Windows on the Danube

Admiral Nicholas Horthy, Regent of Hungary, and his clique of aristocratic Magyar officials had long sought to regain for their country some of its vanished power and glory. From the ceiling-high windows of their brownstone government building in Pest they surveyed Buda spread out in a quiet arc. They looked down the sluggish Danube, past the austere statue of their patron, Saint Stephen, and felt themselves ordained and inevitable monarchs of all they saw and all they could take.

Opportunism had paid dividends in 1940 when, by playing Germany's game, they had taken the long disputed province of Transylvania from Rumania. Germany bought their crops and paid for them. The collapse of Yugoslavia further .strengthened Hungary. Magyar counts strode haughtily along the Danube confident that Budapest would soon be capital of Southeastern Europe, a strong and respected buffer between Berlin and Rome, guardian of the status quo from the Black Sea to the Adriatic.

But the New Order proved a disappointment. By the end of 1942 Hungary had been looted clean by the Germans, found itself at war with three of the world's most powerful countries--which seemed quite a lot to a nation the size of Maine. Hungarian armies were being cut to pieces a thousand miles away in Russia. Hungarian workers were herded into boxcars and shipped off to Germany. The people were war-weary and disillusioned. Berlin blackmailed Budapest into sending more troops to the eastern front by threatening to give Transylvania back to Rumania.

The Magyar counts and the Admiral stared despondently from their high windows and saw Europe and its New Order disintegrating. They saw ahead more dull, humiliating months as errand boys to Hitler, then fine chances for insurrection and chaos. They wondered what they could do about it.

Allied successes in North Africa gave them ideas. The Magyars went to work. Last week they ordered 20,000 Hungarian workers home from Germany by year's end. Berlin, angry, warned that the departing Hungarians could take no money out of the Reich. But the German mark no longer meant as much as it had in months past.

The Magyars had made a bold beginning and seemed to have got away with it. Hope returned to Admiral Horthy. After all, Jean Franc,ois Darlan was an Admiral too.

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