Page:Heinrich Karl Schmitt - The Hungarian Revolution - tr. Matthew Phipps Shiel (1918).djvu/51

 powers for the maintenance of order. Already in these days the chief emphasis was laid on the word "Order" by the entire press. It was felt that the least discrediting of the Revolution must lead to counter-tendencies and counter-actions, too, on the side of the Entente; and this danger ever in view, side by side with the instinct of self-preservation, stamped so deeply upon the general consciousness the necessity of ensuring order, that finally the bloodless Revolution became the symbol of the Temple of Freedom, to rear which without disturbance was not only aimed at, but it seemed to become possible only as a result of bloodlessness.

Meantime the news and rumours from abroad were thrilling the public mind. It was said that blood was flowing in Vienna, in Berlin something quite big was coming, the last Hohenzollern despot had fled to head-quarters, in Italy the Revolution had broken out, on the West front fraternisations between the French and German soldiers were the order of the dayHow many wishes were here the fathers to thoughts, which were not to become realities

Only from the Italian front came concrete news, and from the Balkan theatre of war.

And soldiers arrived from these and from farther fronts.

The Government had ordered the laying down of arms; the announcements in the windows of the newspaper offices were hastily swallowed by thick knots of men—and meantime one saw the soldier reappear from the front.

A new danger broke upon us.

Unwieldy began to become the mass of the returned and wandering soldiers. Out of the great garrison localities into the capital, out of the capital into the villagesand from the fronts into the interior. Not only were physical diseases communicated, but the pathological contagion of acts of coarseness impregnated into the nature during years of war. Threatening voices waxed loud. And ever more men poured in a satanic mass of undefined force whirled about the entire land, shaking like an earthquake all that stood.