Vienna, Saturday

Contrary to the expectations of many friends, I am back safe and sound from my sojourn of three days in Budapest under the Red Star, the hammer and sickle-the advance post of Bolshevism in Europe. None of the difficulties that had been expected materialized. Everything passed off so smoothly that I have an uneasy feeling that perhaps my journey was not clandestine after all and that the new authorities not only acquiesced in my venture but connived at it! The only unpleasant incident took place on the return journey at the new Austrian frontier about an hour out from Vienna, measured by the slow-moving and lice-infested train; here I was held up and accused of being an emissary of the Reds, who had come to corrupt the Austrians and turn them from their apostolic faith. I should say in explanation that the frontier guards I here encountered were drunk and later a very plausible explanation of their condition was forthcoming. It seems that the regular supplies of beer had given out and the customs men had fallen back on the local Branntwein, which is, I should say, corn liquor in its most deadly form. However, I was permitted to telephone to Renner’s office in Vienna and the liberating word came almost immediately. The offending inspector collapsed, whether from the corn liquor or the rebuke he received I cannot say, and I resumed my journey in a roomy but by-no-means-clean cattle car.

Colonel House had insisted on my running down to the Hungarian capital for a “look-see,” however brief. He was inclined to class the reports that he had received from the representative of the Enquiry there with those that came from the scholarly observer¹ of this organization in Vienna whose interminable dispatches dealt almost exclusively with the history of the pragmatic sanction; however, in this, for once, the Colonel was mistaken. The reports of Philip Marshall Brown² were very clear, extremely fair, and always illuminating. I was sorry that he was away during my short stay in his bailiwick.

“But I want another point of view,” insisted the Colonel over the telephone. “You need only stay down there a couple of days. You know Budapest from former visits and perhaps you will meet with people who, having confidence in your discretion, will tell the truth.”

Well, the only difficulties I met with were in starting. In what guise or, rather, in what disguise, should I go? If I went in uniform, that would be some sort of recognition of the Red regime, and I was not authorized to take that step; if I went in civilian garb, and was apprehended, I might be regarded as a spy and dealt with as such. I finally decided on this risk, and even left behind me the diplomatic passport with which I had been provided when starting on the Smuts mission. I decided to go in the familiar role of a newspaper correspondent and in the civilian clothes which G—–³ of the Food Administration kindly furnished. I had no identification papers with me, and fortunately no one asked me for any. Once in Pest, in my best Hungarian, I told the shabby cabdriver at the station to take me to the Hotel Hungaria, my favorite refuge during the days of my Balkan adventures. He seemed surprised, but took me there, and on my arrival I found that the famous hostelry had been converted into government offices and there where the gypsy orchestra had played “To the Ear”—wild, fantastic music— the air was filled with the click of typewriters. He then took me to the Carlton-Astoria, I think it was called, and there I received a cordial welcome and registered as a journalist with residence in New York. This resulted in an unexpected complication. The clerk told me that all journalists received a reduction of 25 per cent on their bills. What should I do in all honesty about that? Fortunately, in the lobby there was a box in which all were invited to place contributions for invalided soldiers, and in this box I later deposited the amount of the professional reduction to which, for the moment, I was not entitled.

It was a greatly changed Budapest in which I now wandered about. The people were quiet but obviously extremely nervous as to the things that were about to happen. As I walked along Andrassy Street, a window fell and all within hearing ran like mad—they evidently apprehended bombs. While the situation was outwardly calm, most people seemed to think that they were merely experiencing the lull that precedes the storm. Three weeks before all the banks had been looted and all the stores sacked. At the moment of my arrival there was nothing left to steal. Kun ordered the “Lenin boys,” for the most part released convicts, to the citizen army, urging them to face the invading Czechs on the north and the Roumanians advancing from the south. It was then they showed their true colors—and their teeth. Not a few of the officers who brought them these unwelcome orders were killed, and in and out of uniform the “boys” continued their depredations.

Since March 21st, when the Karolyi government fell (or rather evaporated), all the factories were taken over by the “State” and then perforce closed down because the only people who knew how to run them had, not unwisely, taken to their heels. In the first three weeks of the Soviet rule the Lenin boys probably murdered a thousand people—thrifty citizens who foolishly sought to retain the little money they had and the stores of food they had hidden away. Of course in a situation like this it is very difficult to control the figures of what were euphemistically called “casualties,” but I believe the above figure is a very liberal underestimate. Kun tried to get these bandits to march against the invaders but with few exceptions, and indeed none among the cityfolk; they had no stomach for fighting. Loot! loot! and ever more loot was their dream—now about to be realized, they hoped.

While I do not claim to have enjoyed anything more than a superficial view of the situation, I do think that but for what is termed his “agricultural policy” Kun might have lasted a little longer.⁴ It is quite true that, first off, the peasants of the Pusztas, or at least a goodly number of them, were enthusiastic at the thought of becoming small landowners, but when the commissars arrived they learned that the redistribution of the large estates did not work out as they had thought it would. It is true that the old territorial lords were displaced and that some of them who lingered around, most unwisely, were murdered by the Lenin boys who accompanied the commissars. But when it turned out that the old estates were to be converted simply into collective farms and that the profits resulting from their labors were to be pocketed by the State, following the bad example that had been given them a few days before, the peasants killed quite a number of the newly arrived commissars, and those who could were glad to return to Budapest and to the protection of the large force of Red soldiers that the little dictator had now assembled there.