In his answer to the memorandum the French general was insulting and contemptuous. The shame of it all! They are slighted and we bear the disgrace. Every word of Franchet d’Esperay was a slap in the face to Károlyi and his fellows. What unfathomable contempt must have been felt by this old Norman nobleman, this patriotic soldier, for Károlyi and his Bolshevick Internationalist companions! Workers’ Council.... Soldiers’ Council.... He looked sternly at the Semitic features of Jászi and the faun-like face of Hatvany as he said: “You only represent the Hungarian race and not the Hungarian people.” Then he answered the clumsy, cunning sentence of the memorandum, sprung from the brain of some journalistic fantast: “From the first of November Hungary ceases to be a belligerent and becomes a neutral country.” “The Hungarians have fought side by side with the Germans and with the Germans they will suffer and pay.” An answer to those who shouted in Parliament over dying Hungary “we are friends of the Entente,” an answer to Károlyi, who in the interest of his personal ascendency intrigued with Prague, Bukarest and Belgrade. “The Czechs, Slovakians, Roumanians and Yugo-Slavs are the enemies of Hungary, and I have only to give the order and you will be destroyed.” I forced my eyes to overcome my shame and anger, and read on. Followed the conditions of the armistice.... Not conditions, but orders born of revenge and hatred dictated by the commander of an armed force to the self-appointed, obtruding envoys of a disarmed people. Horrible nightmare.... The Hungarian government has to evacuate huge territories in the east and in the south. Hungarian soil must be delivered over to the Balkan forces. We must surrender from the Szamos to the Maros-Tisza line, from the Danube to the Sloveno-Croatian frontier, that which has been ours for a thousand years. Eighteen points.... Eighteen blows in the face of the nation. After this Hungary is a country no longer, she is a surrounded quarry thrown to the fury of the pack. The Kill.... Poor country of mine, poor countrymen.... Suddenly I saw the letters no more: something had covered them, as the stones at the bottom of a brook are rendered indistinct by the waves above. I wiped my eyes and looked up. Had others read it too? The little ensign had. He was weeping silently. He sat there with his head bowed, crushing the newspaper in his fist. I looked round. Faces had changed since I had read the paper. The others had read it too. Strangers began to talk to each other excitedly:—“I always told you so, Károlyi alone could bring us a good peace. He got it in two days. It was said that he alone could save us....”