom I had to deal.
“Has there been an accident, that there is no car?” I asked him.
“Maybe,” he said abruptly. And then, as if irritated by my presence, he got angry. “We shall put things straight in no time,” said he. “We’ve settled with the Ganz works. The trams will come next. But first of all we’re going to socialize the state railways, and shall dismiss the managements of all the works and yards. In the provinces we shall take things in hand too. Béla Kún and Comrade Vág have swept the coal-mines of Salgó Tarján.”
“It was a sad sweep,” said I. “The result was eleven killed and about a hundred wounded. Do you know that there was scarcely a house left standing afterwards?”
“The Communist workers behaved all right. It was the rabble that plundered the town.”
“I was told that Béla Kún set the armed workers against the unarmed population. It is said that the miners used dynamite to blow up the town. They took possession of the depôts, the railway station, the post office. Roving gypsies couldn’t have done all that. It was a well organised rising.”
The man looked down, smacking his leggings with his cane. When he looked up again there was hatred in his eyes.