A wild night, like a witches’ Sabbath. The nightingale did not sing, the only sound was the roar of the guns. The shells are still stacked on the other side of the wall of my room, out there on the terrace, and if in the dark a shell were to strike here, not one stone of the village would be left on another. But there is so much misery nowadays that no one troubles about such things. Again the attack did not come off, and during the whole night the garden was wringing its green hands. I was awakened early by excited voices, all talking of the hopeless situation of the Proletarian army. The Rumanians have occupied the bridge-heads at Szolnok and are marching on Budapest. Béla Kun has fallen. The rumours spread through the villages, and the peasant members of the small Directorates, recruited by force, are saying with pallid lips: “I cannot be blamed, I have only done what I was told. No harm can come to me, I never wanted it.” The Communists of Szügy have suddenly become very polite: the Red soldiers actually saluted us. “What is going to happen?” I asked one of them, and as I did so a drunken voice shouted in the yard: “Down with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!” The political delegates to the front have vanished, and disorderly, ugly indiscipline has taken hold of the men. Sergeant Isidor Grosz shouted his orders in the village street in vain, no one paid the least attention to him. One of the soldiers shouted at him: “Shut up! You left your battery, didn’t you, comrade, when the Czechs were shelling us?” I remembered the story of this Isidor Grosz. He went to see his fiancée, having written out a pass for himself and forged his commander’s signature to it. When he turned up again his commander brought him before a court martial. Then the 32nd regiment of heavy artillery began to grumble, and Isidor Grosz ran straight to Béla Kun to complain. The discipline in the Red army is as loose as this everywhere, which explains the feeble resistance it is making. Meanwhile Comrade Böhm, the Commander-in-Chief, declares that Proletarian self-respect is everywhere victorious. The door opened; Mrs. Beniczky looked round and then said in a whisper: “The Counter-revolution has broken out in Balassagyarmat. People are shouting in the street: “We never were Communists!” Our people have seized a telegram: in it the Soviet Cabinet has disclosed the situation. It has fallen.” Steps came along the terrace. We looked round in alarm. It was Mrs. Aladár Huszár. What had happened in Balassagyarmat? And her husband? She made a sad gesture, then said that I must go with her. The Czechs were attacking and Balassagyarmat was preparing to receive them. They only want the railway line. Szügy is not going to be occupied, so that if I remained here I should still be in the Soviet Republic. We should have to hurry. “So they have not fallen after all? And what about the Counter-revolution?”