While we were speaking I heard a curious buzzing in the telephone, as if something were wrong with the apparatus. I wanted to speak to the editor of another paper, but the exchange was unable to give me the connection, though I tried for a long time. Meanwhile I sent to the _Pesti Hirlap_ for my manuscript. When it came at last I took it to the editor of the Radical _Az Ujság_. That also was a new experience, but I was determined that the article should appear in print, and refused to give in. Again the editor received my request courteously, and actually carried out his promise next day; the article appeared, though in an obscure corner, and very indistinctly set. Some day, when peace and quiet have returned, people will wonder how this could have happened under a government which proclaimed the freedom of the press, and at a time when the mouthpiece of the Social Democrats could promise its readers over their breakfast table that “the glorious revolution” would sweep away “bourgeois” society, and could accuse the Hungarian race of jingoism because it would not renounce without protest territory it had held for a thousand years—that a poor essay dealing with Hungary’s sufferings should have had to perform such an Odyssey before a newspaper could be found to publish it. It will perhaps seem just as astonishing that I received in connection with it innumerable letters of thanks, and that a friend of mine who had spent fifty-one months at the front, and who had shown reckless courage, telephoned to me, saying: “Tears came into our eyes when we read your article. I take off my hat to you for having the courage to speak out.” And while all these people, suffering greatly, were grateful because I said what they all felt, our foremost actress, Theresa Csillag, was walking about the town selling the shabby newspaper and, with her inimitable, beautiful voice, reading to the very souls of the passers-by the appeal: “Wake up!” There are many of us, only we don’t know each other. CHAPTER XIII. _December 23rd-24th._ Everyone I have spoken to within the last few days has expressed anger and disgust over Mackensen’s arrest. Countess Raphael Zichy told me she met Michael Károlyi accidentally, and told him straight out what she thought about it. “It was bound to happen,” he answered cynically, “the worst that can happen now is that I shall have the reputation of having been the first ungentlemanly prime minister of Hungary.” We met again in the Zichy Palace, the same group as last time. We had intended talking about our women’s organization, but, somehow, we could not avoid the subject of Mackensen. “We must write to him in the name of the women!” said I, and there was a chorus of approval. I was entrusted with the writing of the letter, and Prince Hohenlohe offered to translate it into German, while the others promised to collect signatures.