A single candle was burning on the table, and by its light we could see a map on the wall—the map of Hungary! That unit of a thousand years which was not created by man but was made into one country by nature. The thing I could never believe, which was always deemed a threat meant only for the Revolutionary Bolshevist Government, the frontier of Hungary as delineated by Clemenceau, has disclosed itself in the Austrian treaty as the real aim of their vengeance. In the name of peoples and nations the men at the Peace Conference are preparing a crime which is only paralleled by the partition of Poland. Suddenly I see, like a train of misty ghosts, a shackled procession pass before my eyes: the granite walls of the Carpathians; the mysterious rushes of Lake Fertö; the sea under the Carso; the Danube rushing through the Iron gate; the summits of Transylvania; the forests of Mármaros—all of them under a foreign yoke! I did not own an inch of that ground, and yet it was all my own. They take it from me, and equally from everyone who is Hungarian. Aladár Huszár has drawn upon the map the frontiers fixed by the Paris Peace Conference. It is as if a knife were passing through our flesh, leaving a line of blood wherever it passes. The ancient frontiers are all left far beyond the line and deep in the country there is an awful gash. The red line proceeds on the map, staggers now and then as though in horror, stumbles, recoils and then goes on, leaving ancient Hungarian cities without, cutting pure Hungarian regions in two, leaving a miserable, truncated body—the Hungary of the Peace Conference! Those who have never leant over the map of their own country, those who have never drawn with weeping eyes new frontiers within the old historical boundaries at the bidding and according to the predatory desires of enemy peoples, those are ignorant of the meaning of torture, of lust for vengeance, of revolt, of hatred, of patriotism. “We shall take it back!...” Which of us said it? It matters not. It is not the saying of one person, it is the word of a whole nation. Even in our misery and destruction we had the strength to say it. “We will take it back!” That is the phrase which all our coming generations will breathe. That is the phrase mothers will teach to their infants. Bride and bridegroom will pledge each other’s troth with that phrase before the altar. Those who go will leave this phrase as an inheritance, those who remain will take their oath upon it. We will take it back! The last clod, the meanest tree, every spring, every blade of grass, every stone. Nothing moved in the silence of the night. Only the flame of the burnt-out candle flickered. “Let us go ... we must sleep. This is the last candle in the house....” * * * * * _July 24th–29th._