PARIS 1919 (24 page)

Rumania's timing was bad; by the time its troops were ready to move, the Central Powers had rallied. By the end of 1916 over half the country was occupied by Germans and Austrians; during that winter, 300,000 Rumanians out of a total of six million died from disease and starvation. Its allies, unfairly perhaps, blamed Rumania itself for the disaster. Under a new Treaty of Bucharest with the Central Powers in May 1918, Rumania dropped out of the war, an understandable move but one that had implications for its territorial claims. Since in the earlier Treaty of Bucharest in 1916, Rumania had promised not to make a separate peace, the Allies now considered themselves no longer bound by their promises. Clemenceau never forgave Br
tianu for his treachery. Br
tianu dealt with the awkwardness by resigning and letting his successors (whom he had chosen) take responsibility. He managed to delay ratification of the new treaty in parliament and on November 10, 1918, declared war again on Germany. This, he announced cheerfully, meant that the deal with the Allies still stood. Rumania had made peace only in order to conserve its strength for war: “neither legally, practically, nor morally, were the Rumanians ever really at peace with the enemy.” Just in case, though, he quietly arranged with the Italians, themselves anxious to limit Serbia's gains, that their two countries would stand together on the need to adhere to wartime treaties.
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The Supreme Council found Rumania's demands excessive and the wrangling with Yugoslavia over the Banat tedious. (Br
tianu complained that some of them had slept during his presentation.) It was with obvious relief that the peacemakers adopted Lloyd George's recommendation to refer Rumania's claims, including those to the Banat, to a subcommittee of experts for a just settlement. When it had studied the matter, he added optimistically, and teased out the truth, only a few issues would have to come back before the council. Wilson agreed, with the reservation that the experts should not look at the political side of the problem. (What was “political” was never defined.) Clemenceau, perhaps as a result of Wilson's intervention, remained virtually speechless and Orlando made an ineffectual plea to settle the borders then and there. And so the future of the Banat, along with other prize pieces of territory in south-central Europe, was shipped off to a special territorial commission, the first of many, which was to have no more success in bringing the different sides together. In time, the Commission on Rumanian and Yugoslav Affairs dealt with all of Yugoslavia's boundaries, except the ones with Italy which, on Italian insistence, were reserved for the Supreme Council.
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Although the experts on the territorial commissions (eventually there were six in all) could not know it, almost all their recommendations were to go into the various peace treaties unchanged because their leaders simply did not have the time to consider them in detail. The Rumanian commission eventually broadened its scope until its experts determined the future shapes of Yugoslavia, Rumania, Greece and Bulgaria and the future balance of power in the Balkans, between Hungary and its neighbors and between Soviet Russia and south-central Europe. “How fallible one feels here!” Nicolson, one of the British experts, wrote. “A map—a pencil— tracing paper. Yet my courage fails at the thought of the people whom our errant lines enclose or exclude, the happiness of several thousands of people.”
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The Supreme Council did not explain what made a just settlement. Did it mean providing defensible borders? Railway networks? Trade routes? In the end the experts agreed only that they would try to draw boundaries along lines of nationality. The Banat, the piece of land that triggered the process, also gave warning as to its difficulties. It held a rich mix of Serbs, Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Slovaks, Gypsies, Jews, even some scattered French and Italians. And there was always the problem of how to count heads in an area where the whole notion of national identity was as slippery as the Danube eels. In the gilt and tapestries of the banqueting room at the Quai d'Orsay, the Rumanian commission got out the maps, read the submissions, heard the witnesses and tried to impose a rational order on an irrational world.
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They also, in the case of the Europeans, kept their own national interests in mind. The French, looking for allies in central Europe, wanted both Rumania and Yugoslavia to be strong and friendly. The Italians split hairs and quibbled over procedure, all with the aim of blocking Yugoslav demands, and then appalled the Americans by hinting that they might agree to some of them in return for Italy's own claims in the Adriatic being accepted. Even where they could have made a magnanimous, and better still a cost-free, gesture in accepting Yugoslavia's claim on the Klagenfurt area of Austria, they would not. “Poor diplomacy,” in the opinion of Charles Seymour, a young historian from Yale University. A French colleague was blunter: “He did not mind the Italian's crookedness, but he did object to the gaucherie.” The Americans tried valiantly to pin down the elusive just settlement, and the British tried to reconcile the Americans and the French. “There was a good deal of jockeying to begin with,” reported Seymour, “and a good deal of rather dirty work in maneuvering for position, so to speak. The British stood firm with us in killing this and in getting down to honest work.”
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Br
tianu made a poor impression, refusing to compromise, showing his temper and sulking when questioned too closely. He made the curious argument that granting the whole of the Banat to Rumania would actually improve relations with Yugoslavia, like “a tooth which has to be extracted.” He also made threats: if he did not get the Banat, he would resign and let the Bolsheviks take over in Rumania. He tried to appeal over the experts' heads to Wilson, who sent him along to see House, who had to endure a drunken harangue about how Rumania had been betrayed by its allies. Br
tianu also accused Hoover of holding up loans and food supplies until American interests, Jewish ones at that, got concessions to Rumania's oil. The news coming in from Central Europe did not help his case. Rumania was advancing beyond the armistice lines into Hungary and Bulgaria; its troops were massing on the northern edge of the Banat; it was making wild accusations that Serbs were murdering Rumanian civilians. The Yugoslavs by comparison appeared reasonable.
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At the beginning of March the Rumanian delegation received a reinforcement when Queen Marie, accompanied by three plump daughters, arrived on the royal train. Colette described her for
Le Matin:
“The morning was grey, but Queen Marie carried light within her. The glitter of her golden hair, the clarity of her pink and white complexion, the glow in her imperious yet soft eyes—such an apparition renders one speechless.” The queen spoke charmingly of her longing to help her country; she called attention to her war work. “I simply went, My God!, I simply went wherever they called for me, and they needed me everywhere.” She was, she said modestly, “a sort of banner raised for my country.”
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She was indeed. It was fortunate that the heir to the Rumanian throne had married the one grandchild of Queen Victoria who had no difficulty in shaking off her English upbringing and adopting the ways of her new country. Ferdinand was deadly dull, shy and stupid; she was lovely, vivacious and adulterous. Her new subjects found this endearing. Her lovers included Joe Boyle, the dashing Canadian millionaire miner from the Klondike, and Br
tianu's brother-in-law, who fathered, it was said, all of her children except the disastrous one who became King Carol. She was also very extravagant. Her trip to Paris was as much about shopping for herself as about her country. “Rumania,” she cried, “has to have Transylvania, Bessarabia too. And what if for the lack of a gown, a concession should be lost?” She talked constantly of “my” ministers, country and army. Her husband, the king, she ignored; she claimed that a letter of advice he sent to Paris was “almost impossible to read but as the first sentence began that he had complete confidence in her she never attempted to read any of the rest.”
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