Page:Heinrich Karl Schmitt - The Hungarian Revolution - tr. Matthew Phipps Shiel (1918).djvu/9

 coccus bianco quickly infected the other organs also.

In the summer of 1917 one of the higher officers of the General Staff of the Vienna School said to me:

"Look you, we win the war, sure, if only munitions. or forage, don't run short."

Then I knew that both had run short and I left him.

On the sharp advance of the Russians it was said: "Pooh, we will keep up the fête-days as they fall due": but the fall of Przemysl was not on a day of fête, but of Fate, which is an important difference.

Upon reverses followed crises: and holes were digged in order, with the earth digged up, to stop up rents made by the explosion of suppressed fury.

Ever sharper blazed up the flame of resistance which Hungary—people and independent parties—opposed to Felix Austria, and the first greater conflicts between Budapest and Vienna arose. Their origin is in the soul of the Hungarian nation, which with difficulty forgets. 1848 sprang out of the predicament into which Austrian speculation drove Hungary's industry, and blow upon blow was added to the quarrel. Who, engaged in strife, can claim Right as his sole objective? No one. The blame is to the unnatural wedlock of two systems straining parabolically apart—systems which should be led towards a community of interest in trade by means of agitation and propaganda, appealing simply to sympathy.

Pathology was bound to avenge itself on the organism of both bodies. …

And now with all this was to be combined that eruptive force which arose out of the longing for freedom from an intolerable load, and led to the meeting of Kàrolyi and Franchet d'Esperay as a final result. Hungary broke up under the pressure of the load, and any one, like me, who was in the movements of the whole period of the war—any spectator of this divorce which severed two souls in one breast—can only say that the temporary so-called "predominance of place" of Hungary in the frame of the monarchy corresponded to an effective force, not to a subjective