Tidal Effects (Gray Tide In The East Book 2) Page 15

  “Oh yes, sorry,” she said apologetically, slipping the weapon into a fold in her jacket.

  With some effort, Swing tugged the knife out of the wood of the chair back, and returned it to his lovely (and evidently lethal) companion. “We have a train to catch at five o’clock…” the next stop on Swing’s itinerary was Rome, where he was to interview Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, “…so we have a couple of hours to work on your impression of a photographer. I am guessing that you are not an expert with that fancy camera you have there, so let me give you a few pointers. Then maybe, just maybe, somebody might mistake you for an actual freelancer. I’ve never been a photographer myself, but I’ve worked with plenty of good ones over the years.”

  Privately, he thought that she was far too glamorous for the part, and would fool no one. On the other hand, Christina’s fabulous looks would probably make her the center of attention of any male who was in the same room as her, so that it was possible Swing would go completely unnoticed while in her company.

  “Thank you, Ray,” she said. She awkwardly lifted the bulky camera from the table.

  “No, no,” he admonished. “A real photographer would never hold her camera like that. First, you grab the handle on top…”

  Speed Graphic “Top Handle”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Budapest, August 23, 1923

  In the end, Mihaly Karolyi was completely unprepared when the match that set the revolution ablaze was struck. But then, so was everyone else.

  After much agonizing, he had had finally decided to make one last attempt to force the Tisza government to resign, even though he personally had little faith in the plan’s prospects for success. He called for a mass rally of all patriotic Hungarians, of all parties, to gather together and march through the streets to Parliament Square, where they would present a petition demanding Tisza and his ministry to step down. This, Karolyi told his supporters, would be the beginning of a new political organization that would replace Tisza’s Liberal Party and begin the process of creating a renewed free and independent Hungary – the kind of party he envisioned would resemble the opposition Party of National Renewal in Russia, or Clemenceau’s National Radical Party in France, offering the combined appeals of social welfare programs for the working classes and patriotic nationalism for the conservative voters.

  Karolyi did not expect his new plan to drive out the government, nor did he harbor any real hope for his proposed new party. He understood the realities of Hungarian politics far too well for that. There was good no reason to think that any of his rivals would agree to merge their parties together under his leadership, no matter what the potential benefits might be. This was understandable: had he been in their shoes, he would not have agreed to place himself and his people under their authority under any circumstances. His trust in his political opponents was practically non-existent, and he knew that the converse was true.

  However, he was gratified at the popular reception to his call for the anti-government rally and march. The public response was so great that Karolyi’s political rivals were forced to pretend that they too were enthusiastic about joining the event, although none of them went so far as to make a commitment to join his proposed new umbrella political party. Tens of thousands of Hungarians from across the political spectrum, including contingents from the Tisza’s own Liberal Party, flooded into the capital from the countryside to join the swelling crowds in the city. Among them were obscure groups that Karolyi had scarcely ever heard of before.

  Among the latter was one calling itself the Sons of Arpad, a recently formed veteran’s organization which was named after a semi-legendary 9th century figure, supposedly the first ruler of the Magyar tribes. The founder and leader of the group was a 55 year-old former naval officer named Miklos Horthy, who was known to his followers more familiarly as Captain Horthy. Up to now, the Sons of Arpad had shown interest only in the limited area of soldiers’ and sailors’ pensions, and this rally was their political coming-out party.

  The contingent of the Sons of Arpad arrived in a long column, marching in company-sized formations under the direction of ‘officers’. They were dressed in uniforms consisting of green trousers, white shirts and red caps, and altogether were rather too military in appearance for Karolyi’s comfort. The men were all armed with either pistols or mean-looking truncheons hanging from their white belts, in spite of Karolyi’s insistence that the marchers be unarmed, as proof of their peaceful intentions. (This requirement had earned a magnificent sneer from Wolf when he heard it).

  Karolyi at first was inclined to forbid the Sons of Arpad from participating as long as they were carrying weapons. Captain Horthy explained that the weapons were necessary in the event that the police went wild and started massacring the crowd. He promised that his men, veterans all, had no intention of causing trouble, were under strict discipline, and would act only in an emergency, and then only to the extent needed to defend their fellow participants in the rally, which included many thousands of the elderly, women and children. These arguments won over most of the leaders of the other parties and, finally, a reluctant Karolyi.

  The march through the streets of Pest to Parliament Square went well at first, although the crowds were so large that it took more than two hours longer than was originally planned. Although the marchers were clearly enthusiastic for their cause, they were in a cheerful, even festive, mood. Thousands of Hungarian flags were in evidence, from handkerchief-sized ones on tiny wooden sticks in the hands of children who waved them excitedly, to the big two-meter long banners mounted on long wooden staffs carried by the Sons of Arpad, lending color to the holiday-like atmosphere. Karolyi, standing on the temporary speaker’s platform, watching the crowds pour into Parliament Square, could detect no sign of violence in the happy throng.

  As had been the case since the day Karolyi had staged his party’s walkout from the Diet, a double line of state police on foot backed by another line of mounted officers along the western side of the plaza, guarding the main entrance of the imposing Országház, home of the Kingdom’s government. The crowd was so huge that many thousands of hopeful participants could not even enter the square and were condemned to catch only distant glimpses of the event from the streets leading up to the Square.

  Although afterwards there were many conflicting claims from eyewitnesses, no investigation was ever able to conclusively prove exactly how it started. Witnesses agree that the police grew conspicuously tense when the armed formations of the Sons of Arpad marched into position, at the very front of the Square, close to the police lines. The first speaker of the event (an otherwise undistinguished conservative politician by the name of Laszlo Lukacs) was just beginning his remarks when the sound of at least one gunshot rang out. It came from the direction of the southwestern corner of the Square, where the Sons of Arpad were stationed, but whether a member of that paramilitary group fired the first shot, no one could say.

  Some survivors claimed that immediately after the initial shot or shots, a machine gun began to fire, but this is almost certainly not correct, as no weapon of this kind was ever seen or recovered after the fighting. What they probably heard was the very rapid discharge of police weapons, which could have been mistaken for the chatter of a machine gun by someone who had never heard one before. Many witnesses swore that there was also an explosion, which sounded like a bomb or grenade of some kind, but this is disputed. The only thing that everyone who was present near the front of the Square agrees on is that seconds after the first discharge, the police leveled their rifles and side arms at the crowd, and began firing with deadly intent and effect, and that the Sons of Arpad started shooting back at the state police with an equally murderous purpose.

  Panic began in the front rows of the crowd, and only gradually spread back through the immense throng, as the screams of the wounded cut through the slogan-chanting mass. In the front of the crowd, dozens of protestors crumpled to lie on the pavement, writhing and crying out for help amid spr
eading pools of blood. Among countless scenes of horror, many of the survivors recall a dark-haired woman holding aloft a boy of perhaps three with a bullet hole drilled through his forehead, shrieking at the police and making no attempt to save herself, until she too was gunned down.

  The crowd reacted in two distinct ways to the police gunfire. On one hand, most of the crowd, who were unarmed and unprepared for violence, did everything in their power to escape the carnage, pushing, shoving and running madly away from the shooting, heedless of those who had fallen under their feet. This panicked stampede actually resulted in more casualties than did the shooting. Out of the 567 people killed on Budapest’s infamous Bloody Thursday, fewer than a third (181) were victims of gunshot wounds. The remainder succumbed to injuries sustained as a result of being trampled by fear-crazed mob’s attempt to escape from the gunfire. In addition, an unknown number of the participants, several thousand at least, suffered wounds ranging from cracked skulls and broken ribs to mashed fingers and sprained ankles, all consistent with being battered and crushed under the feet of their fellows.

  On the other hand, thousands of the participants in the rally had served in the Royal and Imperial Army in the Great War, and they were not inclined to run away at the sight of blood, especially when the blood was that of their neighbors and loved ones. On the contrary, many of these men were enraged by the slaughter of unarmed civilians by the state police, particularly as many of the slain were women, children and old people. Moreover, they were heartened by the resistance of Captain Horthy’s disciplined Sons of Arpad. They were aware that they had an overwhelming numerical superiority over the roughly 250 police lining the Square in front of the Parliament Building. Shouting encouragement to each other, the men gathered together in groups, and in the face of point-blank fire, charged the police lines and overran them. They were aided by the fact that the many of the police were not able to concentrate their weapons on them, as they were already engaged in a firefight with the Sons of Arpad.

  Only seconds after the assault began, the attackers were in among the police lines, and after that the fighting was over in less than a minute. The foot patrolmen were beaten to death with fists or improvised weapons, stamped underfoot, or else shot with guns seized from their colleagues or picked from the ground, while the mounted police were dragged from their horses and dispatched with fists, boots and knives. The only surviving police were the few who threw down their weapons and ran as soon as they saw the charge beginning to take shape.

  Karolyi had been sitting in a folding chair on the speaker’s stand looking over his speech when the gunfire broke out. He stared for a few seconds, watching in disbelief as his ‘peaceful’ rally degenerated into a carnival of slaughter. He was snapped out of his trance when a bullet slammed into a right-wing politician seated beside him on the stand. There was a wet thump! and the man toppled over dead at Karolyi’s feet. Looking around, he suddenly realized how dangerous his exposed position was. He threw himself flat on the platform, and then crawled as rapidly as possible to the front, which was the side farthest away from the gunfire, and dropped to the ground. When he heard the roar made by the veterans attacking the police, he peeked out around the corner of the platform just in time to witness the state police being torn to pieces by the wrathful mob.

  As suddenly as it started, the shooting stopped. The air was filled with the moans of the wounded and the cries of weeping women. The men who had stormed the police lines paused, milling about uncertainly, while officers of the Sons of Arpad began reorganizing their men and assigning them to help the wounded. Karolyi stood up slowly, stunned by the scope of the massacre. The sight of the hundreds of dead and wounded citizens of all ages and both sexes lying in their blood around the Parliament Square was like a scene from a nightmare.

  “God help me, this is all my fault,” he whispered. He buried his face in his hands. An overwhelming, almost physical sense of guilt tore at him. He was sure that he would never be able to forgive himself for being the cause of this terrible tragedy. He wept, his shoulders shaking with his sobs.

  A familiar and unwelcome voice cut into his grieving. “The moment has struck! Now is the time to act!” it said.

  He opened his eyes and brusquely wiped the tears away with his hands. Standing at his side was Wolf, his eyes gleaming with excitement. “You have been given a priceless gift, and you must use it,” he urged. He gestured at the men who had just destroyed the state policemen and Horthy’s Sons of Arpad. “They require only a leader, and they will follow the first man who speaks up. Take them in there,” he pointed at the Parliament Building. “Arrest Tisza and his ministers, and announce the birth of a new, independent Hungary! You have only to stretch out your hand and power will drop into it like a ripe fruit!”

  Karolyi stared at the man beside him. In an instant, his emotions veered from near-suicidal despair to an almost homicidal rage. Wolf considered this massacre of innocents to be… what? A golden opportunity? A priceless gift from the gods?

  “Shut up! Shut up! Shut the hell up!” he shrieked at the German agent, spittle flying from his lips. Wolf hastily backed away from the raving madman.

  Somehow, Karolyi found himself standing back on the speaker’s platform (he had no memory of going back there). His eardrums were assaulted by a man’s voice. The speaker had the loudest unamplified voice he had ever heard. It took a second or two for him to realize that it was he, Karolyi, who was speaking

  “Murderers!” he howled. Every living person in the square, with the exception of the most severely wounded, looked up, startled.

  The words spilled from Karolyi’s mouth without his volition. “The men who gave the orders to kill us, to murder our wives and our daughters, to slaughter our sons and brothers, they are in there!” He pointed at the Parliament. “The butchers Tisza, Ungron and the others are hiding in that building! Will we let them escape punishment for their crimes?”

  One tiny corner of Karolyi’s mind was still rational. It whispered that he was talking nonsense. It was certain that neither the Prime Minister nor the Minister of the Interior, nor indeed anyone in the government had ordered this massacre, and the voice reminded him that no one was more responsible for what had happened here than Karolyi himself. He savagely suppressed the voice, and allowed unreasoning rage to swallow him.

  A low, savage growling noise rose from the remaining crowd, mixed with cries of “No! No!”

  “They do not deserve trials! They should be given the same chance they gave our wives and children. They should be lined up against a wall and shot! We must take them now, before they escape from justice!” Karolyi shrieked. “I am going in there to capture the criminals. Is anyone with me?” He jumped down from the platform and began to walk towards the main entrance to the building, not even looking back to see if anyone was following him.

  There were many cries of “Kill them!” “Shoot the bastards!” and so forth, as thousands of men gathered on either side and behind Karolyi. Most of them were still weaponless, but many had armed themselves with rifles or handguns they had taken from the bodies of the slain state policemen.

  Captain Horthy appeared at Karolyi’s side, with his Sons of Arpad marching behind him. “I place myself and my men under your orders until this government of murderers is brought down,” he said.

  Karolyi hardly noticed the man. All of his attention was fixed on the remaining handful of police who watched in growing terror as the vengeful mob approached the doors of the Parliament Building they were assigned to guard. They had witnessed the fate of their now-deceased colleagues, and unsurprisingly, had no desire to share it. Someone in the mob fired his pistol and, as if this was a signal, the policemen fled, scattering to either side of the Parliament Building, and then running west towards the Danube.

  As the mob wrenched open the doors and ran through the halls of the seat of government of the Kingdom of Hungary, screaming for blood, another rational thought struggled up through the sea of primitive emotions whi
ch at that moment ruled Karolyi.

  No matter how this turns out, at least Kaiser Wilhelm will be pleased, he thought.

  Budapest Parliament interior by Karelj

  Chapter Nine

  Paris, August 25, 1923

  Ray Swing and Christina Dietrichstein sat in an undistinguished Left Bank café eating what passed for breakfast in France, which in that non-breakfast-eating land meant coffee and rolls. They were passing the time before an afternoon meeting with Edouard Herriot, who was the current Premier and Foreign Minister of the French Republic. Swing was reading the Paris Herald’s account of the recent and startling events of what the newspapers were calling “Bloody Thursday” in Budapest. His photographer/bodyguard had a vile French cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth as she pretended to make adjustments to her camera.

  “The Emperor and Prince Sixtus seemed to have underestimated the seriousness of the Hungarian crisis,” Swing remarked, his face hidden from his companion by the pages of the newspaper. “I don’t think they expected Tisza and his Interior Minister to be dragged out of the Diet at gunpoint and executed, or an independent Hungarian Republic to be declared. There may not even be an Imperial representative at this conference we’re trying to arrange for your Emperor, assuming there ever is one, because there may be no Austro-Hungarian Empire by then. Ironic, don’t you think?” he asked.

  As he expected, she did not evince even the slightest interest in the news that her nation was tottering on the edge of the abyss of civil war and possible disintegration. Although the Austrian agent was both beautiful and intelligent, she left much to be desired as a traveling companion, in Swing’s opinion. She was interested in only one thing, to the exclusion of all else: her mission. It seemed that nothing, not even the most startling news, could distract her from her single-minded concentration on her assignment.