Orders for mobilisation are again covering the walls of the town, and the village criers are walking the streets and beating their drums. Huge posters have made their appearance, representing the running figure of a sailor, his mouth wide open. His head is about two feet long, his arms about three yards. Above his head he stretches a red cloth inscribed with the words: TO ARMS! And while this frightful poster-sailor overruns poor, truncated little Hungary, deprived of its seashore, Béla Kun puts out his tongue at the peace conference. At the meeting of the ‘Committee of 150’ he rang the tocsin with one hand: “The Proletariat in Hungary is going through its crisis!” The other he waved in triumph: “To-day the Hungarian Soviet is an important factor in international affairs, more important than old Hungary ever was! This is proven by Clemenceau’s last despatch....” He had a word for everybody, but through his boasting one could hear the chattering of his teeth. The Bavarian Soviet has died, the Austrian Soviet was never born, the armies of the Russian Soviet did not come to the rescue. And throughout Hungary his enemy Counter-revolution raises its head. It is there on the edge of the scythe as the stone sharpens it, it is in the glaring emptiness of the recruiting offices, at the idle writing desks of the offices, in the movement which hides the blue banknotes and refuses the white ones, in the stroke of every oar that crosses the Tisza at Szeged. The Dictatorship is groping about, seeking something to cling to. As a last hope it is clinging to the phantasmagoria of world-revolution, which, after all, was from the beginning the foundation of its politics. So the Soviet Cabinet has addressed an appeal to the Proletariat of the world, calling on it to demonstrate in favour of the Hungarian and Russian Soviets and to proclaim world-revolution on July 20–21st. [Illustration: A RECRUITING PLACARD FOR THE RED ARMY. ] CHAPTER XIV _July 21st._ People call revolutions ‘youth’ and ‘dawn’. But revolutions are not daybreaks, nor are they the chaos out of which comes the beginning of all things. They are not the first hour of a new age, but the last decaying hours of a senile age in which the features of the times have become distorted.