Presently the guns on our bank stopped firing too and on the main road little figures, bent under heavy loads, could be seen approaching. When they got nearer I saw that they were soldiers—the victorious Reds returning from the villages on the other bank among the vineyards, laden heavily with loot. They had captured the entire camp of the fleeing Czechs and brought bundles of rice, matches, tobacco, sacks of dried prunes, barrels of rum, wine and honey. A Jewish front delegate had even obtained a carriage, which he had loaded high with plunder, and the soldiers roared with laughter as he drove down the street. Let Béla Kun run after the Czechs himself if he wants to! They were very merry and some of them very unsteady on their feet. About noon, however, their merriment was unexpectedly interrupted. Firing broke out suddenly and machine-guns rattled in the vineyards. A soldier without his cap and his face white with fright rushed towards the Museum garden. “The Czechs have come back!” he shouted, and his voice rang down the street. “They’re in the vineyards again and have captured our people!” The Czechs had, in fact, returned to the vineyards and caught sixty Reds pilfering there. The buglers sounded the alarm in vain: the Red army was busy cooking rice and drinking rum. Some Proletarian women, who had had no share in the booty, stood there, arms akimbo, and scolded the soldiers: “Of course when there’s a distribution of meat or of milk you’re always in the front row. Then you shout that you are Reds and steal the milk from the kiddies’ mouths. But when it is a question of driving away the Czechs you run home with what you have stolen. You let them take the hill.” Most of the soldiers were drunk, in fact they had got tipsy before the attack began, for while they were falling in Gypsies played to them and rum was distributed. “Mental degradation by means of alcohol was one of the weapons of the bourgeois,” shouts the Red press. “Alcohol is the Proletariat’s greatest foe,” is posted by the Communists on all the walls. Yet the Dictatorship of the Proletariat makes the class-conscious Red army drunk whenever it wants to drive it to face unnecessary death. * * * * * _May 31st._ What hast thou done, Michael Károlyi?