Somebody in our compartment whispered: “It was for to-day that Számuelly had fixed the massacre of the bourgeoisie.... It was to have begun in Budapest. Then all over the country.... Lenin and Trotsky had ordered a stricter Dictatorship.” ‘Lenin speaking!’ The awful words dissolved like rotten things in the air. He speaks no longer here! Nor does Számuelly; but there are voices from gallows-pits, from the graves and from the unburied dead. The track curved, and from the direction of the old castle of Nográd we could see a storm racing towards us. In a few moments the sky was black. The train threw itself against the hurricane, then was compelled to stop. The heavy carriages trembled; the trees slanted and the dust rose in dark clouds. The wind moaned like a monster organ. Such a wind preceded the world-war. To prevent premonitions I said quickly: “If we stick to each other and do not forget.... In one year, in two, or ten or even a hundred years, Hungary will arise again, for there is a little speck of earth which belongs to us. Six feet of ground at the foot of Golgotha was enough to bring the Resurrection....” The storm passed to the west and the spires and cupolas of chastened Budapest appeared again in sunshine above the plain and the hills. I took leave of my companions at the station and then a carriage carried me off. I was alone. Flags were floating above me on all the houses—curious flags, that had been cut in half when the terror was requisitioning them for an auto-da-fé. On the walls the orders of Rumanian generals were posted—on white paper. Like ambulant ruins, the electric trams with smashed windows crawled along their rails. The shops were still closed and between the blinds one could see that the windows were empty. The dusty glass showed traces of removed posters. After the robberies of Communism, life had not yet returned to the beggared town. With steel helmets and fixed bayonets a Rumanian patrol came round a corner. The blood rushed to my face, and then I noticed something else: in ramshackle cabs Rumanian officers with painted cheeks and rouged lips were sitting with young Jewesses. How quickly they have made friends! And how happy they seem! A motor lorry was standing in front of a house from which Rumanian soldiers were removing typewriters. War contribution—everything is war contribution. With mighty swings they threw the delicate machines one on top of the other. A thud, a crash—that was the end of them! Rumania is acquiring the tools of Western culture. But instead of broken typewriters it might have acquired capital in the shape of hundreds of years of Hungarian gratitude, if it had been content to leave the little that was left to a ransacked people.