Outside the walls, no less than inside, the red plague is spreading. I remember the first red flag hoisted. It hung alone for a long time, then it was followed by others. The rebellion of October ordered the beflagging of the town. The perpetrators of that crime commanded an obscene display of joy in the hour of our great disaster, and Budapest donned in cowardly fashion the festive decoration imposed upon her, while the country was being torn to pieces all around. In the days that followed she did not dare to remove it: she stood there, beflagged, during the downfall, under the heel of foreign occupation, like a painted prostitute, and the national colours became antagonistic to our souls, an insult to, a mockery of, our grief. Though it sounds like the talk of a madman, I say that I began to hate the colours for which I would formerly have loved to give my life.
Now the red, white, and green flags are disappearing rapidly. But the soiled colours of the nation are not replaced in the country’s capital by the black of mourning. Every day there are more and more red flags in the streets of this unprincipled town, which is always outrunning itself and stamping its past into the mud. Once I loved this town and wrote its romance, so that its people might learn to love it through my art.[4] Now I have become a stranger within its gates and have no communion with it. I impeach it and repudiate it.
And this accusation is not raised against the foreign race which has achieved power, which has attained its end by sheer perseverance, ingenuity, industry and pluck—but against Magyardom and the whole nation, who have, heedlessly, incapably and blindly, given up their own heart—the capital.
All past powers and governments are responsible for this. The reproach concerns to the same extent those politicians who are still debating about shades and won’t see that to-day there are only colours, and won’t feel that in a short time there will be no more colours, but only one colour, and that that one will be—red.
This bitter thought brought to my mind a Red soldier whom I saw when I was on duty at the railway station. Some armed men came into the hall where we have our Red Cross. They were commanded by a strapping young Hungarian. He stopped in front of me and asked me whether I had seen ninety-six men pass there. They came from Deés, were Whites, armed, and their track had been lost.
“I haven’t seen them.” Then my eyes caught sight of his cap. A broad red ribbon was sewn round it. “What have you done with the red, white, and green one?”
“We lost that on the Piave,” the soldier answered.
“There you lost the black and yellow one.[5] You have torn off our own colours yourselves.” As I said this I looked straight into his eyes. He couldn’t stand my gaze: he snatched the cap from his head and hid it behind his back:
“Well, and you gentlefolk, why don’t you ever give us a lead?”
Many times have those words echoed in my ears since then, every time a soldier or a workman has flung at me the accusation of want of leadership. It seems to be a characteristic of our politicians and intellectuals.