Page:Heinrich Karl Schmitt - The Hungarian Revolution - tr. Matthew Phipps Shiel (1918).djvu/31

 decisions were made with unerring sagacity, and the impossible was realised: the most important occupations took up their work on command, and the public approvisionment, the baths, the electric work, the Austrian-Hungarian Bank, the sanitary institutions, surmounted the Revolution with wonderful composure. The newspaper trades functioned faultlessly, and the publication of news was so regular and sure, and the work of restoring tranquility so unanimous, that any disagreeable consequences could be obviated.

This day declined in the Sign of the White Rose. The millions of white roses had been meant for the church-yards—now they decked every soldier, caps, tunics, great-coats. They are churchyard flowers—and were perhaps quite appropriate to the day. For that day the past was buried, land what now came was the funeral-feast. Anyway, the inheritance was forthwith to prove more embroiled, uncertain and burdensome than anyone would ever have dared to think

It was toward seven o'clock in the evening that the first real shock of the Revolution reached me.

Count Stefan Tisza murdered!

May one speak on this theme already, when History has not yet given her verdict on rôles and causes? Well, well—the heavy load of responsibility for causing the war has been laid on Tisza's shoulders; but already the most recent revelations show that at least he was not the instigator, and that the sending of the fatal note to Serbia did not take place through him, either directly or indirectly. Not he had spoken the word.

Tisza is a phenomenon which I do not venture to criticise, and I have always regarded as presumptuous the fluent judgments of the young men of the newspapers. I believe that he was not the genuine embodiment of all that is hateful which he was made out to be. He was a complete man, he had extraordinary talents, and faults corresponding with them. His only crime was that his Party came to grief. But if one is to judge every statesman who ruled by force and failed, of success, one will have to damn every second leader