This contained a short foreword by Bánffy himself, a translation of which is included in this volume. I am indebted to the editors of both editions of Twenty Five Years (1945), as their notes have been most useful to me in the writing of notes for this English edition.
In both these books Bánffy, who never failed to see the humorous side of any situation, however serious it might have been, uses a light and ironic tone, as if Puck’s aside ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ was never far from his mind (although in the kindest, most gentle way). It is clear that he reserved expression of his deepest feelings of love for his country, his reverence for honesty both in public and private life, his passion for the forests, rivers, meadows and wildlife of the mountains and valleys of his native land, his compassion for the unfortunate and exploited, his tolerance of folly or weakness, his disdain, almost amounting to hatred, of fraud and exploitation of the weak and powerless and, above all, his deep understanding and love of women, for his novels, especially the great trilogy The Writing on the Wall.
From my Memories was published in 1932, after Bánffy’s retirement from active public life, partly through ill health and partly through disgust and disillusion at the treacheries and dishonesties of those who sought power for their own selfish reasons rather than for the good of others. Following the death of his father, Bánffy had retired to his home in Transylvania, the great and beautiful castle of Bonczhida only a few miles north of Koloszvár (now renamed Cluj-Napoca by the Romanians), and was devoting his time to writing. He, together with some others of like mind, founded a publishing house and spent much of his time in the encouragement of those Hungarian writers and painters who had remained in their home province after sovereignty had been transferred to Romania.
It is not clear when Bánffy started work on the great trilogy that told the tale of those crucial years from 1904 to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. It seems to have been conceived many years before the author himself had returned to Transylvania and some years before he had produced the first volume of memoirs. Into it he poured all his feelings about Hungary and its people both humble and grand. Here he painted the picture of a great nation in decline, brought low by the folly and shortsightedness of its ruling class, to which he belonged and saw so clearly, unlike other writers who looked from afar but saw it only through the mists of envy or prejudice. As a chilling account of the folly of politicians and the blinkered vision of the rich and privileged, it draws much of its power not only from the fact that Bánffy knew this world from the inside but also because he wrote with a restraint that made his implied criticisms all the more powerful.
In 1981, when the Communists were still in control despite the cracks that were even then beginning to appear in many parts of Eastern Europe, Professor István Nemeskurty wrote a long article in a respected Budapest literary review in which he pointed out that if the state truly wanted the youth of Hungary to understand why their country had suffered so much between the wars, they should be made to read what had been written by a member of that former ruling class who had held power in those days and who had, in many ways, been responsible for Hungary’s downfall. The writings of such men would provide a far more reliable idea of what had really happened than most of the works by officially approved proletarian writers of working-class background. In particular, he said they should read Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian trilogy which, published in the 1930s, not only painted an unrivalled portrait of the social life and politics of those crucial years between 1904 and 1914 but was also a spellbinding tale by a master novelist who was worthy of comparison with Tolstoy and Lampedusa – high praise, indeed, especially from so respected a Hungarian critic.
Nemeskurty’s reasoned enthusiasm led to the reissue in Budapest in 1982 of the first volume, Megsámláltattál – They Were Counted, and this in turn was followed in 1993 by a de luxe edition of all three books in one mammoth volume under the original general title of Erdélyi Történet – A Transylvanian Tale and more recently as The Writing on the Wall in an English translation of all three books as They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting, and They Were Divided, published by Arcadia Books, London, in 1999, 2000 and 2001. A French translation of the first book came out in June 2002 and the second will appear in 2004.
Bánffy’s great trilogy, even though the first two volumes came out in 1934 and 1937 and immediately went into several editions, was never previously translated into any other language, since the third book was not published until 1940 when the world was already wracked by war. Miklós Bánffy’s daughter Katalin had long wanted to produce an English version of her father’s most famous work, and this ambition was eventually to be realized with the collaboration of the author of this introduction.
One last diplomatic mission came in the darkest days of the war. I make no excuse for quoting here what I wrote in the Introduction to the English translation of the first books of the Transylvanian trilogy, They Were Counted for although Miklós Bánffy’s Twenty-Five Years (1945) had only been written some two years after the events now described, that last posthumous work does not relate anything that took place after his return to Transylvania. I wrote then:
‘On 9 June 1943, Bánffy went to Bucharest to meet the Romanian foreign minister, Georges Mironescu, in order to try to persuade the Romanians to sign a separate peace with the Allies and thereby forestall a Russian invasion and the destruction that a Soviet-imposed political revolution would inevitably bring about. Despite warnings from Hitler that he knew very well what was going on, both sides did agree to abandon the Axis, but there the agreement stopped. Romania, whose claim to historic rights over the whole region had brought about the transfer of sovereignty after the First World War, wanted the immediate return of Northern Transylvania, while Bánffy argued that it would be better to leave this question in abeyance until the war was over when the Great Powers would make a final decision.
‘Bánffy’s private dream, and that of many other Transylvanians at that time, was that this would be the opportunity for Transylvania once again to become semiautonomous as it had been in the seventeenth century. The return to Hungarian rule of the northern part of the province by the 1940 Vienna award had not been greeted by many important Transylvanians with quite the same joy that it had been in Budapest. What Bánffy and his friends really wanted was a measure of independence for their beloved country; and although he and the Hungarian Foreign Ministry both wanted to postpone a decision on the future of Transylvania, it was not entirely for the same reasons. Neither wanted to offer such a hostage to Fortune as would be a preliminary pledge to return those disputed lands to Romania. It was an agonizing choice, for Bánffy realized that unless both Hungary and Romania agreed to abandon the Axis, this dream would be forever unobtainable. Nevertheless, the negotiations were continued, and there was a further meeting between him and a Romanian delegation, this time headed by Iuliu Maniu. Once again the stumbling block proved to be the Transylvanian question, and negotiations were broken off on 23 June 1943.’
Everything that Bánffy had feared was now to come to pass. Romania and Hungary were invaded by the Russians, and Budapest was ravaged by the devastating siege of Budapest and the destruction caused by the last grim struggle between the German and Russian armies. Back in Transylvania the castle of Bonczhida was looted of its contents and set on fire by the retreating German army.
Now, ironically, some fifty years after Bánffy’s death, and just as the importance of his name and work are once more becoming recognized, phoenix-like the castle of Bonzchida is being restored as a cultural centre by the Transylvanian Trust which, with English artisans and the patronage of the Prince of Wales, is now helping to restore some of the neglected national treasures of the ancient province of Transylvania.
From My Memories
It was nine o’clock on a cold November evening.
A few minutes before everything had been the same as on any other night in wartime. Very few people were to be seen in the streets, the theatregoers were in their places and those dining out snuggly indoors. The newsboys’ shouts were stilled. One or two belated pedestrians hurried along the empty pavements, and there could occasionally be heard the clatter of horses’ hooves from a passing hackney carriage. Apart from this … nothing. But at nine o’clock on this day a sudden excitement spread all over the city.
Chapter One 
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