More Russians were coming from the entrance. Soldiers hustled the people with the butt-ends of their rifles. “Go on, Ruski!” A heavy animal stench drifted behind them. Desperate men struggled round the piles of trunks.... A boy dragging an immense old leather bag.... In front of a broken trunk an old lady kneels in the mud. She wears a sable coat and her head is covered with a peasant woman’s neckerchief, just as she had managed to escape. She weeps loudly, wringing her delicate hands. All her possessions have been stolen on the way. Nobody heeds her. Children shriek and cannot tell whence they came. They want their mother, lost during the flight. In one carriage a little girl has been trampled to death in the throng. Soldiers carry her dead on a stretcher. From the other side across the rails, a woman comes running: she jumps wildly and her hair flutters madly in front of her eyes. She screams. She has not yet got there, she has seen nothing, but she knows; it was hers, it was hers.... Meanwhile Polish Jews, slinking along the walls, bargained.... They pounced on the soldiers back from the front, and bought Italian money. At the exit armed sailors made a disturbance and took eggs and fat from the baskets of peasant women. Agitators with red ribbons round their arms, delegates of the Soldiers’ Council, distributed revolutionary handbills; one of them made a speech. The soldiers surrounded him, some listened, some laughed, scratched their heads, and, as they went on, no longer saluted their superiors. A train came in with a shrill cry, as if it were a refugee itself, panting and shabby after its long flight, and poured out more people. Wounded soldiers dragged themselves to the refreshment room. The foot of one was wrapped in a newspaper: the red guards at the Austrian frontier had taken his boots. More refugees. Once they had a home, they had a fireside.... Now all is lost! Hunger stares imploringly out of their eyes and they reach for their crust of bread as if they were asking for alms. What hast thou done, Károlyi? I went home with a reeling head. Morning had extinguished the gas lamps a long while ago. I looked in the faces that passed me in the gray light of day. Are these refugees too? The town around me was shabby and dirty. Grimy flags flapped from the houses in the cold air. They were still there to proclaim their impudent lie—“the people’s victory.” We have lost the war. Foreign troops invade Hungary, tens of thousands of refugees tramp the streets, and Budapest feasts her traitors and stands beflagged in the centre of the collapsing country. CHAPTER VII _November 8th._ The wind chases the clouds above the Danube. It whistles down the chimneys. The streets of Buda shiver between the houses.