After this disgraceful sitting, in front of the very gate of the House of Parliament, an attempt was made on Count Stephen Tisza’s life. Years before a deputy called Kovács-Strasser, and now a certain Lékai-Leiter, raised the weapon against him.
On October the 22nd Tisza spoke for the last time in the Commons and declared that we must stand by our allies. If we had to fall, let us fall together, honourably. And then his voice, which never deceived and never lied, told the unfortunate nation that: “We have lost this war!” ... Amidst breathless silence the sinister words rang through the country and, like Death’s scythe, cut down all hope.
“Tisza said so....”
There was no more. And henceforth every new event was but another mortal wound. Wilson sent a reply to the Monarchy which implored him for peace. He would have no intercourse with us, and referred us to the Czechs, the Roumanians and the Serbs. They wanted to humiliate us, and humiliate us they did. But we still had an army, and we clung to the idea: the Hungarian troops would come back from the front.
Before we could recover our breath there came another stroke. On the 23rd of October a deputy of the Károlyi party shouted into the sitting House of Commons that when the King had entered Debreczen the Austrian National Anthem had been played. Nobody asked if the news were true. The song of Austria’s Emperors in the very heart of the Great Hungarian Plain! Always, even now? Have they not yet learned, will they never forget?... Then Károlyi read aloud a telegram which turned out later to be a forgery: the Croatian regiment in Fiume had mutinied!—Thus the opposition possessed itself of two weapons. The reporters in the press gallery jumped up at once and loudly supported Károlyi’s camp. The impossible happened: in the Hungarian Parliament the Radical newspaper men of the press gallery brought about the fall of the government! Tisza looked angrily towards the gallery and made signs to the speaker. What had become of his authority, the imposing of which had nearly cost him his life?
The storm passed by, and after this the ground gave way quickly under the Hungarian Parliament. Wekerle resigned. All parties negotiated a coalition.
Meanwhile the King sat in council at Gödöllö, and it was about this time that the shifty rabble which gathered in the night of the 22nd of October at Károlyi’s palace and dubbed itself the National Council emerged from darkness. The storm-troops of destruction, the Galileist Circle, came again to the fore; headed by a flag which Károlyi had given them they paraded the town and penetrated into the Royal Castle. The flag-bearer, a medical student of Galician origin called Rappaport, stuck the flag out of one of the castle’s windows and addressed the rabble in the court yard. He blackguarded the King and called for cheers for Károlyi and the Republic.
Nobody attached any great importance to all this, and the town remained indifferent: the incident was practically unknown beyond the streets where the Galileists’ strange, noisy procession had passed. Through the gate of Károlyi’s palace furtive people hurried in and out. Some said that officers and men escaped from the front were hiding in the palace, others whispered of secret meetings in the Count’s rooms.
What was going on there? Nobody troubled about it, and the newspapers wrote long articles about the Spanish “flu.” The epidemic was serious, people met their friends at funerals, but the newspapers exaggerated intentionally; they published alarming statistics and reported that the undertakers could not cope with the situation: people had to be buried by torchlight at night. The panic-stricken crowd could scarcely think of anything else. The terror of the epidemic was everywhere, and the greater terror which threatened, the brewing revolution, was hidden by it. The press, as if working to order, hypnotised the public with the ghost of the epidemic while it belittled the misfortunes of the unfortunate nation and rocked its anxiety to sleep by raising foolish, false hopes of a good peace, and gushed over Károlyi’s connections with the Entente.
And so the big, unwieldy mass of citizens slid towards the precipice in its sleep.