Bonsal, Stephen
Stories
1
Chapters
81
Words
89.4 K
Comments
0
Reading
7 h, 27 m
Yesterday a petit mot, brought by a shabby Dienstmann came from Princess Metternich, asking me to call; evidently the great lady is no longer served by the gorgeous palace lackeys who in former days ran her errands and did her bidding. I felt I had been remiss in not calling without awaiting an invitation, but the new people with whom I had my contacts were not at all likely to know her whereabouts and so I had assumed, and indeed hoped, that the Princess had been able to escape from the mourning, starving…- 91.2 K • Completed
- 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…
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- 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…
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- I am back from a brief dip in the troubled waters of the Balkans, for so many years my familiar swimming hole, where, surprisingly enough, I did not hear a hostile shot. In this respect it was a record-breaking journey. Down there, with stoical determination, all the peoples are digging themselves out of the wreckage that four years of war have wrought, and now back in peace-loving and traditionally frivolous Vienna I find myself involved in riots and in mass killings so surprising that at times I am…
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- I wandered up the hillside through the ruins of the White City with whose broad avenues and byways I had been familiar not so long ago. All man’s work has been destroyed by man’s diabolical inventions. Only the Danube and the Save majestically flow on to their union under the old Turkish citadel, and so I know I am in Belgrade, or what is left of it. At times there was such an uproar I thought that once again the capital of the Serbs was under fire, but that was not the case. Gangs of soldiers…
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- A report of German plotting in Belgrade forwarded by our delegation in Paris reached me yesterday. It came without an expression of belief or skepticism, merely registering a rumor to the effect that German agents in Yugoslavia, particularly in Croatia, are planning to supplant the pro-ally, Regent Alexander, by his elder brother, Prince George. For some months now, as was well known, George had been under restraint, practically under arrest, in a country house near Nish. Apparently the young man is…
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- In the following days Herr Renner called upon me several times at the Bristol. It was evident he wished to discuss further the Anschluss, but as I had delivered my message and had no further instructions I kept off the subject. Our purpose had been achieved, at least for the present, and Allize, the French agent, told me that, in high dudgeon, the German Minister, Botho Wedel, had gone back to Berlin. The secondary purpose of his visits was to renew his plea and to induce me to take up my residence in the…
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- Today, alone, I again visited the Burg Palace. All the great figures who in their little day had strutted across this scene, the aged Francis Joseph, the beautiful Elizabeth, the luckless Rudolph of the Mayerling mystery, have vanished now, and the millennial empire of the Hapsburgs lies in squalid ruins. But there was one in the hungry crowd who recalled the well-fed days. He was tattered and torn, but from his manner it was evident that in the happier days he had been a palace lackey and his thoughts ran…
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- I dined tonight with Admiral Hohnel; General Margutti was also his guest, but how different were the circumstances and the temper of the party from that evening in March 1915 when they dined with me at the Bristol. Then the Russians were being driven back over the Carpathians, according to War Office reports, and the war would be over in a few weeks! Now the war was over, and the government that had displaced the Empire had told them that as they had both been appointed to their respective services from…
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- A man who knows history and recalls it, as so few of us do, wrote interestingly yesterday in the Frankfurter Zeitung about the flight of Emperor Karl: “This is indeed poetic justice,” he writes. “For hundreds of years the House of Austria sought to destroy the independence of the Swiss Confederation and the rights of free men. Had it succeeded, the Swiss would have become lieges of Austria and today they could not have offered a refuge to the last of the Hapsburgs, now landless and forlorn.…
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