CHAPTER IV
The 2nd, 3rd and 4th of
October.
How absolutely natural and necessary the Revolution had come was revealed m the days following its outbreak.
The city had assumed an almost normal appearance, and apart from externals, nothing special seemed to have befallen.
The rush of the puffing and blowing military motors over the streets was already no more on the third day of the Revolution, the firing of shots, become senseless, had completely ceased, and merely the placards which just like a flood rankly covered every visible spot, gave evidence of what was working below.
The maintenance of public order constituted the greatest care of the new Government.
In Budapest there was plunder of small extent in the Lower Danube district; in the outermost districts there were petty robberies. The denial of public and private property from political motives did not make itself heard, and, thanks to the prompt handling of the authorities, the formation of organised groups of plunderers could be completely obviated. While the single hand could do only petty damage, on the other side bands were at once scattered, and on the whole quiet was maintained in the capital.
More markedly began the provincial rabble to break out. Once more it was in Croatia and the districts about Siebenbürgen, as well as, in particular, in Slovakia, where, following on the provocation of intense race-hatreds by paid agents, a debauch in plunder by the masses became formidable.
To me it was at once clear that there it was not a simple question of crimes against property, but that the intention was to furnish a pretext for invasion to foreigners. Order and tranquility had to be overthrown there, in order to "necessitate" the occupation of these regions by foreign troops, following on the demonstration that the Government was incapable of maintaining order.
Already in those first days it was evident that the cessation of hostilities was an object which haidto reckon with other forces and opinions than those at the helm on the enemy's side.
Declarations made by national politicians in the camps of the Roumanians, Servians, Czechs, Jugo-Slavs, revealed that, through the armistice, the moment seemed to have come for the enemies of Hungary to compensate the restraint of their fury with brute violence.
A hue-and-cry without parallel set in against the young Hungary, and all the sins of the past were now, like debts, to be avenged and driven home.
Meanwhile, the new Government was probing by its handling of facts that it was resolved to effectuate its program of progress of Radical Democracy.
The Minister of Nationalities, Jàszi, immediately on entering his office, began to set on foot negotiations with the nationalities, and what I learned from those who surrounded him confirmed me in the belief that this man strove with a peculiar nobility to translate ideal principles into actualities. At the time, indeed, it is true that the ideal stood in sharp contrast with the actual, for precisely the condition precedent for success in the negotiations was absent—namely, goodwill in the other parties to the negotiations. A rapprochement, as it may really henceforth be named, was complicated by prejudiced criticism and tribal expressions of opinion; and once more it was seen how appetite comes by eating. Only the future will teach and shew that the stomach of Europe will not permanently be able to bear this excess of purging through separate nationalities, without suffering grave damage thereby.
One epoch-making item of the Programme was at once brought to the point of fulfilment. The franchise law, fundamentally modified, was put upon a new basis. It had already appeared, upon the Programme, that it was the most radical conceivable suffrage law, which gave to a preponderant mass of men the equal, secret, inassailable right to determine its own representation.
Already these two forward steps must have clearly shown that the taxing and executive power of the State reposed in hands reliably radical. And the establishment of woman's franchise, active and passive, redounds to the fullest honour of the young régime.
***
The National Council, meantime, had been enlarged; and in this, too, reason was the guide.
A chaos was avoided by the prompt transference of the Administrative functions from the National Council to the special Ministries. In the countries of the late revolutions, with national representations forming a centralised system, the intention to retain power in their own hands has been made evident; but in the young Hungary there was a better way discovered, and it was the National Council itself which devolved every sort of executive function, and reserved for itself only the clearly defined, political duties which, as the point of organisation of the Revolution, belonged to it. In this way no questions of competence arose, whose cropping up was much to be feared. Such processes always lead to internal splits, which must end in castrophes—as in Germany, to say nothing of Russia.
The curiosity of those days was in my eyes always the Cabinet, to which men of the most diverse shades of opinion belonged, and worked in friendly co-operation. The Social Democrats filled their office with the greatest political self-control, and I heard from a really well-informed source that in these critical days no kind of difficulties had been made by any Party—difficulties whose consequences no one could have foreseen, because not only must they have brought with them the paralysis of the Administration, but the splitting of the energies of the labouring masses.
***
That the Revolution should throw up some very curious people is almost a matter of course. Some sudden idea, indeed, is enough in such times to "make" a man. Beside phenomena of importance rose others of small account, arose and at once began to go under.
I have never forgotten one incident in the War Ministry.
With all the arts of persuasion a singular individual insinuated himself again and again into the waiting-room of the Secretary of State, in which the most various sorts of people, of quite unceremonious dress and bearing, insisted on an audience. This little man who had quick-twinkling eyes, made superhuman efforts to push himself forward. Finally, he had to be listened to, and as every man in such a radical state of things may properly bring forward his capabilities and ideas, the little man plunged at once into speaking of the concrete. With a theatrical pose he struck his breast:
"I am prepared to restore order and tranquility at once in the whole country, aye, and maintain them. As a condition, I must ask for a hundred automobiles."
I asked him the modest question"
"Have you, then, purchasers for such a considerable park of motors?" to which he proudly replied: "I am no motor agent. I only want to get the motors in order to travel about the whole country, and restore order by timely interference at dangerous spots. Far from me is love of pelf. My country is in need: I stand by her!"
The irrationality of his ideas could not be made clear to him. But he did not get the motors, and I am of opinion that, in spite of his denial, the man had purchasers ready for all the hundred motors.
For the rest, he took himself off very ungraciously and ill-governed, saying repeatedly that, the whole revolution. was a humbug, since real talent could not make itself felt: let the old paternal régime rule as before.
The Revolution therewith lost an adherent, and I believe I am not wrong in thinking that many such adherents quickly passed over into the other camp—into that camp that for the moment did not exist, yet ever and everywhere constitutes the Opposition, where the greed of individuals is not unconditionally and immediately appeased.
***
A chapter by itself is the question of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils.
The Soldiers' Council did excellent work in the way of preserving order, and high merit is to be ascribed to it and its leaders, especially to Dr. Josef Pogàny, a journalist, now Chief-Commissary of the Soldiers' Council.
The Soldiers' Council was, in Budapest, at once an element in Education. and an administrative organ, in which not politics was uppermost, but the organisation of a People's Army on the basis of the "vertrauungs-männer" system. The Soldiers' Council did not for a moment use its considerable influence for the inauguration of a reign of force: it worked rather hand in hand with the Social Democrat organisations and with the Cabinet, to the consolidation of which it was able to contribute greatly. And while the Russian Soldiers' Councils became the sources of the grimmest tyranny and despotism, the Hungarian Soldiers' Council developed into a centre for the soldiers' agenda, which did excellent service in respect of restoring human conditions in the barracks, of hygiene, of hospital questions, of the organisation of a people's army for the support of the Government and good order.
***
The fever, which slowly abated, became as heat-energy transmuted into "work." With the exception of those few who knew how to get something out of it, as out of the vast bloodshed of the nations—men, who, however, this time were struck down with lightning severity—with these exceptions the individual and the whole worked with an offering up of all their human powers for the maintenance of order. Already in these days the chief emphasis was laid on the word "Order" by the entire press. It was felt that the least discrediting of the Revolution must lead to counter-tendencies and counter-actions, too, on the side of the Entente; and this danger ever in view, side by side with the instinct of self-preservation, stamped so deeply upon the general consciousness the necessity of ensuring order, that finally the bloodless Revolution became the symbol of the Temple of Freedom, to rear which without disturbance was not only aimed at, but it seemed to become possible only as a result of bloodlessness.
***
Meantime the news and rumours from abroad were thrilling the public mind. It was said that blood was flowing in Vienna, in Berlin something quite big was coming, the last Hohenzollern despot had fled to head-quarters, in Italy the Revolution had broken out, on the West front fraternisations between the French and German soldiers were the order of the day. . . .How many wishes were here the fathers to thoughts, which were not to become realities. . . . .
Only from the Italian front came concrete news, and from the Balkan theatre of war.
And soldiers arrived from these and from farther fronts.
The Government had ordered the laying down of arms; the announcements in the windows of the newspaper offices were hastily swallowed by thick knots of men—and meantime one saw the soldier reappear from the front.
A new danger broke upon us.
Unwieldy began to become the mass of the returned and wandering soldiers. Out of the great garrison localities into the capital, out of the capital into the villages. . . .and from the fronts into the interior. Not only were physical diseases communicated, but the pathological contagion of acts of coarseness impregnated into the nature during years of war. Threatening voices waxed loud. And ever more men poured in a satanic mass of undefined force whirled about the entire land, shaking like an earthquake all that stood.
This greatest danger, too, was overcome.
It came to plunderings in several districts, but the strict organisation of the Social Democracy and of the Soldiers' Council maintained order. It came to no anarchy, to no nightmare of plunder, and what did take place was the work of political agents provocateurs in the pay of the Nationalities, as well as of the expression of the people's fury against the oppressor in the land and the winners of the war. Yet little blood flowed, and where it flowed alcohol was the chief cause. The incredibly severe Government order, by which the sale of alcohol in every form was forbidden under heavy penalties, proved a blessing—and only where great distances prevented its execution for the time being, did some small catastrophes befall.
But the sober mind of the people was master of temperament, and almost throughout the country the local guardians of order stamped out the bands that sporadically showed themselves.
The Revolution was too popular for the great mass of the people not to be willing to guard with their own bodies what had been won.