Yesterday we thought we had escaped. Yesterday the news came that the Cabinet had fallen and that the Red armies were everywhere on the run. To-day they have shunted the ill-success of their arms and the people’s fury on to the bourgeoisie. The game of the Károlyi revolution is being repeated. Instead of pogroms, let there be massacres of Christians. They spoke of it at the market place: Számuelly is coming to restore order. The lives of the fallen Red soldiers must be revenged. Mobilisation!... The newspaper seems to be composed entirely of exclamation marks. ‘To the factory workers!’ ‘Order!’ ‘Appeal!’ ‘Decree!’ Comrade Pogány has sounded a tocsin of alarm: “The news from the front is bad. Our defeat at the front means the return of the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie, our victory means the conservation of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Everything depends on organised labour. To-day the position is this: the revolutionary Proletariat of Budapest can no longer trust the front, on the contrary, it rests with the Proletariat of Budapest to save the front by its revolutionary impetus. The Dictatorship has reached its crisis....” Only after this confession did the newspaper give a belated account of the May festivities of the capital. The town in scarlet: hundreds of thousands in the streets: an exodus to the woods: illuminations, fireworks.... And the poor people who expected to be fed on the festive occasion staggered back like madmen to the great incertitude, hungry, and their eyes sore with the scarlet glare. The deadly colour of the red madness was still on the walls of the houses when at 2 p.m. the trembling Cabinet met in the great room of the Town Hall. Meanwhile rain had begun to fall, and the thirty millions’ worth of red paper-cloth was soaked; red streamed down the houses, the walls, the plaster statues, the pavement. Everything was painted red. It is said that the town looked like a huge blood-covered slaughter-house. And then the news spread that the Dictatorship had fallen. The newspapers reported the details of the emergency meeting of the Workers’ Council. Béla Kun shouted to the audience that “The masses of the Red army are fleeing before the hireling armies of Imperialism. Looking now,” he said with raised voice, “at Soviet Hungary, I remember a story by Gorki. Gorki went to Paris in search of the spirit of Revolution, seeking its aid for the struggling revolution of the Russian Proletariat. He searched for the ancient Revolution, crowned with the good Phrygian cap, he searched and inquired, and at last was led to a hotel where he found a courtesan, a woman fallen more or less to the level of a street prostitute, and he asked her not to give herself to the Czar, but to help the Revolution. But the woman the Revolution had turned into a courtesan gave herself none the less to the Czar; so Gorki ends with these words: ‘I wanted to spit my bloody, purulent saliva into her face.’”