Fog ... clinging, dense fog. People choke as they walk, in an accursed land; they slip about in the sticky, heavy mud, and can neither halt nor run. A doomed city is our prison. The hearths are cold, we have no light, and all the doors are shut. Streets end in darkness, and at the street corners cold blasts strike one, coming no one knows whence. One cannot escape it. One has to go on, under dark windows, through the fog, across deadly alleys. Nobody looks out of the houses, and there is no sign of life about. The air seems to be a sloppy glue closing suddenly over one’s mouth like a horrible, gigantic hand, and stopping one’s breath. We shudder with discomfort and misery, and if we try to lay hold of something solid, the walls recede before our groping hands, and the doors move like ghosts. They are not locked, just ajar, and they open noiselessly inward. Behind them somebody stands and waits, waits with open eyes in the dark, conscious of some awful news impending: Hungary has lost something again.... In the next street, in all the streets about us, red ferocious beasts are lurking with soft noiseless steps, ready to pounce.... That is our present life. 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. With sweeping gestures they declare: “Everything is yours! Take everything!” These words are all over the town to-day, and Károlyi’s Government says it all the time, in every one of its declarations: “Everything is yours!” It says it to socialists, communists, radicals, Czechs, Roumanians, Serbians.... [Illustration: A COMMUNIST ORATOR. (_To face p. 176._)] Having begun with the Roumanians, Jászi now takes counsel with the Slovaks; and while the Czechs’ troops descend, unhindered, into the valley of the Vág, and occupy town after town, the precious springs of Pöstyén among others, Jászi, Diener-Dénes and a fellow called Braun hand over to them our thousand-year-old rights. Jászi has already presented them with five Hungarian counties and offers a common administration for ten more. He bargains, humbles himself, and libels our rule of a thousand years. And even while he was shamefully giving up everything, and stupidly betraying the Government’s hopeless inability to act, it turns out that the whole of the negotiations were nothing but a trap. After having surveyed the situation here, Prag has informed Budapest officially: “No negotiations whatever with the Hungarian Government have been authorised by the Czecho-Slovak Republic....”