Tuesday

As far as I can make out this is the immediate background of the present very insistent Magyar problem. Nearly a month ago the Karolyi government collapsed under the weight of its stupidity. Apparently it was neither Tory nor Red, neither fish nor fowl nor even good red herring. Anarchy was spreading through the land, and at this juncture Bela Kun, the shrewd little Polish Jew who for some time, as an agent of Lenin, had been engaged in subterranean work in Hungary, entered the government and in a very few days took control of it. It is only fair to state that Kun was perfectly frank as to his intentions: he almost immediately proclaimed the right of the industrial workers to rule the factories in which they had slaved for so long; also the right of the peasants to the lands on which they and their forebears had been held as serfs for generations. His foreign policy was equally clear. In alliance with Moscow, and as its spearhead, he would overrun all the bourgeois countries who did not frankly accept the New Gospel and bring them to heel. In the first flush it cannot be denied that his program was warmly received in many quarters, particularly by the peasants who shouted innumerable “Eljens,” for Moscow and for Kun. I am told, however, by some, that many of the peasants thought that these alien catchwords were the names of fast-running horses!

. . . Before leaving Vienna on the Hungarian venture I had talked with my old friend, Rittmeister Pronay, and he had offered to be helpful and also discreet. In happier days I had known him as the commander of a squadron of that crack regiment, the Radetzky Hussars, that witched the Prater and all Vienna with its horsemanship. Now poor Pronay was a war invalid and his outlook dark indeed. Even before the coming of the catastrophe he had lost his estates at cards, I think. Invalids were not wanted in Hungary any more than anywhere else, and Renner, out of charity, was keeping him employed on a mere pittance in drawing up a record of the casualties of the Great War, the listen of those who had died, and those who had disappeared, and those who were still marooned in the Siberian prison camps.

“We have reached March 1918,” said Pronay. “We move slowly, I and my comrades, but slow as we move someday we will reach Armistice Day, and then we, too, shall be on the bread line.”

Pronay had wanted to give me letters to some of his loyalist friends in Pest, but I had declined, believing that they would prove as embarrassing to them as to me. However, in some way that I did not seek to discover he had advised many of them of my coming, and as a result clandestine communications reached me from time to time in my room, and also were often discreetly slipped to me at the cafés and restaurants which I frequented. They were generally typed on a machine of ancient make and were always marked “P” to authenticate their source. I must say that the information that reached me in this way was not always convincing. It should be frankly admitted, however, that the situation was terribly confused. The Esterhâzys, the Zichys, the Festetics, and the rest of Pronay’s horsy friends to whose statements I might have given some credence had fled the country or, wisely, I think, remained in hiding. Count Kârolyi, the pseudo-democrat, in control for a few weeks, when the Red storm broke, had also sought safety in flight. His hide-out was a closely held secret.

There was an amusing story told me of an incident in these last troubled days in which the telephone played an unusual role. From the last of the Hapsburgs, Kârolyi, upon taking office, asked and received release from his oath of allegiance and publicly announced his loyal adherence to the People’s Republic, but he, too, not unwisely, I think, ran away before it was inaugurated. Perhaps I should throw a charitable veil over the conduct of the Archduke Joseph at this critical and, it must be admitted, most perplexing moment for a Hapsburg and a man of great wealth. He saved his estates and probably his life by throwing in his fortunes with the Reds. At least the Soviet-controlled papers announced that he also, again by telephone, had secured his release from his allegiance to the head of the Hapsburg house, now a fugitive, and had taken an oath to support the People’s Republic. The papers were also printing in lurid letters extracts from a speech which must have sounded strange indeed as they fell from Hapsburg lips, if they ever did. As reported, his concluding statement was:

“With a little Bolshevism we shall pull ourselves out of the hole where the war has landed us.” Evidently this archduke was a teachable fellow. He knew the times were changing—and that it was the part of wisdom to change with them.

On my arrival I was permitted, even urged, to attend a session of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council of the Revolution. Kun spoke very frankly and well, I thought, and by the aid of a volunteer interpreter I think I got at least the general drift of his remarks. My interpreter spoke very bad German and he explained that Kun spoke very bad Magyar, so he had a difficult role. Kun began by saying:

“Comrades, I will not beautify the situation which is one of danger to us all. We have lost the fight at Szatmar-Nemety and the Roumanians are at the gates of Grosswardein; some of our men fought well; others, I regret to say, deserted their positions. But in Debreczen we have scored some successes; there the Workers have risen in their might and expelled the counterrevolutionaries. Everywhere the invading Roumanians outnumber us and are better armed. The great need of the young army of the new proletarian State is better weapons and more of them.

“We do not know whether the Entente means to hold the Roumanians to the line of demarcation which was fixed by Colonel Vix (acting for the Supreme War Council) or whether they would condemn us to the fate of the Paris Commune. At the present moment the Czechs are not advancing, but that may happen tomorrow and we must prepare for an invasion on this front also. There is no reason to despair, but I must admit that as far as munitions and arms are concerned, we are in bad shape. At present we can most certainly not undertake an offensive. Every proletarian in Pest must hasten to the front; and remember, even if we fail, we shall have sounded the tocsin that will awaken the proletarians of the world. We shall have notified them of the inevitable struggle that is coming and our fate, if adverse, will serve to warn them in time of the necessity to arm.”

People’s Commissar Bakany then took the floor with a stern warning to the bourgeoisie factions who, he said, the moment the Roumanians appeared, “threw off all concealment, put out the old flag, and shouted ‘Long live the King!’ ”

He then moved that at least half the members of the Council and all the Workers who were not engaged on pivotal jobs should proceed to the front. It was carried, but the motion was weakened, I thought, by the proviso attached to the effect that the Workers’ Council should decide which of its members should be sent to the firing line.

In my role of an inquiring journalist I had later on the same day a talk with Bela Kun. He was most accessible and outspoken. More clearly than what he said, a mere repetition of his speech at the Workers’ Council, I recall his surroundings and his appearance. With a guide that was furnished by the hotel, and with the prestige of a tourist, a rare bird indeed in these revolutionary days, I was ushered into a cabinet council in the very same room where in former years I had interviewed in succession the former Prime Ministers of a vanished Hungary, the Tiszas, father and son. The portraits of Deak and of Kossuth which had formerly adorned the council chamber were gone, and their successors were sitting around a large table with heads close together. The heating apparatus in the palace, as everywhere else in the city, was out of order, and it was probably wise for the new counselors to sit in their overcoats—all wore imitation fur coats; and so good was the imitation that even the moths were deceived and had evidently been at work gnawing on the now-upturned collars!

I shall never forget Bela Kun as I now saw him at close quarters and cheek by jowl with his coterie of conspirators. He made upon me an indelible impression, but it is one that is difficult to convey. He had a round bulbous head and his hair was so closely shaven that he seemed to be bald; he had a short, squat nose, ugly thick lips, but undoubtedly his outstanding physical feature was his great pointed ears. Some people suggested, but under their breath, that with his great abnormal head and his small but very active body he looked like a lizard, and certainly there was a touch of green in his coloring. In a word, his figure was one that I have never seen duplicated in any of my wanderings.

Rumor has it that when the war came (1914) Kun was under arrest charged with the embezzlement of funds, but the charge was dropped when he was drafted into the commissary branch of the Hungarian Army. When the Russians made their great drive over the Carpathians in 1916 he became, it is said, a very willing captive. Sent to the celebrated prison camp at Tomsk in Siberia, he learned Russian so well that when the Revolution broke he was able to distinguish himself by his eloquent appeals to his fellow prisoners in favor of the new gospel. I was given copies of his awakening speech, his call to arms in seven or eight languages. It opens, and for that matter concludes, with the familiar words: “Proletarians of the World, unite. The hour of liberation has struck! ” This speech and many others attracted the attention of Radek, the famous Russian propagandist, and through him Kun came in contact with Lenin and soon he was enrolled as a missionary of the Red gospel.

A few days after the Karolyi government was established, in the fall of 1918, Kun appeared in Budapest, officially at least as the representative of the Russian Red Cross. He brought with him many millions of rubles, ostensibly to succor the thousands of Russian prisoners and wounded, who were still marooned in Hungary. In the executive council, the so-called Commissioners of the People, by whom the renegade Count Karolyi was surrounded, out of the twenty-six who composed it at this time, eighteen were Jews, at least so I am informed. Be the religious and racial divisions what they may, it is quite certain that very shortly a majority of the counselors welcomed the latest recruit and fell under the spell of his eloquence, or, as some insist, of the Moscow gold which he distributed so lavishly.

I did not enjoy even a glimpse of Karolyi. He had disappeared two weeks before my arrival—and left no address behind him. Many and strange are the stories I heard about him, and probably some of them are worthy of credence. He was born to great wealth and broad possessions, in the renowned Magnat family whose name he bears, as most of them think, most unworthily. A great many fairies were not present at his birth and in their absence they certainly failed to shower rich gifts upon him. He came into the world with his mouth awry and he had to be provided with an artificial palate. Even with a mechanical device, when he raised his voice, it is said something more resembling a dog’s bark than a human cry emerged.

At the age of ten, so the story runs, he startled his affluent parents by announcing that at the earliest possible moment he proposed starting a revolution! That was certainly a bombshell hurled in the midst of a family group that had much reason to believe that they were living in the best of all possible worlds. Cut off from a career in the army, and indeed from all official life, by his physical handicaps, Michael Karolyi found an outlet for his restless spirit in gambling. At the baccarat table in the Nemzet Club, for a hundred years the rendezvous of the great, the daring, above all the affluent, of Hungary, he played for high stakes and won or lost millions on the turn of a card. When in the last year of the war things began to look dark for Hungary, Karolyi was nearly dead broke and also interned in France as a dangerous alien.¹ Many think, especially those who have not a word to say in favor of a man who, whatever his motives may have been, was a renegade to his caste and a humiliation to his clan, that it was the need to rehabilitate his finances that induced him to enter upon the strange associations by which he will always be remembered.

In his earlier years Karolyi had been a frequent and generally an unsuccessful duelist, and some of the circumstances of the duel that he fought with Stephen Tisza, the last Prime Minister of Hungary (murdered by mutinous soldiers returning from the front at the time of the Armistice), is legendary, because of its great length and one-sidedness. The weapons used were sabers, and as Tisza was a skilled swordsman, he is said to have struck Karolyi thirty-five times, but merely with the flat of his sword! In later life he lamented his generosity.

“I should have killed Michael that day,” he said; “had I done so, I would have spared our country its deepest humiliation.”

Catherine Karolyi, the devoted wife of Michael, one of the strangest figures in this lurid “incident,” was a granddaughter of the great Andrassy, who, while he fought against the Hapsburgs under Kossuth, in later life became Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Dual Monarchy, and represented Francis Joseph at the Congress of Berlin and on many other important occasions. Catherine’s own father was the Jules Andrassy who was sent by Czernin on a mission to Switzerland in 1917, probably to negotiate a separate peace. An attempt was made to cloak these clandestine negotiations, but it was unsuccessful, for one reason because Andrassy broke all the discreet rules of the diplomatic game by making at the time a frank speech in Parliament, calling upon the Government “to abandon Germany, bring back our troops from all the fronts, and save our homeland.”

Sensible words, indeed, but they were spoken too late. Apparently the only path still open to Austria led to the abyss into which she fell twelve months later.

In the early days of his startling political activities Karolyi was frequently insulted and indeed not seldom assaulted in public places. Whatever else he may have been, Karolyi was no coward, and he always reacted by challenging those who so despitefully used him; however, finally a court of honor held at the Nemzet Club handed down the crushing decision that “Michael Karolyi by his own actions was incapable of affording satisfaction to a gentleman on the field of honor.”

Undoubtedly this sentence of ostracism, this denial of the privilege which above all others he and his peers cherished and so frequently exercised, the right of being satisfaktions-fähig, had great influence in pushing Michael into the Socialist and, as some charge, into the Bolsheviki fold.

Karolyi, to sum up, gave up the seals of office on March 21st (1919), several weeks before I reached Budapest. I make this statement, although I admit there is another story to the effect that he never had them in his possession, and this story may be true. The feudal lords were very jealous of the emblems of the historic rule of King Stephen, and the seals may have been buried, as were so many other historic symbols, to save them from contamination. But whatever insignia Karolyi may have had, authenticating his ministry, he turned them over at the hour of crisis to a certain Garbai, who had been in his cabinet. Garbai served for a few hectic hours as president of the Council, but within the week he was eased out by his own cabinet, of which Bela Kun was the most energetic figure. Kun inaugurated the new era by issuing an ukase that smacked of Moscow and which declared that all trade was a State monopoly and that all money, however held, in the banks or privately, belonged to the Government. In the lurid days which Budapest now lived through, while all the records available certainly come from untrustworthy sources, there is much reason to believe that more than six hundred people of some prominence were murdered, not for open opposition to the revolutionary regime, but because they were suspected of not being sympathetic “fellow travelers.”

Certainly I was glad to get away from the city that in my hectic Balkan days had always been my favorite retreat. And I was lucky too. As Admiral Hohnel said in welcoming me back to the city of the Waltz King: “You, as an American officer, in civilian clothes were vogel frei, anyone had the right to shoot you down!” But, as a matter of fact, no one bothered to do it.