The Phoenix Land (23 page)

The policeman posted in Landstrasse was astonished by the crowd gathering there and at once assumed that if young working-class men were being recruited there it could only be the work of Bolshevik agents and so telephoned the police station for orders. He was at once told that everyone there, recruiters and recruited alike, should be arrested without delay.

Towards noon a band of policemen, led by a detective, entered the
Rother Hahn
.

‘Hände hoch!’
– ‘Hands Up!’ cried the detective, gun in hand.

The result was panic. Those recruits who had already been signed up disappeared in seconds, while two of the five
recruiting
officers escaped in the general confusion. Only my friend and two others stood their ground. The detective asked them for their identity papers. He was already somewhat taken aback to discover that of the first two he spoke to one was a major of
hussars
and the other a captain, but when he heard who my friend was – he bore a noble name well known in Vienna – his
astonishment
was such that he was only convinced of the truth of it on examining all the papers.

‘Jésu Maria!’
he cried in his Viennese dialect.
‘San’s denn a Verwandter vom lieben Grafen Anton? Und von der Gráfin Sarolta? Und wie san’s denn a Bolschewik worden?
– ‘Are you a relation of dear Count Anton? And of the Countess Sarolta? How did you become a Bolshevik then?’

It turned out that in his youth the detective had been a forest guard on their estate and knew and loved the whole family who had always been so kind to him that he remembered them with great devotion.

After that it was not difficult to convince him that men were being recruited to fight the Communists, not to aid them. The detective would then have been happy to let everybody go free but had been ordered to round up all those involved and escort them to the local police station. He was very loath to do this. It was unthinkable that such important, nobly born gentlemen should be marched through the streets in broad daylight with a
police escort! He hit upon a neat solution. It was simply that the ‘prisoners’ should walk ahead, just as if they had been taking a stroll, while the police, carrying their piles of confiscated
documents
, should follow ten paces behind. The detective himself would be on the sidewalk, from time to time waving a hand to indicate when they had to turn left or right until they all arrived at the police station.

The police commissioner was a neat little official smelling of ink. With scrupulous courtesy he carried out his duties to the letter of the law. He retained only the papers relating to the case while my friend’s personal belongings, including his chequebook, were at once returned to him. ‘I will telephone immediately to headquarters for further instructions,’ the commissioner said. ‘In the meantime, gentlemen, please make yourselves at home!’

By then it was already midday and, as the reply did not come at once, the policemen sent round to the nearest good restaurant for some lunch for the detainees, while the detective did his best to entertain them. A few hours went by like this until finally the order came for them to be set free. Towards evening those
members
of the recruiting committee who had not tried to evade arrest were allowed to depart in peace.

Not so those who fled. With the usual Hungarian
conspirator’s
disdain for taking precautions, the other two went out for a pleasant stroll that same afternoon. As they walked down
Kärtnerstrasse
they were recognized by one of the would-be recruits. This goody-goody busybody rushed off to tell a policeman, who blew his whistle for help, and soon the two officers were arrested and sent under guard to the chief of police’s offices on the Ring. There they were to left to pine in solitary confinement for several days. At length the Refugee Committee learned what had
happened
to them and applied officially for their release, which, at long last, was granted.

As I only returned to Vienna at the end of July, my personal knowledge of events dates from then. Otherwise, I have to depend on what I was told by friends who had been living there. So I have decided only to recount here what has not been
published
elsewhere but which seems to me to characterize the atmosphere we lived in those days.

In the Vienna of those days I knew only of two bright oases where the gaiety of the old imperial city was kept alive.

One was the Zichy villa in Hietzing, where many of the refugee ladies would meet in the afternoons to play bridge for some imaginary currency since no one had any real money. There was plenty of light-hearted flirting and, as there were plenty of men and very few women, the so-called weaker sex had a very good time.

Many months later, back in Budapest, I met one of these beauties again.

‘We haven’t seen each other since the days of the Bolshevik threat,’ I said.

‘Oh! Whatever became of that dear old Bolshevism?’ she replied, smiling.

The other oasis was Frau Sacher’s shop. Old Frau Sacher, who owned the famous hotel that bore her name, was the last truly activist believer in Legitimacy in Austria. She even managed to resist the determined and persistent pressure of the
Renner-Bauer
government.

This government tried its best to break her. They had her
electricity
cut off, they withdrew her license to sell alcoholic drinks, and they even provoked her staff to strike. They fined her and did many other things to bring her to heel, but she never yielded. She closed her restaurant, keeping only the shop open, and there she sat, enthroned on an armchair placed near the cash register, for all the world as if she were an empress herself. Here she would receive all her old loyal customers, who would drop in from time to time, ostensibly only to buy a tin of sardines or a small jar of ‘Mixed Pickles’
51
but really just to kiss her hand and gossip about those wonderful days of old now only a memory. She was indeed the last ruler of the old
Kaiserstadt
– the imperial city.

I saw only two of those left-wing actors in the tragicomedy of Budapest
52
. These were Baron Lajos Hatvany and Vilmos Böhm.

Here in Vienna Hatvany was just the same sort of
‘kibitz’
to the refugee committee as he had been to the revolutionary ‘statesmen’ back in Budapest.

The nature of the
kibitz
is that he always attaches himself to the winning side. If a player holds a ‘full house, aces high’ a
kibitz
would behave as if he had personally arranged it, and if the lucky player fails to double, the
kibitz
would then shake his head vehemently to show that that is not what
he
would have done if it had been
his
hand in another game. A
kibitz
would make out that, of course, ‘X’ should not have played trumps but
something
quite different, as he had suggested, but then no one
listened
to him, oh no, not to him!

At one time he had basked in the reflected glory of Ady. Ady, who resented Hatvany’s bragging about his share in the poet’s glory, took his revenge in some of his poems. Károlyi did it differently.

Hatvany’s book
The Story of a Month
was his way of
‘kibitzing’
the October Revolution. In this work he attributed any
success
to his influence; he had advised this, he had pointed out that; and it had only been his foresight that had prevented any number of possible mistakes.

In reality he never had any influence even though he had
usually
been on the spot. It is true he was at the Astoria and also in Belgrade, but in his book, which was written that same
December
to blow his own trumpet as soon as the revolution had
apparently
achieved its aims, Hatvany took all the credit to himself, so much so that anyone who read it was apt to believe everything he wrote, and this was the basis for much of the hatred he was to inspire later, poor man, when all he had done was to stand behind the real leaders with his fingers crossed!

It was the same in Vienna. Despite the fact that Communism, as the logical outcome of the Károlyi regime, had ignored his radical opinions and landed him, that great industrial
millionaire
, in penurious exile far from home, he now adopted an Olympian pose and issued his approval or his objections as from a great height of empirical wisdom. Alas, it was only the waiters in restaurants who bowed deeply when they caught sight of that thin face whose carefully composed expression seemed to resemble that of Lucifer.

One of the results of the great hostility his absurd vanity had provoked was that, one evening, while walking down the Ring, he was attacked and beaten up.

At dinnertime one day he left the Imperial Hotel and was walking to the Grand Hotel, with a lady on each side of him and an Italian journalist – could this have been a precaution against an expected ambush? When they were halfway along this wide boulevard a dwarfish but muscularly built man tapped him on the shoulder from behind and said, ‘If it please your Lordship?’ Hatvany turned, thus letting his two female protectors get a step or two ahead, and was given two hefty blows to the face so
noisily
that they could be heard, it was said, from the Opera to Schwarzenburg Square. The Italian newsman jumped to his aid, but the attacker was not alone, and his companion at once landed him a heavy blow too. The Italian screamed out
‘Soccorso! Soccorso!’
– ‘Help! Help!’ which brought other members of the Italian Mission running from the Imperial Hotel to the aid of their compatriot. Unfortunately only one man was caught, the one who had struck Hatvany, while the other, he who had hit the Italian, escaped. By then, hearing all the noise, a crowd had
gathered
in the street, and so back into the hotel went the officers, together with their squat prisoner and the offended journalist. There followed a long discussion, but when they confronted the prisoner with the man who had been hit, the latter declared that that was not the man who had hit him;
his
attacker had been a tall skinny man. Excuses were made all round, and as the dwarfish muscular man spoke Italian there followed a general scene of reconciliation, with much hugging and toasts in champagne, to celebrate the renewal of peace. No one bothered any more about poor Hatvany who, as always, had stayed outside the hotel and so had taken no part in the discussion! He had been propped up on a bench between his two lady friends, bent double because it seemed that to defend himself he had flung himself down on his back, and someone had stamped on his stomach in the general confusion.

No one bothered about him or his complaining. Neither friend nor foe seemed in the least interested, and indeed he could have been knocked silly a hundred times and nobody would have
taken any notice. It would have been of no consequence
compared
with the real course of events. Once again he had merely been there, and this of itself was of no importance.

While I was in Vienna the head of the English mission, Sir Thomas Cunningham, invited István Bethlen to a discussion with Vilmos Böhm, the communist Hungarian Soviet envoy. I encountered Böhm’s car just as he was arriving and recognized him immediately even though I had only seen him once before when he had been Secretary of State for War in the Károlyi
government
. He had somehow managed to obtain this post even though he had no precise position in the Socialist Party. Being a typewriter mechanic by profession, he had been employed for many years in the War Ministry to maintain all the typewriting machines in good order. Seeing him now, I was reminded of an amusing anecdote about him.

The day after his appointment as minister he was mounting the stairs to his new office when a band of young female typists came down on their way to lunch. One of them gave the new minister of state a little tap on the shoulder and said ‘Böhm, old thing … nice to see you … Do take a look at my Remington, there’s something wrong with it!’ and ran down the stairs
without
waiting for an answer.

Böhm was later to move on to greater things. After becoming army commissar he was appointed commander-in-chief of the Red Army, and in this position one must admit that he was
sensible
enough to let his Chief of General Staff, Stromfeld, act without referring matters to him. At the same time, he would defend him against those whom Stromfeld had antagonized.

So it turned out that perhaps his years in the War Ministry had been useful experience for him, after all!

It seems to be axiomatic that in revolutionary circumstances a big role often has to be played by a man who would in peaceful times be quite differently occupied and who would never, as they say in the theatre, be cast for anything more important than a member of a crowd or a soldier. A junior secretary becomes an
ambassador and, for a few hours, a young lieutenant has to play the general. It is all luck. One is on the spot; there are no other candidates. If a man is there just when an emergency occurs and decisions have to be taken in the absence of any higher
authority
, then he may find himself filling a post he either never dreamed of or for which he would normally be fitted only after a lifetime of service. It might happen, from time to time, that a man of real talent will emerge and, with a tremendous leap upwards, gain a position that would normally have taken years to aspire to … and this is admirable. Most are not like that. Many of such upstarts will think of the part they have been called upon to play by so many extraneous influences as gained only because of their own exceptional merits. Often such men later find
themselves
, perhaps for the rest of their lives, disillusioned, bitter and ripe for intrigue. This is inevitable. Once order has been
reestablished
such men are soon cast aside, but will they ever
recognize
that this is due to their lack of ability? Oh no! It is rather that they are victims of other people’s malignance. Nothing is more difficult to forget than political responsibility, especially when it has come unexpectedly. In times of revolution there is not a man who does not feel himself capable of anything. He seizes the moment. He starts with great vigour, but how often are his actions foolhardy or ill considered … and how often are they unscrupulous?