Hungary

Nicholas Horthy, Regent of Hungary, spoke sadly to me. "This was Europe's greatest nation some 800 years ago," he said. "Even in 1914 we had everything: lands and men and minerals, timber, wealth, seaports, and ships. Look at us today!

"Yet still I'm glad to be Hungarian.

Our poorest, humblest peasant would rather lose an arm than break a promise. Our wheat may go to America, our musicians to Poland, our chess players, even, to France, and win against the best.

"In Berlin an international contest sought the world's best cook," he added.

"Who won?" I asked. "My cook!"

It was Nicholas Horthy, fleetless admiral, who marched troops into Budapest 19 years ago after the overthrow of Bela Kun's bloody four-month communistic dictatorship.

Hungarians acclaimed him Regent, to uphold a Constitution more than seven centuries old, and to rule a kingless kingdom where St. Stephen's sacred crown is the revered, thousand-year-old emblem of limited monarchy.

Children begin each school day as they end it: singing plaintive prayers for a restored Fatherland they were born too late to know. Metal plaques-Hungary crowned with thorns-are tacked to thousands of doors. A lever on a popular, ingenious postcard tears from a map of old Hungary, as the Treaty of Trianon did, nearly three-fourths of her territory.

A clipped hedge map in a Budapest park is the Nation "then and now." The same motif appears on cakes in bakers' windows, in a dozen children's games, in every bus and streetcar. "Remain as it is?" reads the caption. "No. No. Never!"

This subject completely dominates Hungarian life and thought. Its implications must be understood, or Hungary cannot be.

November in Budapest was dark and damp. When north winds raced down-river, gentlemen buttoned full fur linings into overcoats and ladies tucked soft fingers into muffs that were purses, too.

Teamsters walked beside their horses. Peasant women transferred shawls from shoulders to their heads.

Chestnut venders, edging closer to charcoal fire kettles, sold more hot wedges of roast pumpkin. The Danube fell, inches daily, between masonry-protected banks; soon towboat funnels could have cleared its unopenable bridges without being "broken" like shotgun barrels.

Sometimes fog rolled down the valley, stayed twice the clock around, and halted river barges. There came sleet and sanded streets. On a few days, short, bright, and cold, Buda's crescent of hills seemed in the clear air to draw nearer and huddle around Pest's warm chimneys, like Hungarian plainsmen about their autumn fires…”