Winter is still with us, but the winds bring signs of awakening from afar. March ... the month of fevers and commotions. On the earth fatigue and restlessness chase each other. Flooded rivers race along. There is no visible sign of it, yet spring is there somewhere over the horizon. Whose spring is this to be? Ours or theirs? Signs of evil omen prophesy against us. The monster, raised from the dark by Károlyi’s party in October, shows its head daily more boldly and now grips the city with innumerable tentacles. Its suckers pierce the flesh of Budapest, and where they fasten themselves the streets become convulsed, and, like blood, red flags trickle out of the houses. The Galileists openly avowed at their last meeting that they are Communists. At the instigation of Maria Goszthonyi and a Jewish Communist woman the Socialist women demonstrated in the Old House of Commons against the religious and patriotic spirit in the schools. On the initiative of John Hock, himself a priest, orators clamoured in favour of abolishing the Catholic priests’ celibacy. Revolutionary orders from the War Office and the Soldiers’ Council spread all over the country. Pogány has sent instructions to the various military detachments that they should, with the help of the confidential men, elect officers of the most advanced political opinions and dismiss the others. In the Town Hall the Workers’ Council has now passed sentence of death on the system of small holdings and on the distribution of land. This distribution would at least have left Hungarians to some extent possessed of their birthright. But that would have retarded the plans of our new conquerors. So they want to socialize it and create producers’ co-operative Societies, controlled from Budapest, and directed, instead of by the old Hungarian landlords, by people who, as Kunfi said: “are inspired by the new spirit of Hungary.” They want to achieve the revolution of the soil even as they achieved their political revolution. After the wheel, they want to lay hands on the ship itself. Outside the walls, no less than inside, the red plague is spreading. I remember the first red flag hoisted. It hung alone for a long time, then it was followed by others. The rebellion of October ordered the beflagging of the town. The perpetrators of that crime commanded an obscene display of joy in the hour of our great disaster, and Budapest donned in cowardly fashion the festive decoration imposed upon her, while the country was being torn to pieces all around. In the days that followed she did not dare to remove it: she stood there, beflagged, during the downfall, under the heel of foreign occupation, like a painted prostitute, and the national colours became antagonistic to our souls, an insult to, a mockery of, our grief. Though it sounds like the talk of a madman, I say that I began to hate the colours for which I would formerly have loved to give my life.