Or take the case of Mrs. Schwartz. She and her husband had been in a prosperous way and had owned a thriving store. At that time they had had four children. When Hungary was invaded, the Cossacks burnt the store and cut her husband slowly to pieces before her eyes. The result of this is that the youngest child is deaf, dumb and imbecile. In her flight between the retreating and invading armies, two of her children died. She arrived in Budapest like thousands of others, friendless and penniless. Year by year, dragging out the agony, she has starved. When we visited her she was on her last legs—she could scarcely rise.
These cases can be enumerated endlessly till the sheer weight of their tragedy kills their drama. But the question is what are we going to do about it? Are we going to let millions of human beings die like rats in a hole? Are we going to let the children of Hungary perish? They at least should be saved.
CHAPTER VI—IT IS NOT SAFE
Today I had an interview, lasting for an hour, with Admiral Horthy, who is Governor of Hungary. It was he who snatched his country from the throes of Bolshevism and established in the midst of disaster a representative government. He is a patriot and man of the world in the finest sense. He was wounded in the Great War and has lived through to peace days without animosities. My object in seeing him was to obtain a personal statement from him of how he proposed to reconstruct the fallen destinies of Hungary.
I was met by a liaison officer whose wife is an American, resident in New York, and was taken in a car of the American Relief to the palace which sits above the Danube on the heights of Buda. The old magnificence of palace etiquette is still kept up. We mounted the marble stairs, encountering guards, with clanking swords, at every turn. The excursion seemed more like fiction than reality—more like a page out of The Prisoner of Zenda through which one walked as a living character. At the top of the staircase we were challenged by halbardiers, in medieval uniforms not dissimilar from those of the Swiss Guards. In an ante-room we were requested to remove our coats and to prepare for the interview. After a wait of not more than five minutes, we were summoned. Passing along a hall filled with priceless cloisonni, we came to a doorway outside which a soldier, caparisoned as though to take part in Grand Opera, was standing. Behind the door a seaman, as bluff and cheery as any British Admiral was seated at a desk. His breast was a rainbow flash of decorations. He rose with his hand outstretched as we entered; his whole attitude one of ease and friendliness.
His first act was to beckon us to a group of chairs and to offer us cigarettes. This was the man on whom at no far distant date the peace of Europe may depend. Admiral Horthy is a cleanshaven, square-faced man, with resolute eyes and the nose of a hawk. The kind of man who inspires trust and whom men cannot fail to like immensely.
My first question was how he accounted for Hungary's present forlorn condition. His answer was forthright—the Peace Treaty. The old Hungary was an economic entity, complete in itself. It had coal-mines, wheatfields, factories, and was a seagoing nation. Today it has no outlet to the sea, no mines and no money with which to buy the coal to operate its factories. It is like a body in which the arteries have been cut so that the blood cannot circulate. Even its wheatfields have been handed over in part as a bribe to other nations. This would not matter so much if the wheat-lands were under cultivation. But they are not. The wheat-lands apportioned to Roumania were divided among peasants who had not the capital to work them. They were compelled by their Government to accept them under the threat that, if they refused, they would be conscripted into the army. As a consequence, when the world is crying for food, large areas of Hungarian tillage in Roumanians hands are lying idle. They are like the engines and rolling-stock taken in reparation from the enemy, which may be seen in Roumania, Belgium and France rusting on the rails. The old Hungary consisted of a conglomeration of races mutually inter-dependent. Labour travelled from point to point at recognised seasons along recognised routes. At the harvest Roumanian peasants had for centuries come to Hungary to lend a hand. They tried to do the same this year, but were turned back at the frontier by their own soldiery with a loss of three hundred lives.
“What is the remedy?” I asked.