SUITORS AND SUPPLIANTS

I confess I did not greatly enjoy the unusual luxury of the Imperial-Royal train. Inured as I am to scenes of massacre and mass murder, the present atmosphere redolent of this personal tragedy depressed me. Often during the night I heard the last words of the dying arch-duke, who did not know the fate that had also befallen his wife, '"Sophie! Sophie! Watch over the Kinder." Unmoved I had walked over the battlefields of Verdun with its half million dead, many unburied with still protruding, beseeching arms, and with but a passing shudder I had seen the bodies of hundreds of the "hot-country men" who had, at the field of La Victoria in Venezuela, been cut to pieces by the cutlasses of Castro's Andinos. These things were horrible and, as I think, disgraceful to our civilization, but they were too horrible to grasp. On the other hand, it will be long before I shall forget the face of the little quartermaster captain who was mashed flat as a pancake on the Boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle in Paris twenty feet from where I stood, by the overturning of a lumber truck. And there another dead soldier who travels with me, whose face I shall long see, although years have passed and millions have died, many of whom I have known and not a few of whom I knew intimately. It was on the East Front in March 1915. We were halted by a patrol outside of Memel where the street fighting between the Russians and the advancing Germans continued. Orders came from the High Command we were not to go down into the city where fighting continued, and in below-zero weather we stood until midnight on the brow of a hill where a few hours before a Russian battery had been stormed with heavy losses by a Landwehr battalion. We left our cars and ran up and down to keep from freezing, but gradually fatigue and the cold were bearing us down. The wind from the Baltic increased in intensity, and it seemed as if we would be frozen to death, and indeed some of us rather welcomed this escape from suffering. Then someone had a bright, if ghoulish, idea. All around the battery lay the frozen, stiff corpses of the men who, pulsating with life and vigor, had stormed it but a few hours before. Our chauffeurs picked up the dead and piled them together into a stockade and physically, at least, for the rest of the night we were protected from the icy blast, but one, a middle-aged sergeant with a great black beard, faced the corner into which I crawled. He greatly resembled the crude picture of Stonewall Jackson that presided over my nursery in the days when I first began to listen to war tales. The dead sergeant and I, alive perhaps because of the protection which his sturdy body afforded, lay side by side throughout that long night, and so a personal contact was established which still persists and so it will be, I fear, with my trip in the car which carried the archducal pair to the romantic honeymoon in Italy and to their death in Sarajevo. Of course I can do nothing about it and I should try to forget them, but still I know that for a long time I shall hear those piteous words of entreaty: "Sophie! Sophie! Watch over the Kinder."

Belgrade, in early April.

I wandered up the hillside through the ruins of the White City with whose broad avenues and byways I had been familiar not so long ago. All man's work has been destroyed by man's diabolical inventions. Only the Danube and the Save majestically flow on to their union under the old Turkish citadel, and so I know I am in Belgrade, or what is left of it.

At times there was such an uproar I thought that once again the capital of the Serbs was under fire, but that was not the case. Gangs of soldiers and civilians, urged on by the loud cries of officers and foremen, were clearing away the ruins that tell the sad story of the Austrian bombardment with which the holocaust of disaster began. Rapid-fire explosions rent the air, and now and again the wreckers brought to view the body of a man or a woman who had not lived to see this day of liberation. Generally the corpses were exceedingly lifelike and some had homely utensils in their hands, showing that they were going about their daily round of duties when death came down out of the clouds, or from the ironclad monitors on the river. Entombed as they have been for four years in piles of brick and timber, these first victims of the war have been protected from the scavengers of the air who now, however, circle menacingly over the scene of desolation. As I climbed in and out of the ruins I heard scraps of every language known to man, and many of the speakers have come from faraway lands and over distant seas. I spotted two Filipinos and tackled them in scraps of Tagalog, but they shook their heads.

"Me Visayan," said one, and then they explained in scrappy Spanish that early in the war they had enlisted on an English ship as stewards and now were serving with the Danube patrol. At last I escaped the labyrinth of wreckage and before me waved invitingly the Stars and Stripes over a building still intact that was once the Turkish Legation. I hastened on to greet one of our most competent representatives, H. Percival Dodge,[31] a career man upon whom I had dropped in at many faraway posts, in China, in Morocco, in Panama, and in Paris.

On the steps of the Legation I was delayed by an arresting figure, and soon I was in conversation with perhaps the only happy and contented man I have come up with in all the acrimonious days which have followed upon the Armistice. He was talking with the French-speaking butler, and not making much headway, but at sight of my uniform he turned to me with evident relief.

"I am Mikel Tusla," he said, "an American citizen," and he glowed with pride. His nakedness was covered with a scanty assortment of rags. He wore a fur cap from which the fur was gone and only the skin remained. His face was grimy and his feet were wrapped in rags. As we talked, a gentle rain began to fall and washed little canyons down his mud-caked face.

"I'm Mikel Tusla, an American citizen," he repeated, "but when I heard Mother Serbia was invaded, I came back home; and could I do otherwise? My brother had been killed and the little house on the hillside where I was born had gone up in flames! God! even in the days of the Turks our home had been spared. For four years I have fought with the Smedalia brigade and now that we have victory and peace, I want to go back to my Iowa farm - but there is difficulty."

I sat down on the doorstep and talked for some minutes with this happy man, without a shirt and without shoes, but who had an expression of contentment in his eyes to which I had long been a stranger. Then the Minister (H. Percival Dodge.) appeared and proudly I introduced our fellow citizen.

"You should - and you shall have - a decoration," said the Minister. "Only last week the Prince Regent told me that all the boys who came back across the sea to fight for the homeland would be remembered."

This talk about a decoration failed to interest Mikel.

"I only want a little writing on my passport, to say it is good; you see, it was only good for two years, but it was not my fault that it took us four years to lick the `Swabs.' Now that all is well in Serbia, I want to go home to my farm in Iowa and to my American children."

The Minister, after examining his army papers, wrote on that passport a citation that would make the heart of any soldier swell with pride.

Then Mikel turned to me.

"Would you mind if I touched your uniform? Someday my son will wear it."

"I shall be proud," I answered. And he laid his grimy hand on my insignia with something that was very like a caress.

"You must come to see me tomorrow, or any day, any hour, if there is any further difficulty," said the Minister.

"With that writing on my pass, there will be no difficulty," said Mikel Tusla. And he turned and went down the hill through the smoking ruins, the only happy, contented man I had met in months, and he was without a shirt or shoes.

"The melting pot," said the Minister, "and glory be to it."

I confess the atmosphere of the at once honeymoon chariot and funeral car on which I came to the smoking ruins of the Serbian capital had depressed me, and I planned to make the return journey by ordinary conveyance, but when after two days in the mourning city Logan agreed to hold his car for me at least twelve hours I succumbed to the comforts, the creature comforts, which it afforded. If there are ghosts in this world they certainly must have infested that tragic Pullman. But of course there are none, simply devils and demons of flesh and blood, extremely like ourselves. We made a quick journey back to what had been the Kaiserstadt without any noteworthy experience except one just as we were running into the station. Hearing Logan and myself discussing once again the ill-fated couple, the porter said: "I want to show you something." We followed him, and in my sleeping compartment he pointed out, scratched on one of the panels, "Sophie and Franzl," but he was not a sensationalist. He admitted that he did nor know whether the names dated from the honeymoon journey, when the honeymooners might have written them, as so many democratic trippers do on similar occasions, or whether it had been scratched there by some railway servant with a romantic leaning toward the vanished regime.

April, Vienna, Monday.

I am back from a brief dip in the troubled waters of the Balkans, for so many years my familiar swimming hole, where, surprisingly enough, I did not hear a hostile shot. In this respect it was a record-breaking journey. Down there, with stoical determination, all the peoples are digging themselves out of the wreckage that four years of war have wrought, and now back in peace-loving and traditionally frivolous Vienna I find myself involved in riots and in mass killings so surprising that at times I am inclined to disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes. I came back on the morning of what they call in Germany, and here, Gründonnerstag, our Maundy Thursday, a day of penitence and sorrow, on which it is traditional throughout Christendom for those who can to share at least a crust with the disinherited and the needy.

Leaving my bags at the hotel and feeling stuffy from the long railway journey, I immediately started out for a walk on the Ringstrasse. I noticed a greater number of police than was usual, and that most of them were mounted. Here and there I also caught sight of small detachments of troops half hidden away in the courtyards of the great apartment houses on the Ring between the Opera and the Parliament building. The fact is, however, that I paid little attention to the actual scene; I was living over again in memory what had happened on Maundy Thursday more than twenty years ago. On that day, through the courtesy of Count Taaffe, the Prime Minister, I had been invited to the Burg and had witnessed the medieval ceremony which then survived in the Holy Roman Empire as perhaps nowhere else. There in the great hall of the Hapsburg Burg, surrounded by the gorgeously attired dignitaries of the realm, the Emperor Francis Joseph, with a silver ewer in his hand, knelt down before a row of some twenty care fully selected beggars, and with perfumed water washed their poor, misshapen feet. Before the curious and the interlopers from distant lands arrived, the great Salle was already crowded with the mighty ones of the earth and the high dignitaries of the realm who had assembled to see the Emperor "with the pride that apes humility" perform this penitential act.

In appearance and garb, at least, the most striking were the Knights of St. John, the traditional defenders of the Holy Sepulcher, at this time, alas! still in the unholy keeping of the Turks. Two of them very graciously led us to a raised gallery from which we could in comfort survey the scene. They were gorgeously appareled in white satin robes with the Maltese cross of the Crusaders embroidered on their breasts and armlets. They had escort and other duties to perform and were constantly hurrying hither and thither, but the great dignitaries stood stock-still, waited and yawned. Among them were the men of the high army and navy command, the members of the General Staff with their haughty plumed hats, and not a few of the great magnates from Hungary, their tunics encrusted with medals and their shoulders covered with leopard skins. Among them also were the great territorial lords of the Empire, the Schwarzenbergs, the Liechtensteins, the Kinskys, the Trautsmansdorffs and scores more whose possessions are now scattered to the four winds, as are the dust and ashes of those of their caste who perhaps had the good fortune to fall in the battles on the Carpathian Mountains.

Suddenly the beggars, politely called pensioners, appeared - twelve men and twelve women; some were so feeble that they had to be supported by halberdiers and court servants. They were hardly in their places before the Emperor came in, and he was flanked by the cardinal archbishop of the apostolic city and the papal nuncio, the famous Monsignor Galimberti.

From now on the Church was in control of the ceremonial proceedings and it was the cardinal archbishop who gave the Emperor his cue. Reading from the Gospel of St. John, he announced: "Posuit vestimenta sua [He laid aside His garments] ," and the Emperor obediently entrusted his sword and his hat to an adjutant. Then the Cardinal read "et coepit lavare pedes Discipulorum [and He began to wash the feet of the Disciples] ." A servant now appeared with a silver ewer and preceded by a court chaplain who sprinkled the protruding feet of the pensioners with what was evidently perfumed or aromatic water, the Emperor began his task. Half kneeling before each of his humble guests, the lord of many lands wiped the moisture away from the now obviously shrinking feet. Then he gave them new socks and stout shoes. He led them to a great table, groaning under a weight of meat and drink, and, for the first course of this banquet, the Emperor-King served them with his own hands. The Emperor did not seem to enjoy the unusual experience, but he went through with it doggedly, with the determination with which he complied with all the requirements of his profession. The Emperor even tasted the soup and told one of the lackeys to put in several more pinches of salt, which he did. I do not think the pensioners enjoyed the repast. They ate sparingly and looked about with curious eyes. Then they were told that receptacles would be given them to carry away the rich food to humbler surroundings where they could eat more at their ease and this pleased them. So their eyes wandered over the scene which was, I have no doubt, as strange to them as it was to me. So, following their roving eyes, I also looked about me.

...But evidently I am a poor substitute for Froissart. I cannot recall whether the beautiful Empress was there. Had she been there, the memory of her grace would doubtless have remained with me throughout the drab years that have followed. But I am almost certain she was not present; doubtless she was breaking in the wild horses of the Hungarian Pusztas down at Gödöllö, and probably the carefully selected old ladies in their prim hats and gray smocks, now brought in, had their feet washed and were otherwise comforted by her ladies in waiting in a side apartment, to which we, the curious spectators, were not admitted. But, certainly, few other members of the Hapsburg family were absent. There was the sturdy Karl Ludwig, fat and rosy, although he is surviving his fourth marriage. By his side stood his eldest son, Francis Ferdinand, whose death at Sarajevo set the world ablaze and started the holocaust of disaster. Also, there were two little boys in sailor suits, the sons of the Archduke Otto, who was not present. He never attended Church festivities if he could help it, and on this day he could not have been present even had he wanted to; it was an open secret that because of a certain indiscretion the handsome Otto was being detained under arrest in a Tyrolean castle at least for the duration of his uncle s displeasure.

The elder of the little boys was Karl, who succeeded to his great uncle's tottering throne in 1916. He could not cope with the difficulties that confronted him, and he is now in Switzerland in none-too-affluent exile. And there was little Elizabeth, a scrawny elf with a wizened but shrewd, uncanny face. She is the only child of the luckless Crown Prince Rudolph, who died so mysteriously at Mayerling, and the Princess Stephanie, who, plump and plain, survives her unhappy marriage, but, no favorite at Court, she is not present today. The Viennese of both high and low degree blame her for not holding her "man," or if she could not do that, for not having overlooked his gallantries. She is particularly criticized for the gala Court carriage she on a memorable occasion maliciously stationed outside the apartment of the soubrette Rudolph was visiting; that was a thing that had never been done in Court circles before - at least not since the days of Maria Theresa, who, after all, was a warm-blooded woman as well as a fighting empress, and who tried to rule her flighty Franz with an iron hand.

...Now came the last of the scriptural scenes. Preceded by a noble boy carrying heavy purses in a great basket, the old Emperor, with somewhat unsteady step, climbed upon the estrade where the Court pensioners sat, exalted. Around the neck of each of them he placed the corded noose of a purse, which doubtless contained the traditional forty pieces of silver. The eyes of the pensioners were wide open now.

Then, in the twinkling of an eye, the pageant came to an end. Preceded by the noble boys, the nuncio and the archbishop, the Emperor vanished behind an arras, and the assemblage disbanded. We went down the corridor and the gala steps out into the Schweizerhof. It was crowded with Court carriages and lackeys in gorgeous liveries. I recall helping a charming French lady into her carriage and also what she said, with a touch of cynicism, which, had it been overheard, in those days would have been regarded as treason.

"C' est jouer la comédie - mais au moins, la pièce est fort belle." To me it certainly seemed a strange pageant, a relic from the medieval world, which probably nowhere else survived...

What a contrast is the scene with which I find myself confronted today. There are no gala carriages and no bemedaled courtiers to be seen. The Ring smells of the accumulation of garbage. Here and there a shabby taxi raffles by. Here and there along the broken railings of the Volksgarten there slinks an invalid soldier of the Hoch und Deutschmeister, once the darling regiment of the Viennese, the pride of the Imperial City. How gaily they sang as I saw them sally out to war in 1915:

"Ach du mein Östereich!

Du bist em schones Land."

Today they sang no more. Many had empty sleeves, all were pale of face, many seemed to be starving; some were asking for alms from those who had nothing to give, or pleading to be taken to the reconstruction hospitals, which were already overcrowded. And yet perhaps these were the lucky ones in contrast to their comrades I had seen in 1916, dying like flies in the prison camp at Khabarovsk on the Amoor in faraway Siberia. Lucky they doubtless were, but certainly they did not seem to know it.

...Deep in this reminiscent mood it was natural that my thought should travel back to the last time I saw the mighty ruler of this long-lived, millennial empire, whose ruins lay strewn before me. It was in February 1915, but what I saw then is as plainly etched in my mind s eye as though it had happened but yesterday. Francis Joseph was coming down the Mariahilferstrasse on one of his last visits to his post of duty in the Burg. Perhaps it was his very last as a few months later an attack of gentle pneumonia, that blessing to octogenarians, eased his departure from a world where he certainly could not have had any desire to linger. As I saw him for the last time he did not ride in a gilded Court carriage nor was he surrounded by the pomp and panoply of the Imperial Guard. Indeed he sat in his private zwei-spanner only to be distinguished from the public vehicles of that category by the fire and the beauty of the blooded horses that drew it.

The mighty Emperor whose empire was crashing about him was on his way to the Burg, to hold a war council, to hear the dark news that was coming in from so many fronts. By his side sat Count Paar or General Margutti, which of his personal adjutants it was I could not tell, so swiftly they passed me. On the box sat a "Jaeger." The great man was late, and the horses were being pushed. Persuaded, perhaps, that this was an historic moment, I stood still on the curb, almost spellbound, and my coat was flecked with the foam from the snorting onrushing horses. The strange old man was greatly changed. He seemed to me quite ripe for the end that awaits monarch as well as serf. His expressionless eyes were glazed and from one corner of his mouth there hung unlit the inevitable Virginier cigar, a libel on the noble state where really sweet tobacco is grown (only second to our Maryland crop), that the Austrian tobacco monopoly had proclaimed to the world, unashamed, for so many generations. Had the Emperor not said: "It would seem no misfortune is spared me"? But he was wrong. He, at least, was to die in his bed and still an emperor, while Kaiser Bill skulks, a refugee in Holland, and little Nicholas, but yesterday the autocrat of all the Russias, trapped in an Ekaterinburg cellar with all his nearest and dearest, has been butchered to make a Communist holiday.

Perhaps beyond the Styx, but never again in this world - this vale of tears, at least in part of their making - will the mighty men meet to reshape their dominions. Never again will the cloth of gold be spread for their Imperial Majesties on the dreary Polish plain of Skerniwicze. Never again in "shining armor" will they strut about on that lonely island in the fogbound Baltic, remaking maps of their world and redressing balances of powers. Indeed they will not ever again hobnob, and drink the waters at Tyrolean Ischl, which they were told, at least by the Court physicians, could not fail to have a rejuvenating effect on their senile bodies.

Now the old empires are being partitioned, and the new boundaries are about to be drawn by those who were for so long the underdogs. A herculean task it will prove to be, but one consoling thought suggests itself - they cannot possibly make a worse mess of it than did those who claimed to rule by Divine right. And at least Crown Prince Rudolph presents no problem except to the writers of mystery stories who have such unrestrained license in dealing with historic facts. About the mystery of Mayerling, as it is called, best sellers have been written in many tongues, but little light emerges. Unlike most of these brilliant fictionists, I did investigate the mystery. I did bring to light at least two long-veiled facts, but unfortunately they proved contradictory, and so while the unfortunate young man who was the heir to the apostolic throne has long crumbled into dust, the mystery, the deepest of the many in his line, survives and will doubtless always re main unsolved.

If I had a reputation to lose, say, as a transatlantic Sherlock Holmes, I could advance the plea that when my services were called in it was a cold trail, indeed it was three months old. I was in Constantinople when the news of the sudden death of Rudolph shocked Europe, and in a few hours the many versions of how it had happened set many tongues wagging. A few hours later I received a wire from the Commodore[32] ordering me to Vienna and urging me to elucidate the mystery. Nothing could have been more unwelcome to me. Owing to one or two minor achievements during my first sojourn in the waltz capital, my chief had a wholly exaggerated notion as to the sources of in-formation I enjoyed there, and now I was sure that this myth would be exploded. A few hours later, however, another wire came, which was most welcome. "Have made other arrangements in Vienna. Stay with the Armenians."

Three months later the myth came to dangerous life again. I was called to Paris to confer on the tangled Macedonian situation but also instructed by the Commodore to stop off for a week in Vienna and "clear up" what was still known throughout the world as the Mayerling mystery. Neither the unfortunate man who had substituted for me nor any of his competitors had accomplished this and so I was put on the cold trail and told to go to it.

The discoveries I made, particularly the unmarked grave in the Heiligenkreuz, "peace Acre," cast doubt upon many of the popularly accepted solutions. It certainly was dug within a few hours of the tragedy but unhappily it did leave my own theory in the "not-proven" class. I was, as so often before, mulling over the inconclusive end of my researches when suddenly I was recalled from my Rip Van Winkle dreams of court splendors and unsolved mysteries to the ugly present by musketry fire. I heard the raffle of sabers being drawn from scabbards and the cobbles in the driveway of the Ring rang with the approach of mounted men and the sharp orders that brought the slouching troops out of the courtyards and to attention fell on my ear. Fully aroused now and looking about me, I saw a disorderly mob of men, women, and barefooted children marching down the Mariahilferstrasse and I also saw that the police were drawing a cordon across the street which leads from the industrial quarters, with the evident purpose of preventing them from reaching the Parliament building a few hundred yards farther along. As they drew nearer I could see how miserably clad they were and I could hear their cries:

"We are starving! Give us bread and jackets! Es Friert uns! Wir verhungern! We are famished and we freeze."

In all the uproar and the confusion that followed, in which so unexpectedly I was involved, I cannot say that I have a very clear idea of how the battle began. Suddenly, however, shots rang out, followed by volleys, and these were certainly not warning shots. Some of the police fell and many of the horses. There ensued a regular fusillade and peering from behind the newspaper kiosk where I had sought refuge, I could see that many of the starving workers had fallen and riderless horses were prancing over their bodies. Some of the workers were running away but other more resolute groups were pushing on. The troops now entered the melee, in support of the police, and soon the Ring was cleared of the living. Here and there lay groups of dead and tangled masses of the writhing wounded which showed how deadly the firing had been while it lasted.

When the shots became desultory and finally died away, or almost, I saw a sight which gave me full realization of the dangers starving people will face under the compelling urge of hunger. Men, and women, too, now crept out from their refuges in the adjacent buildings and though frequently fired upon could not be kept from hacking with their dull knives at the bodies of the horses that had fallen and then making off with hunks of bloody booty!

When the last of the rioters had disappeared and ambulances for the police, at least, arrived on the scene, I emerged from my makeshift bombproof which had served its unusual purpose and did what I could for the wounded. Many indeed were past helping. Among these was a handsome Englishwoman who had been shot through the heart and had died instantly. It developed from her papers that she was a Mrs. Thompson, a casual passer-by, as was I, the wife of a distinguished engineer who had come to Vienna on the invitation of the new government to advise them on the water-power projects that are being planned to give employment and bread to the thousands who are literally starving. After what I had seen of the reckless courage of the rioters who were risking their lives for a chunk of horse meat, there could be no doubt that the need is appalling and that our Food Administration is getting to work none too soon.

Vienna, Saturday.

Contrary to the expectations of many friends, I am back safe and sound from my sojourn of three days in Budapest under the Red Star, the hammer and sickle - the advance post of Bolshevism in Europe. None of the difficulties that had been expected materialized. Everything passed off so smoothly that I have an uneasy feeling that perhaps my journey was not clandestine after all and that the new authorities not only acquiesced in my venture but connived at it! The only unpleasant incident took place on the return journey at the new Austrian frontier about an hour out from Vienna, measured by the slow-moving and lice-infested train; here I was held up and accused of being an emissary of the Reds, who had come to corrupt the Austrians and turn them from their apostolic faith. I should say in explanation that the frontier guards I here encountered were drunk and later a very plausible explanation of their condition was forth coming. It seems that the regular supplies of beer had given out and the customs men had fallen back on the local Branntwein, which is, I should say, corn liquor in its most deadly form. However, I was permitted to telephone to Renner's office in Vienna and the liberating word came almost immediately. The offending inspector collapsed, whether from the corn liquor or the rebuke he received I cannot say, and I resumed my journey in a roomy but by-no-means-clean cattle car.

Colonel House had insisted on my running down to the Hungarian capital for a "look-see," however brief. He was inclined to class the reports that he had received from the representative of the Enquiry there with those that came from the scholarly observer[33] of this organization in Vienna whose interminable dispatches dealt almost exclusively with the history of the pragmatic sanction; however, in this, for once, the Colonel was mistaken. The reports of Philip Marshall Brown,[34] were very clear, extremely fair, and always illuminating. I was sorry that he was away during my short stay in his bailiwick.

"But I want another point of view," insisted the Colonel over the telephone. "You need only stay down there a couple of days. You know Budapest from former visits and perhaps you will meet with people who, having confidence in your discretion, will tell the truth."

Well, the only difficulties I met with were in starting. In what guise or, rather, in what disguise, should I go? If I went in uniform, that would be some sort of recognition of the Red regime, and I was not authorized to take that step; if I went in civilian garb, and was apprehended, might be regarded as a spy and dealt with as such. I finally decided on this risk, and even left behind me the diplomatic passport with which I had been provided when starting on the Smuts mission. I decided to go in the familiar role of a newspaper correspondent and in the civilian clothes which Gregory of the Food Administration kindly furnished. I had no identification papers with me, and fortunately no one asked me for any. Once in Pest, in my best Hungarian, I told the shabby cabdriver at the station to take me to the Hotel Hungaria, my favorite refuge during the days of my Balkan adventures. He seemed surprised, but took me there, and on my arrival I found that the famous hostelry had been converted into government offices and there where the gypsy orchestra had played "To the Ear" - wild, fantastic music - the air was filled with the click of typewriters. He then took me to the Carlton-Astoria, I think it was called, and there I received a cordial welcome and registered as a journalist with residence in New York. This resulted in an unexpected complication. The clerk told me that all journalists received a reduction of 25 per cent on their bills. What should I do in all honesty about that? Fortunately, in the lobby there was a box in which all were invited to place contributions for invalided soldiers, and in this box I later deposited the amount of the professional reduction to which, for the moment, I was not entitled.

It was a greatly changed Budapest in which I now wandered about. The people were quiet but obviously extremely nervous as to the things that were about to happen. As I walked along Andrassy Street, a window fell and all within hearing ran like mad - they evidently apprehended bombs. While the situation was outwardly calm, most people seemed to think that they were merely experiencing the lull that precedes the storm. Three weeks before all the banks had been looted and all the stores sacked. At the moment of my arrival there was nothing left to steal. Kun ordered the "Lenin boys," for the most part released convicts, to the citizen army, urging them to face the invading Czechs on the north and the Roumanians advancing from the south. It was then they showed their true colors -

and their teeth. Not a few of the officers who brought them these unwelcome orders were killed, and in and out of uniform the "boys" continued their depredations.

Since March 21st, when the Károlyi government fell (or rather evaporated), all the factories were taken over by the "State" and then perforce closed down because the only people who knew how to run them had, not unwisely, taken to their heels. In the first three weeks of the Soviet rule the Lenin boys probably murdered a thousand people - thrifty citizens who foolishly sought to retain the little money they had and the stores of food they had hidden away. Of course in a situation like this it is very difficult to control the figures of what were euphemistically called "casualties," but I believe the above figure is a very liberal underestimate. Kun tried to get these bandits to march against the invaders but with few exceptions, and indeed none among the cityfolk; they had no stomach for fighting. Loot! loot! and ever more loot was their dream - now about to be realized, they hoped.

While I do not claim to have enjoyed anything more than a superficial view of the situation, I do think that but for what is termed his "agricultural policy" Kun might have lasted a little longer.[35] It is quite true that, first off, the peasants of the Pusztas, or at least a goodly number of them, were enthusiastic at the thought of becoming small landowners, but when the commissars arrived they learned that the redistribution of the large estates did not work out as they had thought it would. It is true that the old territorial lords were displaced and that some of them who lingered around, most unwisely, were murdered by the Lenin boys who accompanied the commissars. But when it turned out that the old estates were to be converted simply into collective farms and that the profits resulting from their labors were to be pocketed by the State, following the bad example that had been given them a few days before, the peasants killed quite a number of the newly arrived commissars, and those who could were glad to return to Budapest and to the protection of the large force of Red soldiers that the little dictator had now assembled there.

Tuesday.

As far as I can make out this is the immediate background of the present very insistent Magyar problem. Nearly a month ago the Károlyi government collapsed under the weight of its stupidity. Apparently it was neither Tory nor Red, neither fish nor fowl nor even good red herring. Anarchy was spreading through the land, and at this juncture Bela Kun, the shrewd little Polish Jew who for some time, as an agent of Lenin, had been engaged in subterranean work in Hungary, entered the government and in a very few days took control of it. It is only fair to state that Kun was perfectly frank as to his intentions: he almost immediately proclaimed the right of the industrial workers to rule the factories in which they had slaved for so long; also the right of the peasants to the lands on which they and their forebears had been held as serfs for generations. His foreign policy was equally clear. In alliance with Moscow, and as its spearhead, he would overrun all the bourgeois countries who did not frankly accept the New Gospel and bring them to heel. In the first flush it cannot be denied that his program was warmly received in many quarters, particularly by the peasants who shouted innumerable "Eljens ," for Moscow and for Kun. I am told, however, by some, that many of the peasants thought that these alien catchwords were the names of fast-running horses!

Before leaving Vienna on the Hungarian venture I had talked with my old friend, Rittmeister Pronay, and he had offered to be helpful and also discreet. In happier days I had known him as the commander of a squadron of that crack regiment, the Radetzky Hussars, that witched the Prater and all Vienna with its horsemanship. Now poor Pronay was a war invalid and his outlook dark indeed. Even before the coming of the catastrophe he had lost his estates at cards, I think. Invalids were not wanted in Hungary any more than anywhere else, and Renner, out of charity, was keeping him employed on a mere pittance in drawing up a record of the casualties of the Great War, the listen of those who had died, and those who had disappeared, and those who were still marooned in the Siberian prison camps.

"We have reached March 1918," said Pronay. "We move slowly, I and my comrades, but slow as we move someday we will reach Armistice Day, and then we, too, shall be on the bread line."

Pronay had wanted to give me letters to some of his loyalist friends in Pest, but I had declined, believing that they would prove as embarrassing to them as to me. However, in some way that I did not seek to discover he had advised many of them of my coming, and as a result clandestine communications reached me from time to time in my room, and also were often discreetly slipped to me at the cafés and restaurants which I frequented. They were generally typed on a machine of ancient make and were always marked "P" to authenticate their source. I must say that the information that reached me in this way was not always convincing. It should be frankly admitted, however, that the situation was terribly confused. The Esterhazys, the Zichys, the Festetics, and the rest of Pronay's horsy friends to whose statements I might have given some credence had fled the country or, wisely, I think, remained in hiding. Count Károlyi, the pseudo-democrat, in control for a few weeks, when the Red storm broke, had also sought safety in flight. His hide-out was a closely held secret.

There was an amusing story told me of an incident in these last troubled days in which the telephone played an unusual role. From the last of the Hapsburgs, Károlyi, upon taking office, asked and received release from his oath of allegiance and publicly announced his loyal adherence to the People's Republic, but he, too, not unwisely, I think, ran away before it was inaugurated. Perhaps I should throw a charitable veil over the conduct of the Archduke Joseph at this critical and, it must be admitted, most perplexing moment for a Hapsburg and a man of great wealth. He saved his estates and probably his life by throwing in his fortunes with the Reds. At least the Soviet-controlled papers announced that he also, again by telephone, had secured his release from his allegiance to the head of the Hapsburg house, now a fugitive, and had taken an oath to support the People's Republic. The papers were also printing in lurid letters extracts from a speech which must have sounded strange indeed as they fell from Hapsburg lips, if they ever did. As reported, his concluding statement was:

"With a little Bolshevism we shall pull ourselves out of the hole where the war has landed us." Evidently this archduke was a teachable fellow. He knew the times were changing and that it was the part of wisdom to change with them.

On my arrival I was permitted, even urged, to attend a session of the Workers and Soldiers Council of the Revolution. Kun spoke very frankly and well, I thought, and by the aid of a volunteer interpreter I think I got at least the general drift of his remarks. My interpreter spoke very bad German and he explained that Kun spoke very bad Magyar, so he had a difficult role. Kun began by saying:

"Comrades, I will not beautify the situation which is one of danger to us all. We have lost the fight at Szatmár-Németi and the Roumanians are at the gates of Grosswardein; some of our men fought well; others, I regret to say, deserted their positions. But in Debreczen we have scored some successes; there the Workers have risen in their might and expelled the counterrevolutionaries. Everywhere the invading Roumanians outnumber us and are better armed. The great need of the young army of the new proletarian State is better weapons and more of them.

"We do not know whether the Entente means to hold the Roumanians to the line of demarcation which was fixed by Colonel Vix (acting for the Supreme War Council) or whether they would condemn us to the fate of the Paris Commune. At the present moment the Czechs are not advancing, but that may happen tomorrow and we must prepare for an invasion on this front also. There is no reason to despair, but I must admit that as far as munitions and arms are concerned, we are in bad shape. At present we can most certainly not undertake an offensive. Every proletarian in Pest must hasten to the front; and remember, even if we fail, we shall have sounded the tocsin that will awaken the proletarians of the world. We shall have notified them of the inevitable struggle that is coming and our fate, if adverse, will serve to warn them in time of the necessity to arm.

People's Commissar Bakany then took the floor with a stern warning to the bourgeoisie factions who, he said, the moment the Roumanians appeared, "threw off all concealment, put out the old flag, and shouted `Long live the King!' "

He then moved that at least half the members of the Council and all the Workers who were not engaged on pivotal jobs should proceed to the front. It was carried, but the motion was weakened, I thought, by the proviso attached to the effect that the Workers Council should decide which of its members should be sent to the firing line.

In my role of an inquiring journalist I had later on the same day a talk with Bela Kun. He was most accessible and outspoken. More clearly than what he said, a mere repetition of his speech at the Workers Council, I recall his surroundings and his appearance. With a guide that was furnished by the hotel, and with the prestige of a tourist, a rare bird indeed in these revolutionary days, I was ushered into a cabinet council in the very same room where in former years I had interviewed in succession the former Prime Ministers of a vanished Hungary, the Tiszas, father and son. The portraits of Deak and of Kossuth which had formerly adorned the council chamber were gone, and their successors were sitting around a large table with heads close together. The heating apparatus in the palace, as everywhere else in the city, was out of order, and it was probably wise for the new counselors to sit in their overcoats all wore imitation fur coats; and so good was the imitation that even the moths were deceived and had evidently been at work gnawing on the now-upturned collars!

I shall never forget Bela Kun as I now saw him at close quarters and cheek by jowl with his coterie of conspirators. He made upon me an indelible impression, but it is one that is difficult to convey. He had a round bulbous head and his hair was so closely shaven that he seemed to be bald; he had a short, squat nose, ugly thick lips, but un doubtedly his outstanding physical feature was his great pointed ears. Some people suggested, but under their breath, that with his great abnormal head and his small but very active body he looked like a lizard, and certainly there was a touch of green in his coloring. In a word, his figure was one that I have never seen duplicated in any of my wanderings.

Rumor has it that when the war came (1914) Kun was under arrest charged with the embezzlement of funds, but the charge was dropped when he was drafted into the commissary branch of the Hungarian Army. When the Russians made their great drive over the Carpathians in 1916 he became, it is said, a very willing captive. Sent to the celebrated prison camp at Tomsk in Siberia, he learned Russian so well that when the Revolution broke he was able to distinguish himself by his eloquent appeals to his fellow prisoners in favor of the new gospel. I was given copies of his awakening speech, his call to arms in seven or eight languages. It opens, and for that matter concludes, with the familiar words: "Proletarians of the World, unite. The hour of liberation has struck!" This speech and many others attracted the attention of Radek, the famous Russian propagandist, and through him Kun came in contact with Lenin and soon he was enrolled as a missionary of the Red gospel.

A few days after the Károlyi government was established, in the fall of 1918, Kun appeared in Budapest, officially at least as the representative of the Russian Red Cross. He brought with him many millions of rubles, ostensibly to succor the thousands of Russian prisoners and wounded, who were still marooned in Hungary. In the executive council, the so-called Commissioners of the People, by whom the renegade Count Károlyi was surrounded, out of the twenty-six who composed it at this time, eighteen were Jews, at least so I am informed. Be the religious and racial divisions what they may, it is quite certain that very shortly a majority of the counselors welcomed the latest recruit and fell under the spell of his eloquence, or, as some insist, of the Moscow gold which he distributed so lavishly.

I did not enjoy even a glimpse of Károlyi. He had disappeared two weeks before my arrival and left no address behind him. Many and strange are the stories I heard about him, and probably some of them are worthy of credence. He was born to great wealth and broad possessions, in the renowned Magnat family whose name he bears, as most of them think, most unworthily. A great many fairies were not present at his birth and in their absence they certainly failed to shower rich gifts upon him. He came into the world with his mouth awry and he had to be provided with an artificial palate. Even with a mechanical device, when he raised his voice, it is said something more resembling a dog's bark than a human cry emerged.

At the age of ten, so the story runs, he startled his affluent parents by announcing that at the earliest possible moment he proposed starting a revolution! That was certainly a bombshell hurled in the midst of a family group that had much reason to believe that they were living in the best of all possible worlds. Cut off from a career in the army, and indeed from all official life, by his physical handicaps, Michael Károlyi found an outlet for his restless spirit in gambling. At the baccarat table in the Nemzet Club, for a hundred years the rendezvous of the great, the daring, above all the affluent, of Hungary, he played for high stakes and won or lost millions on the turn of a card. When in the last year of the war things began to look dark for Hungary, Károlyi was nearly dead broke and also interned in France as a dangerous alien.[36] Many think, especially those who have not a word to say in favor of a man who, whatever his motives may have been, was a renegade to his caste and a humiliation to his clan, that it was the need to rehabilitate his finances that induced him to enter upon the strange associations by which he will always be remembered.

In his earlier years Károlyi had been a frequent and generally an unsuccessful duelist, and some of the circumstances of the duel that he fought with Stephen Tisza, the last Prime Minister of Hungary (murdered by mutinous soldiers returning from the front at the time of the Armistice), is legendary, because of its great length and one-sided-ness. The weapons used were sabers, and as Tisza was a skilled swordsman, he is said to have struck Károlyi thirty-five times, but merely with the flat of his sword! In later life he lamented his generosity.

"I should have killed Michael that day," he said; "had I done so, I would have spared our country its deepest humiliation."

Catherine Károlyi, the devoted wife of Michael, one of the strangest figures in this lurid "incident," was a granddaughter of the great Andrassy, who, while he fought against the Hapsburgs under Kossuth, in later life became Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Dual Monarchy, and represented Francis Joseph at the Congress of Berlin and on many other important occasions. Catherine's own father was the Jules Andrassy who was sent by Czernin on a mission to Switzerland in 1917, probably to negotiate a separate peace. An attempt was made to cloak these clandestine negotiations, but it was unsuccessful, for one reason because Andrassy broke all the discreet rules of the diplomatic game by making at the time a frank speech in Parliament, calling upon the Government "to abandon Germany, bring back our troops from all the fronts, and save our homeland."

Sensible words, indeed, but they were spoken too late. Apparently the only path still open to Austria led to the abyss into which she fell twelve months later.

In the early days of his startling political activities Károlyi was frequently insulted and indeed not seldom assaulted in public places. Whatever else he may have been, Károlyi was no coward, and he always reacted by challenging those who so despitefully used him; however, finally a court of honor held at the Nemzet Club handed down the crushing decision that "Michael Károlyi by his own actions was incapable of affording satisfaction to a gentleman on the field of honor."

Undoubtedly this sentence of ostracism, this denial of the privilege which above all others he and his peers cherished and so frequently exercised, the right of being satisfaktions-fähig, had great influence in pushing Michael into the Socialist and, as some charge, into the Bolsheviki fold.

Károlyi, to sum up, gave up the seals of office on March 21st (1919), several weeks before I reached Budapest. I make this statement, although I admit there is another story to the effect that he never had them in his possession, and this story may be true. The feudal lords were very jealous of the emblems of the historic rule of King Stephen, and the seals may have been buried, as were so many other historic symbols, to save them from contamination. But whatever insignia Károlyi may have had, authenticating his ministry, he turned them over at the hour of crisis to a certain Garbai, who had been in his cabinet. Garbai served for a few hectic hours as president of the Council, but within the week he was eased out by his own cabinet, of which Bela Kun was the most energetic figure. Kun inaugurated the new era by issuing an ukase that smacked of Moscow and which declared that all trade was a State monopoly and that all money, however held, in the banks or privately, belonged to the Government. In the lurid days which Budapest now lived through, while all the records available certainly come from untrustworthy sources, there is much reason to believe that more than six hundred people of some prominence were murdered, not for open opposition to the revolutionary regime, but because they were suspected of not being sympathetic "fellow travelers."

Certainly I was glad to get away from the city that in my hectic Balkan days had always been my favorite retreat. And I was lucky too. As Admiral Höhnel said in welcoming me back to the city of the Waltz King: "You, as an American officer, in civilian clothes were vogel frei, anyone had the right to shoot you down!" But, as a matter of fact, no one bothered to do it.

Paris, April 12^th.

In my first talk since my return with General Smuts today, he was not as reticent as to his bout with Kun as he had been in Vienna, but even so what he did say was not very enlightening. He evidently did not regard the incident as a diplomatic triumph and soon the conversation turned to other fields. He admitted, however, that he had told Kun that the scattered forces, more or less under his control, on the Czech frontier were violating the terms of the Armistice and that sooner or later this attitude would compel the Allies to take severe measures. To this Kun answered that his government were not bound by the agreements which may have been accepted by Károlyi, and that as a matter of fact they were completely ignorant of their provisions. He then asked if the Roumanians were honoring the agreements they had made and Smuts admitted they were not, but he assured him that they, too, would very shortly be brought to book. I have a clear idea now that under his instructions from the Supreme War Council Smuts had tried to convince Kun that his regime was doomed and had also offered to assist him (for the benefit of all concerned) to an easy "getaway."

It must be admitted that the Roumanians also are not paying even lip service to the mighty men in Paris. Without a mandate and against positive and repeated orders, they are marching up through Transylvania and, further complications, thousands of old Magyar soldiers are flocking to the national standard of St. Stephen which Admiral Horthy has unfurled at Szegedin and so another little war looms on the horizon!

True, the Czechs were on the Hungarian border, probably they had overstepped it, but no one really knew as the new boundaries had not been fixed. Smuts s first task was to prevent the clash that was so near and, by expelling Kun, to rob the advancing armies of all justification of invasion. Kun stayed in power much longer than Smuts believed he could. Smuts said in April the former Jewish insurance agent could not hang on for more than six weeks. As a matter of fact he retained power for many months, until August, and then made his escape to Moscow via Vienna. There is much reason to believe that before they left Kun and his crew had sent much loot and booty to Russia which would, they hoped, assure them of a comfortable, carefree existence in the years to come. However, these "old-age pensions" with which the White Hungarian papers taunted the provident Red refugees were confiscated by the Moscow Soviet and it is said that Kun has been forced to resume his former pursuit of writing life insurance. But now his methods and technique are quite different. It is said he does not write policies in the great international companies as formerly. You simply paid him premiums and as long as you kept them up you were safe from arrest at the hands of the Ogpu, in which he is all-powerful!

I should perhaps repeat here that in my parting talk with Smuts (before his return to Paris) he not only approved of my staying on in Vienna (as instructed by House), but urged me to try to realize his plan of a subconference to be held in Paris at which all the Succession States of the defunct Empire would be represented. He wished me to work on his plan, which had been interrupted by his call from Lloyd George to take up the Irish problem, and in his enthusiasm he announced that he was confident that within ten days I would be "herding the delegates" yet to be appointed to the peace fold in Paris. However, I received no instructions on the subject and naturally did nothing. Renner approved of the plan and told me that "in a hasty talk with him, Smuts had touched lightly upon the matter" - "flüchtig beruht" - were the words he used, and that he was strongly in favor of the plan - but the invitation never came.

On my return to Paris, Frazier assured me that the plan never reached the Big Four, or even the Supreme War Council. He thought that in all probability Lloyd George had decided that Smuts should devote all his time and his great abilities to a solution of the situation in Erin which was, it is true, quite a man-sized job. Several days later, at a reception House gave to the delegates, Smuts came in and, pushing me into a corner, told me confidentially that his plan had not prospered and that he greatly regretted what he regarded as the unfortunate neglect of a golden opportunity.

He was pleased when I told him that Renner had authorized me to say that as far as Austria was concerned, the project was not dead. Hearing nothing further on the subject from Smuts and fearing that he had been diverted definitely from the only concrete plan he brought back from southeastern Europe, I (April 30th) accompanied the Colonel on one of his constitutional walks, and though I knew how beset he was with problems emerging from every point of the compass, I again explained, at considerable length I fear, the sad posture of affairs in the Succession States as I saw it. He, too, was impressed that something must and should be done, and right away. He took the matter up with the President and found that he, too, was favorable. He had no objection to the plan of a subconference but it soon developed the Italians had. At the moment the Fiume cauldron was at the boiling-over point and so the vital and indeed most urgent matter was again postponed and later definitely dropped.

As an alternative, I suggested that a mission be sent to Hungary to take over when the Soviet regime collapsed, as collapse it would, although not as soon as Smuts had predicted.[37] This plan also won approval but was never carried out. It is true there were many, but certainly not more, important problems pressing for solution. Unfortunately, however, these problems were nearer at hand and those who pressed them carried more guns than I did.

Paris, April 14^th.

Since my return I find much misinformation in circulation, and in circles which should be well informed, with regard to the wishes of the Austrian Germans toward the Anschluss, the union with the German Reich which, as I was instructed to tell Renner, is to be forbidden in formal terms by the Versailles Treaty. I am well aware that an opinion based upon but a few days stay in Vienna is not very convincing and should not be accepted without further study, but, on the other hand, it should be taken into consideration that owing to many long sojourns in Austria in previous years I was able to make contacts with important people who would have been more reticent in their talks with a casual stranger. The result of all this preamble is that I have no hesitancy in affirming that the great majority of Austrians are opposed to the plan, at the present time, and that to the few who toy with the idea it is a counsel of despair. These people say "crippled Austria cannot stand alone, she must lean on someone, what crutch can you suggest other than North Germany?"

Even the people who favor the Anschluss see clearly what union would mean to Austria. As one of them said, "We shall become the granary, the very limited granary, of the Reich, and our infant industries will be put out of business by the greater productivity of the North German industrial plants." And whenever the subject was broached I had ample opportunity to realize that the dislike,[38] even the antipathy, of the Austrian for the Prussian, has not been quenched by the common misfortunes endured during the Great War. On the contrary, I think it has been increased.

SUITORS AND SUPPLIANTS