November 9th.
Huge white posters have appeared on the walls. All along the streets everything is covered with them. They are posted on the shop windows, on the windows of the coffee-houses. They appear between the announcements of the kinematographs in the advertisement columns. Not orders, not regulations, not proclamations: from far away I could see it, one word at the top of them all: A BALLAD.
It is an old, sweet word, one which seems to come from olden days bringing a message to the new: a ballad.... I scanned one of the posters, but was unable to decipher the smaller words. I had to cross the road. While doing so I pondered: will this ballad contain that which we are waiting for, the cry of Hungary’s agony? The rebelling voice of our sufferings? Is it an old ballad, or one of the later ones? Or is it by some misled poet who has helped to burn his ancestor’s soil and had aided the band of Jews to make the revolution? Has the erring soul returned to the fold of his race and does he give voice to the tortures of the betrayed Hungarian land into which Balkan robbers are already setting their teeth? Or is it by one who could shape into our language the sufferings of homeless Dante, who could put into verse the moaning of the dread storm that rages over the Great Plain?
Not they, it is not Hungarians who speak. The sickly verses of one Renée Erdös polluted the air, plastered up by the government all over the town.
“And he went to Belgrade, good Michael Karolyi
sad Michael Karolyi
great Michael Karolyi.”
And this was stuck up on every house in Budapest. What a childish game! The ballad is meant to create sympathy for Michael Károlyi, so that anger against him shall not rise in people’s hearts; it attempts to transfer to him the pity that the nation should feel for itself. And as though by a word of command, the whole press of Budapest is writing in the same strain. The newspapers practically hide the conditions of the armistice and enlarge on the rude contempt of the French general. In their columns Károlyi has became a martyr who has suffered for the nation.
The people in the street stopped and read the ballad, and now and then somebody said: “Poor Michael Károlyi!” But even while this was being said bitter news spread over the town, news which none could stop. The truth about the Belgrade meeting has filtered through, and already people are clenching their fists.
Franchet d’Esperay had come to the meeting in an aeroplane from Salonika. He stationed a guard of honour in front of his hotel. He wore full dress uniform, with all his decorations, and thus received those whom he believed to be the envoys of Hungary. Michael Károlyi and his friends appeared in shooting-jackets, breeches, gaiters: as if they were out for a holiday. The general glared in astonishment at the motley company. He became cold and contemptuous, shook hands with nobody, and folded his arms over his chest. Astonished at first, he became ironical as he listened to Károlyi’s faulty speech. After taking possession of the accusing memorandum (which had been edited by Jászi) he ranged the company within the light of his lamp and looked attentively at one after the other.