Page:Heinrich Karl Schmitt - The Hungarian Revolution - tr. Matthew Phipps Shiel (1918).djvu/8

 faced enough to hide itself from the sun. But on she circles, all the same.

A thrilling rumour of victory ran through us, the heat of which breathed fever and miasma, which did not warm, but scorched—and induced pyrexia. The reign of force inflamed and consumed the last wit left to men.

Was it not the law of gravitation—was it the swelling flood whose rise no object and no substance might hold out against, since the void has yawned?

The rush of mass ever swifter hurtling—mass of material, mass of men—was bound to give rise to an enormous reaction. It was easy to see that the foundation-stones of this rotten building would not at the present rate long resist disintegration. Dust must all that become, if all the laws of change and development were not to prove untrue.

I only darkly remember the first bread-coupons, the care of one's shoe-leather, the limited tobacco (limited because no one had limited his garment to his cloth), and the stoppage of the exhibition of placards.

A lanky man sprang lightly out of a carriage, and hastened up the steps. A stranger asked the sentry:

"Who was that?"

The man answered reverently:

"That is the Hungarian Premier."

And after a short time came the lean man again, threw himself into the depths of the carriage—and no one asked the sentry:

"Who is that?"

The man in uniform said low:

"That was the Hungarian Premier"—and Tiza went, Esterhazy came, went likewise. Wekerle came names, names, names.

At this time, which I may call the post-exaltation epoch of the war. appeared the first blank spaces—"censored"—in the newspapers of the Extreme Left. And like a plague, this