Cécile Tormay

“ Have even the songs of our fighting bards forsaken Hungary? Have the minstrels that remained at home all bled to death? The recital of our sorrows should be piercing the hearts of five continents; strength and faith should be sung to our sufferers at home, the bloodless nation should be stirred up with wild inspiring songs, so that it may not abandon hope. Poets are needed, poets whose voices can hold together the Hungarian soil, poets who will teach Hungarians to help each other. ”

“ But we recognised his greatness, his strength, his endurance and his honour, and I am convinced that there is not a single Hungarian in Hungary who does not repudiate, desperately and indignantly, that which Károlyi has dared to do in our name to Mackensen.
It was torture to lie still in bed. Why is there nobody among us who will avenge this? Why is there nobody who will wipe off the dirt before it dries on us? Innumerable eyes glared at me through the dark from under German soldiers’ caps, and at last I could bear it no longer. ”

“ From the frontiers, narrowing round us every day, fugitive Hungarians are pouring in. On all the roads of the land despoiled and homeless people are in flight. Carts and coaches, pedestrians and herds of cattle mix on the highway, and the trains roll along, dragging cattle trucks filled with homeless humanity. Villages, whole towns in flight....
Maddened, with weeping eyes, half Hungary is escaping towards the capital which has betrayed it. And the heart-breaking wave of humanity is no longer an unknown crowd: familiar names are mentioned, and one perceives familiar faces. ”

“ It is so, although the Government says that it is a victory for Social Democracy; but in Transylvania it is not the Internationale which is fighting, but a people patriotically defending its very existence.
The position of the Roumanians is becoming dangerous in Transylvania and their soldiers are beginning to desert and go home. It is as though the breeze of a new awakening is coming from over the snow-clad mountains and is blowing to flame the embers that have been smouldering all over the country. ”

“ Fog, yellow, clinging fog, in which the town, with all its streets and houses, glides on mud towards a bottomless abyss.
Day by day more cockades of the national colours disappear from the soldiers’ caps, and as each one disappears it leaves a wound: a spot of blood ... red buttons take their place. In one of the main streets yesterday a red flag was displayed on a house. In the northern suburbs communists meet in shady little inns, and in the streets foreign-looking men harangue chance crowds from dust-bins or the tops of hand-carts. ”

“ The testament of Peter the Great is the programme of Panslavism. The communist declaration of Karl Marx, the son of a rabbi, Mordechai by his real name, is the programme of Panjudaism. If it is realised, Hungary perishes, and human culture will follow it into its grave. We who fight on the soil of dismembered, trampled Hungary do not fight for ourselves alone, but for every Christian woman in the world. They know it not, and they stretch forth no hand to help us, but look on while the nations to which they belong ruin us. ”

“ Those who speak and act in our name to-day are not Hungarians. This is a life and death struggle, a desperate fight between a people bled to death and a race that has been allowed to breed too freely—a new kind of war. A short time ago our defeat seemed certain: the Hungarian people made no resistance because its faith had been killed, but now the faith has revived. ”

“ Events come fast, crowding one on the other without rhyme or reason. Common sense is of no use, for our fate is woven by maniacs. We have occasional bright moments, little flickers which the storm extinguishes. If we see clearly for an instant, darkness falls before we can find our way, and in its gloom, fate deals us such blows that we become giddy and lose our bearings. Nothing helps. Everything is new and strange; in a present like this the past is no guide. One cannot acquire the habit of dying!—and Hungary is struggling in agony in the hands of her murderers. ”

“ In close formation, headed by its flags, the victorious German army enters Paris. Along its route the windows are closed, flags of mourning float from the houses, and the still-burning street-lamps are shrouded in crepe; the people, conscious of its dignity even in the moment of its humiliation, observes a gloomy silence in the streets. No order has been given, no instructions have been issued, yet, men, women and children, all turn their heads aside, and the eyes of the victors fail to meet the tear-dimmed eyes, burning with hate, of the vanquished.... ”

“ Are the Jews going to outlive us too, because they will not die for the land? All my national instincts rebelled. They shall not outlive us! Their time will come. They are only mortal, for they want a country—they want our country. The life of peoples is like the life of individuals. They have their childhood, their youth, their manhood and their old age. Humanity has deprived the Jewish people of the flowering time of youth and manhood. Their race has aged unsatisfied while it has buried its contemporaries—Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians. ”

“ When the lamp was lit others came in, shivering, and we all gathered round the fire like conspirators, for we all suffered the same pangs, we all wanted the same thing. We knew that the hour had come, that we had to call out the women from behind their locked doors. In the history of Hungary women have not often appeared. They have never had to fight for their rights, because there is no code in the world which protects the rights of woman so well as ours did—even in the darker centuries. ”

“ The rabble start pillaging. There is general disorder and in the upheaval somebody turns up who, on pretence of restoring order, calls in the army. A foreign armed patrol enters: eighteen men who stick up their flag and beat down the Hungarian arms. And our folk just stare and look as if they were sleep-walking lunatics.
That is what they say, all of them, wherever they come from. One Hungarian town after the other falls into enemy hands. What we have held for a thousand years is lost in a single hour, and foreign occupations spread over Hungary’s body like the spots of a plague. ”

“ For neither Károlyi, nor Linder, nor Oscar Jászi possessed that demoniacal influence which crushes will power and opposition, makes cowards of brave souls and drags honour in the dust. This force did not rise to-day or yesterday; it is the result of thousands of years of savage hatred and bestial will for power, a monster begotten in obscurity, which, safe from attack, has spread across the globe, waiting its opportunity, setting its snares with cunning, watching for the hour when it can strangle its victim as with a rope. ”

“ For Pressburg weeps above the Danube, the people of our northern counties have lost their homes, faithful Zips calls broken-hearted to the Great Plain. Kassa is ready to grasp Rákoczi’s sword. Transylvania shows her martyr’s wounds while the proud Székler shakes off his shackles and the ancient land that Hunyádi held is breaking its heart over the disgrace of Belgrade. Who can give us a word of comfort, who can strengthen us with faith in a better future, in this hour of our agony, if not the poets of the nation? ”

“ And the crowd increased. It was as though the city had for years devoured countless Galician immigrants and now vomited them forth in sickness. How sick it was! Syrian faces and bodies, red posters and red hammers whirled round in it. And freemasons, feminists, editorial offices, Galileans, night cafés came to the surface—and the ghetto sported cockades of national colours and chrysanthemums.
As though it were beneath some wicked enchantment, the invisible part of the town has now become visible. It has come forth from the darkness to take what it has long claimed as its own. ”

“ And while he holds forth, and declares that in a single moment he is going to efface the history of a thousand years, these thousand years of Hungarian history shout from every side in desperate protest. Széklers, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Germans and Catholic Serbians clamour like suffering brethren, appealing to each other over the indifference shown by a muzzled land. The voices of their anguish come like a storm down the mountains and join over the Great Plain under the November sky in a harmony that knows no discord. ”

“ The protests from our outposts have died away and the tragic ray of light has been swallowed up in the general gloom. As long as the despoilers of the nation are in power it will always be like that. The Government has given millions to the Transylvanian Roumanians and has supplied them with a profusion of arms, taken from Hungarian soldiers, while it leaves the Hungarians and Széklers in sweating terror, defenceless in the midst of an enemy that clamours for their lives.
Károlyi’s Government supports everybody who is against us. ”

“ One of the greatest empires of the world now presents the picture of a society enduring a living death; Hungary and Italy have saved themselves by their exertions and perhaps Europe by their example. Ireland’s fate is trembling in the balance, but the corruption of a whole population, the systematic training of the youth of a country to exalt rebellion into a science and murder into a religion, can only have one result. ”

“ It shall speak of those things which were unknown to the foreign inspirers of the revolution, because to them everything that was truly Hungarian was incomprehensible.
May there survive in my book that which perishes with us: the honour of a most unfortunate generation of a people that has been sentenced to death. May those who come after us see what tortures our oppressed and humiliated race suffered silently during the year of its trial. May An Outlaw’s Diary be the diary of our sufferings. ”

“ During the last few weeks the life of us Hungarians has been like an attempt to climb out of a putrid well into daylight. We have toiled painfully upwards, we have made desperate efforts to escape the slimy horrors of the water, but in vain. The wall of the well, like a slippery drain, grows higher above our heads, the water rises behind us, and there is no escape. Slimy stagnant water, beastliness, utter beastliness.
Yesterday Mackensen was surrounded by French Spahis in the castle of Fóth. He is now guarded like a criminal, and people are saying that Károlyi is responsible for this. ”

“ They could live quietly in those days, and the handsome narrow faces of Hungarian women shone only in the mild light of the home fire. Those were Hungary’s happy days. But when the land was afire and misery was reaping its harvest, then the Hungarian women rose to the occasion and stood in the fore-front of the [183] fight. Our country has never suffered greater distress than now, and, as we sat there, we all knew that the women would respond to our call and would sow the seed of the counter-revolution. ”

“ Loafing soldiers on the look-out gathered round the entrance when we arrived. Where are the old times? Where are the homes that knew no care? Electric lights dimmed in silken shades, the dainty lines of beautiful dresses, Paris scents, the smoke of Egyptian cigarettes; flowers, a shower of flowers——.
Now there are last Spring’s dresses, dim light, scanty heating, cigarettes of a coarse tobacco. [273] Scents exist no more, and in a wide-necked vase three miserable, sad flowers. Hungarian society no longer has a social life. Those who can amuse themselves in these times are not Hungarians. ”

“ The monster, raised from the dark by Károlyi’s party in October, shows its head daily more boldly and now grips the city with innumerable tentacles. Its suckers pierce the flesh of Budapest, and where they fasten themselves the streets become convulsed, and, like blood, red flags trickle out of the houses.
The Galileists openly avowed at their last meeting that they are Communists. At the instigation of Maria Goszthonyi and a Jewish Communist woman the Socialist women demonstrated in the Old House of Commons against the religious and patriotic spirit in the schools. ”

“ There he stands, in the midst of a poisoned town, the son of Russo-Polish Jews, declaiming, with all the destructive vigour of his race, separatist theories against associations made by nature itself, forgetting that, while in Switzerland the extreme branches of three races join in a common summit, in Hungary the peoples’ streams flow into a common basin, the strength and soul of which must always be the Hungarian people. ”

“ I feel like death, and giddy with rage, when I read Károlyi’s speeches. “Confidence is due to the government,” says he—and he defends the Socialists: “Let nobody presume to say that they are unpatriotic, that the fate of their country is not dear to their hearts ...” and the radicals: “In Arad, Minister Jászi has fought to the last gasp for the integrity of Hungarian territory....” In short, he defends everybody who does not defend the country.
Among the parties which support the government differences become more manifest every day. ”

“ It is to our everlasting shame that no single Hungarian rose to choke these words. In the Hall of Hungary’s parliament Lenin’s agent could unfurl at his ease the flag of Bolshevism, could blow the clarion of social revolution and announce the advent of a world-revolution, while outside, in Parliament Square, Lovászy and Bokányi, accompanied by Jászi, informed the people that the National Council had proclaimed the republic. ”

“ After our war of liberation, they, as the secret agents of Austrian absolutism, agents provocateurs, and hangmen plenipotentiary, tortured Hungary’s people more cruelly than any conqueror has ever done. And Venice and Lombardy could tell a tale too. There the memory of imperial torturers, “gli sbirre austriaci,” still haunts the country, and most of those were Czechs. It is they who are responsible for the turn things have taken, and yet, as allied forces of the Allies, they now participate in the execution of the armistice which directs the occupation of the old Monarchy’s territory! ”

“ The Hungarian people are snipping tiny flags from the three national colours, while against them the Internationalists hoist a single flag dipped in blood, and round us, over all our frontiers, the Czechs, Serbians and Roumanians pour in, each united under its own single banner. ”

“ This programme, which is not an end but only a landmark, expresses as yet Kautsky’s ideas. But then, suddenly, it is no longer Kautsky; it is Lenin and Liebknecht who speak through this representative of their creed.
“Political democracy is only a tool for us,” said Kunfi; “this political freedom is valuable to us only because we believe and hope that by its means we shall be able to carry through the great social transformation just as bloodlessly, and with as few victims, as we have managed to achieve the Hungarian Revolution.” ”

“ Down in the square, Landler, Welter, Preusz and other Jews glorified the republic—there was not a single Hungarian among them. That was the secret of the whole revolution. Above: the mask, Michael Károlyi; below: the foreign race which has proclaimed its mastery.
And bands of Hungarian workmen and gypsies played the National Anthem and the Marseillaise, and Gallileists sang the Internationale. Humiliated, with bitter anger, I read in the newspapers of hundreds of thousands of people, furious cheers, and the frenzied happiness of the multitude. ”