A message reached me from Elisabeth Kállay: she and her family have gone into the country and she asked me to come to them. But I shook my head; to-morrow I return to my mother. Many have left town. Those who could went by train, others fled by carriage, on foot, by whatever means they could manage. All traces of them disappear—they simply exist no longer. One political party after another pronounces its extinction. The general officers and high officials have disappeared from the scene. Nobody attempts to raise a dam against the deluge, though yesterday a sluice-gate might have stopped it. October 31st has returned like a haunting spectre and we live the evil day again. Then the trap was baited with the device: ‘Independent Hungary,’ now it is: ‘Territorial Integrity.’ The whole thing is like the semi-conscious feeling during a nightmare that one has dreamt the same horrors before. Where are those who used to be always ready to give advice to the King in Schönbrunn and the halls of the Vienna Burg? Why do they not advise our unfortunate nation now? And where are now those who during the war were ready to order thousands ‘over the top’ into the jaws of death whenever a single trench was in danger? Where is my whole haughty race which used to go so proudly, singing a merry tune, to face death on foreign fields? Why does it stand now, with glaring eyes, inactive, on our fields at home? Since Károlyi’s treason, four and a half months have passed. And this new danger finds us again without a leader, without organisation. Running shapes are in flight. Shadows are disappearing in the distance, shadows which once were thought the great realities of Hungary. And those who stay with us, in offices, in poor officers’ quarters, are but hungry, ragged, grey little shadows with bended heads. Wherever the red hand of Bolshevism has grasped the rod of power it has always raised a spirit of resistance. The streets of Moscow, Petrograd, Helsingfors, Berlin and Altona have run with the hot human blood of revolt—Budapest alone has submitted in dizzy apathy. Is the hideous enchantment more powerful here than elsewhere? Here, where in the time of Károlyi’s revolution there were no more than two hundred and sixty thousand organised workers and even yesterday no more than five thousand Communists? What has happened? Austrian bugles have called on Hungarian troops for too many charges during the war. Those who might have saved us to-day are dead. I felt a desperate longing for action: to do something even if one had to die in the effort, to do something which would break the charm and free the energies benumbed by its humiliating spell! I clenched my fists and shook my head in frenzy; it cannot remain like this. To-morrrow—to-morrow I shall go home. And wearily I shut my tired eyes.