The tram to our hills was practically empty. Everybody has come to town and the houses stand abandoned. The strokes of axes resound in the woods, and trembling townspeople steal scraps of wood along the roadside. Shabby clerks, teachers, women pick up brushwood in the thickets. Now and then a shot is heard from the hills. Thousands of disbanded soldiers have taken their rifles with them and are shooting game freely all over the country. The woods are crowded with poachers. Blood-stains. A rotting carcase. Hungary’s famous game is on the verge of extinction. I reached our villa and walked round the abandoned house. It has not yet been broken into. The wind was twisting the dead leaves along the road into ropes. There was a dry rattle everywhere, and the branches of the bare trees knocked together in the moving air. An old woman walked down the road and her thin silken skirt fluttered in the wind. She must have known better days, and now she carried firewood on her back. There is no wood to be got in town. What will happen in winter? We shall freeze.... Coming back I bought a newspaper through the tram window. Many hands were stretched out. Opposite me a young ensign bought one too. The torn off insignia of his rank had left their mark on the collar of his uniform. Well disposed officers have ceased to wear uniforms. It has become a livery of shame, and is worn only by those who have nothing else to wear. This one looked like one of that category. Only deserters, civilians, and those who shirked the war now wear uniforms. I began to read the midday paper. Belgrade.... Everything around me disappeared. Through the printed letters of the paper I saw the Serbian town as I had known it long ago. The Danube was rolling past the wharf, there was the high fort, once Hunyadi’s impregnable Hungarian stronghold, the Konak; and between the trees beyond the town the small convent where, under the oil-painted planks of the floor, without any monument, the massacred bodies of the last Obrenovic and his mutilated Serbian queen, Draga, lie. Then I thought of the garden of Topcider and its oriental little Kiosk where Serbian Gypsies used to fiddle and sing. Officers, in brilliant uniforms after the Russian pattern, took their afternoon substitute for tea at small round tables, eating onions with bread. Some of them had the ribbon of an Order on their chest. A Serbian explained to me proudly that this Order was bestowed only on those who had taken an active part in the events that cleared the road to the throne for Peter Karageorgevic.