STORY OF HUNGARY

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 59, Issue 39, 25 November 1938, Page 8

STORY OF HUNGARY

PEASANTS AND THE LAND. IMPOVERISHED MILLIONS. Fekete Janos is John Black, writes B. H. Markham from Szeged, Hungary, to the “Christian Science Monitor.” John is Janosh, pronounced with a swish. The Hungarians say the last name first, and the first name last. They also travel eastwards from Budapest out of the “west station’’ and west out of the “east station.” They have no word for “have,” conjugate their pronouns, use so many prefixes and suffixes that a word often resembles a sparrow 'with aeroplane wings, and put fancy aprons on their men. If you wish to honour a stalwart young Hungarian cowboy, do it with a nice, lace-edged apron. Everything is mysterious, confusing, and thrilling here, and whatever you say about Hungary may be partly wrong.

There are 107 Feketes in the Budapest telephone hook and 100 Fehers, which means “White.” !So the Blacks are in the majority, and that is not right, for the Budapestians revel in bright clothes. However, it is logical for the villagers to be called Fekete, since they love black. Black felt hats, black suits, shiny black boots. Many of the women wear black kerchiefs, black dresses, and black shawls. They all have dark faces, tanned by sun and wind. The peasants are solemn, too, and quiet. I suppose all this solemnity comes from the men’s moustaches, which are long, drooping adornments like the branches of weeping willow trees. Old King Arpad brought them from Asia a millennium ago, and they are still dearly cherished. To laugh through them would be sheer desecration. If Arpad had worn a Charlie Chaplin or Kaiser Wilhelm moustache, the Hungarian character might be entirely different. But Hungary’s striking statues would then lose half their lure.

Wiife Bind’s Sheaves. My Fekete Janos, however, was clean shaven and quite talkative, though not gay. I found him scything his way across a Hungarian wheat field, with his wife beside him, tying up the bundles. She was barefoot, with a poor blue dress and a loose head-cloth. .Janos wore clumsy shoes without socks, a high straw hat of very ancient origin, grey, shirt and old pants reaching half-way to the ankles. He was brown and strong and grim. Already he had been at work for thirteen hours that day, but swung his scythe with undiminished vigour. As I stopped beside the road to greet the pair they said “Jo napot kivanok,” which meant they wished me a good day. Then the woman tied up a bundle of wheat to show me how she did it. The man did, also, and his was somewhat firmer. Then he leaned on his scythe and began to talk. Janos said lie was working for a neighbour on a small field, but added that there were not many small fields. “The land all belongs to the Count,” he explained. “You could walk for 20 miles without ever leaving the Count’s property. He has 13,000 acres, and the 4500 peasants in our village have only 3000. Thirteen thousand for one man and 3000 for the rest!”

Janos and liis wife were very sad and wanted to tell the world about their troubles. He was not revolutionary but felt himself the victim of a wrong.

“I have a little house and two acres of land/’ he said, “no horse, no oxen, and no cow. I can’t buy them. And my field is six miles from home. My taxes are 85 pengoes (£4 ss) a year, which is half of all the cash I earn.’ 5

Families on the Land. “How many families in your village live from their land?” I asked. “Not one in five,” he asserted. “They’re all like me. We can never ibuy new clothes and never get ahead. Just look at my shoes; they cost nine pengoes a month ago and are already half gone. Wo look like beggars, but aren’t ; the whole village is like that. “The count spends 100(1 pengoes in a day, blit none of us ever has a. pengo in his pocket. We can buy no land, for he has it all. We can work at nothing else, for there is nothing. We’re idle three-fourths of the year; and when rush season comes we get only a pengo and a half a day. “Our life is dull idleness and dry bread! And maybe, not even bread!” he exclaimed, “for sometimes we cat boiled beets and things like that. Even since the World War, they’ve promised better times, hut such times never come. How can they, when one man owns 18,000 acres and all the rest together have 3000.” I saw r he would never talk himself out, so said, “Goodbye,” and started on. “God he with you,” ho replied, and began plying his scythe again,

cutting his swathe through the field. As 1 advanced he gfew smaller and •smaller until he diminished to tiny rhythmic speck, .in an endless sea of gold. A Relirj of Feudalism. Impersonal, unnamed, crushed, a relic of feudialism, the most abused of all Europe’s children, a penniless, powerless peasant, with no horse, no plough, no hope, swinging bis silent way down the centuries, down the millenniums.

How vain seemed books on economy, speeches in Parliament, and social theories, us a barefoot woman in a poor blue dress followed her ragged husband over another man’s field that had no end!

I walked on into the dusty, dreary village, stopped for a moment at a. cross street to gaze at a magnificent distant castle in a wonderful fore.st above the rivor, passed on to the little church before which was a war memorial with seventy-one names on it, and stopped beside a great sign crudely whitewashed on a wall, *'Ma'gyarorszagnak Tgajzsag.” These peasants wanted “Justice* for

Hungary.” They lovo their fatliorlaml. Seventy-one gave tlioir lives for it. They are the truest of the true and patient beyond all measure. Hut of their fatherland’s land, , 4000 of them have 30()f> acres and one count with a foreign name has 13,000. All of Hungary’s 3500 villages are not as poor as this, but there are 3,000,000 peasants in this land as poor as Janos and his barefoot wife. (