What was happening there?... In front of the Garrison Commander’s building, under some bare trees, some soldiers were holding open a large red, white and green flag. At first I thought they were at play. Then I saw that an unkempt, bandy-legged little man was cutting out the crown from above the coat-of-arms with his pocket-knife. And they held it out for him!... I felt as if I had been burnt, and turned my head away so that nobody might see my face. A little further on the declaration of the Social Democratic Party stared at me from a wall:
“Fellow workers. Comrades! The egotism of class rule has driven the country with inevitable fatality into revolution. The troops who have joined the National Council have occupied without bloodshed the principal places of the capital, the Post Office, the Telephone Exchanges and the Town Hall, on Wednesday night, and have sworn allegiance to the National Council. Workers! Comrades! Now it is your turn! The counter revolution will undoubtedly attempt to regain power. You must demonstrate that you are on the side of your soldier brethren. Out into the streets! Stop all work!
The Hungarian Social Democratic Party.”
This poster made a curious impression on me: it was as if a monstrous lie had proclaimed the truth about itself. The party which was striving for the rule of the working-class orders in its first declaration: “Stop all work!” After such a beginning, what will it order to-morrow—and after?
People came towards me: workmen who were not workmen, who no longer do any work; soldiers who were not soldiers, who no longer obey. In this foul atmosphere nothing is any longer what it seems. The many red, white and green flags on the houses are no longer our flags; no longer are they the nation’s colours. Only the chrysanthemums remain true flowers of the graveyard.
I went on slowly, but suddenly I stopped again: on the glass window of an obscure little tobacconist’s shop, among the newspapers exposed for sale, appeared a sickly, crushed-strawberry coloured poster, which proclaimed in red “Long live the National Council.” And then, as if some loathsome skin-disease had infected the houses, appeared more and more red posters, and their colour became bolder and bolder. I was informed later that panic-stricken tradespeople had paid two hundred crowns, some even a thousand, into the funds of the National Council for this shop-window insurance.
In the windows of some shops the big poster of the Népszava[1] was displayed. In one night the organ of the Social Democrats had penetrated from its slum into the city, and its poster proclaimed from the windows of meek bourgeois shops “Behold the writing!” ... On the poster was printed in red a naked man lifting his red hammer at the crowd beyond the window. A horror made of blood.... The thronging crowd never thought that the hammer was lifted to break its head. And the tradesmen never thought that the hairy red hand was on the point of emptying their tills. I noticed that on the poster of evil omen, besides the bloody monster, a red working-man was struggling with a policeman who held him in chains.
A curious picture.... I now thought of the police of the capital. The day before yesterday it had adhered to Károlyi’s National Council. The famous police force of Budapest had forsaken its high ideals of duty and had gone over to the wreckers. Never before did I realize the importance of this betrayal. I shivered. The fog drifted as if the very atmosphere had become unstable. The walls of the houses near me seemed to waver too; and I seemed to hear the cracking of the plaster, as if they also were preparing to collapse. The noise came from the very foundation of things. Something invisible was collapsing in this city already undermined.
“Hungarians” ... then silence. A little further it went on: “National” ... then it started again all along the street. My unwilling eyes were reading the posters over and over again.
“National Council”.... What is this obscure assembly after all? How dare it call itself the council of the nation? Who are those who incite against the state and collect oaths of allegiance for themselves? Who are those who from the room of an hotel appeal to the nation and promise “an immediate Hungarian peace, the equal right of all nations, the League of Nations, the freeing of the world, a social policy which will strengthen the power of the workers”?... They have not got a word for our frontiers established a thousand years! What happens in the background whither our eyes cannot penetrate? Do the secret allies of the Entente work among us, or only our own enemies who, by means of their proclamations, shout in their Ghetto-lingo that “this programme, which is to save Hungary and free the people, has the whole-hearted support of the Hungarian army?”