Immediate disarmament, the withdrawal of our armies from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier.... When I read on my eyes faltered. Then they were filled with alarm. The last terrible condition (unknown in modern warfare) followed: Prisoners of war to be returned without any reciprocity! This seemed incomprehensible. Our enemies want to retain as white slaves soldiers, heroes who had faced them armed in open battle. Then another pain stabbed me: We must lose the coast, Dalmatia, the dreamy blue islands, the fleet to whose flag so much glory was attached, the monitors of the Danube. We must deliver up all floating material, the commercial harbours, and ships. [Illustration: FIUME (HUNGARY’S ONLY PORT—TAKEN FROM HER BY THE PEACE TREATY). _Photo. Erdelyi, Budapest._ (_To face p. 78._)] The scorched, lifeless Carso, wild tracts of rock under an azure sky, great murmuring forests, and there, down below, the sea, and, like corals and shells on the shore, Fiume, Hungary’s gate to the seas. It was indeed a bitter thought. Italy, with thy hundred ports, why dost thou rob us? We have only this one! It was a tiny fishing village, like so many others in the bay of Quarnero. We made it what it is: it sprung up from Hungarian labour, the gold from Hungarian harvests of corn and wine has flowed there to raise dams, to build quays, to work a wonder among the stones. Fiume is our only port.... And beyond, that which was not ours but which we loved dearly, the rosy bastions of the Dolomites, reaching into the clouds, the home of the Tyrolese, and Riga on the shores of Lake Garda, peaks and ravines, sacred by so much Hungarian blood. What the war could not take is peace to take from us? Beside myself, I walked up and down in my room till morning, haunted by despair, utter, complete despair. * * * * * _November 5th._ In place of the free morning of the woods, the gloom of a narrow street looked in through my window. The wall of the opposite house drove my eyes back to my books, my furniture, my pictures. Now I saw their beauty again, and I was glad that they were there with me. The many old books in the bookcase behind my writing-table ran up the wall like the fading gold of an ancient embroidery. Above, on the red wall, in a frame surmounted by the Pope’s triple crown, in a soft haze the Madonna of Venice by Sebastiano Ricci. The portrait of Castruccio Castracani and a Dutch Old Man in a sable-bordered green mantle. The clock ticked under the Empire mirror. From the escritoire with the many little drawers, a copy of San Lorenzo the child-monk, the most beautiful piece of sculpture of the early Renaissance, looked into my room with a youthful challenge.