While Béla Kun was declaiming: “I am not in despair ... I do not want to make you despair, comrades ... you will never hear despondent words from my lips.... I shall never give it up.... I say we won’t be downhearted ... bad times, but not hopeless....” news was brought to the assembly: the position in the field is not hopeless! The attitude of the meeting altered at once. The orator became truculent once more. “If possible we must defend the Dictatorship before Budapest, through the Bakony, to Wiener Neustadt.... We must not resign our power!” The Workers’ Council then adopted a resolution—that it is the duty of organised labour “to defend to the last drop of blood the achievements of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” How this defence is to be conducted was revealed by a comrade called Surek: “Honoured Workers’ Council.... The bourgeoisie is grinning and rubbing its hands everywhere. We must freeze this grin on its face! To-morrow we must go to the factories and our first duty will be to exterminate the bourgeoisie effectively, in the strictest sense of the word. We must keep our pledge that when the Entente comes here it shall find nothing but mountains of bourgeois corpses and a determined Proletariat. Enough bourgeois must not be left alive to form a Government.” In deference to foreign countries this speech was not reported in the papers; but political agitators are spreading the words of Comrade Surek. Now and then a bowed female form passes the window, her face set towards the prison, carrying food for some hostage. The observation post of the Reds has been established on the prison roof, just above the hostages. Let the Czechs shell it! Soldiers stop the women, inspect their baskets and take whatever they fancy. Then they say, as a parting greeting: “That is the last dinner you need bring! If the Czechs enter, we shall hang the swine.” * * * * * _May 5th._ The bombardment has ceased and the town is creeping out of its holes. But people pass each other stealthily, without exchanging words, as if they dared no longer talk. And above the county hall the wind is toying with the red flag. A blood-red shawl is floating in the spring breeze: Szolnok has been retaken. In the afternoon Gregory, the Huszárs’ coachman, came running horror-stricken from the town: the Reds have declared that instead of Aladár Huszár they are going to arrest his wife. It was about ten o’clock when there was a knock at the door. “Let me go,” I said to my friend. Are they coming for her, or has her husband come back, or are they searching for me? The candle guttered in the wind, and at the garden gate three men with fixed bayonets emerged from the dark. They pushed me aside without saying a word and marched up the stairs into the room. I ran and got in front of them. “What do you want?”