PARIS 1919 (48 page)

The Hungarians temporarily rallied. Even conservative army officers found Béla Kun preferable to the Rumanians. The regime, for its part, dropped the language of the proletarian revolution and appealed simply to patriotism. Volunteers rushed to join the army. The Italians, motivated largely by their hostility to Hungary's other hostile neighbor, Yugoslavia, sold Kun guns and ammunition. According to a British observer, they also passed on information about Allied plans. By the middle of May Hungarian forces had pushed the Czechs back and driven a wedge between them and the Rumanians.
²⁷

In Paris, the peacemakers failed to take this in at first. Wilson was inclined to think the Hungarians the innocent party but asked an awkward, and all too familiar, question: “Do we have a way of stopping the movement of the Rumanians?” Lloyd George and Clemenceau could only suggest talking firmly to Br
tianu. They were, it must be admitted, distracted by the breach with the Italians over Fiume. When the Council of Four saw its experts' recommendations on Hungary's borders with Rumania and Czechoslovakia in the second week of May, it approved them with scarcely any discussion.
²⁸

The fighting went briskly on, forcing the peacemakers to take notice. In June a British journalist recently arrived from Hungary was invited to lunch with Lloyd George and his military adviser, Henry Wilson, to explain the situation. He found the British prime minister in a cheerful mood; together, they looked at a map of Central Europe. Lloyd George now blamed the Czechoslovaks and the Rumanians for the conflict. “I think,” he added, “the Hungarians are the best of the lot out there. They are the most powerful race and have always kept the others in order.” They talked about Allied intervention against Béla Kun. Henry Wilson asked gloomily, “Where are the troops to come from?” Lloyd George maintained that Bolshevism would die out of its own accord. He had enjoyed this chat; it would be helpful when he talked to his colleagues later that day. “It was quite obvious,” the journalist concluded, “that the Big Four had hardly given the countries east of Germany a thought, being far too occupied with the principal offender to bother about the lesser minions.”
²⁹

The Council of Four sent off its warnings and orders, just as it had done with the Poles, and with as little success. The Rumanians were told that they must not occupy Budapest. Br
tianu took a high moral line: “We wanted in a spirit of solidarity with the Entente to march on Pest in order to help in the re-establishment of order.” This was a familiar claim; so was his repeated charge that the Allies were treating Rumania with ingratitude after its great services during the war. The Hungarians were ordered to stop fighting. Kun replied that Hungary was willing to stop if Rumania and Czechoslovakia did.
³⁰

The Allies found it difficult to agree on what to do next. The French military were for sending in an army made up of Rumanian, Yugoslav and French troops to occupy what was left of Hungary; the Americans pointed out that, once in, the Rumanians might never leave. Lloyd George suggested that they might threaten to cut off supplies to Rumania. On June 12, the Council of Four settled for telegrams to Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Rumania, informing them of what their new borders were to be and ordering them to withdraw their troops into their own territory. There was to be no more land-grabbing; the Allies would not be induced to change their decisions “by the unscrupulous use of military methods.” The American delegate, General Bliss, was deputed to make sure the various forces withdrew. “A nice job,” he wrote to his wife, “to unload on a peaceful and peaceloving and somewhat tired man, isn't it?”
³¹

Lloyd George warned Wilson and Clemenceau that “we must impose our will now; we can no longer hurl vain orders.” But the fighting went on. The Rumanians refused to move back toward the east. Br
tianu feared, he said, a simultaneous attack by Kun and the Russian Bolsheviks, perhaps even one from Bulgaria which, he claimed, was armed to the teeth. In July, the Hungarians provided him with an excuse to start advancing again when Kun, in a last desperate gamble, tried to throw the Rumanians back across the Tisza River, about a hundred kilometers east of Budapest. The Rumanians counterattacked in force. Several units of the Hungarian army that were in touch with the opposition around Admiral Horthy stopped fighting, and the Hungarian lines collapsed. Kun fled to Austria and then the Soviet Union. He was arrested there during Stalin's purges, charged with conspiring with the Rumanian secret police, and executed in the autumn of 1939.
³²

On August 3, 1919, Rumanian troops entered Budapest. The Yugoslavs and the Czechoslovaks took the opportunity to advance farther into Hungarian territory along their borders. In spite of repeated complaints from the Allies, all of Hungary's enemies stayed firmly where they were through the autumn of 1919. A series of weak Hungarian governments proved unable to deal either with them or with the Horthy forces, who were going from strength to strength in the countryside. “If the three great powers had been able to keep armies,” the American military representative in Budapest wrote in his diary, “and could have sent them immediately to any place where trouble was brewing, it would have been entirely different, but the Supreme Council's prestige went aglimmering when a steady stream of ultimata had no effect whatever upon that miserable little nation of Rumania.” The Peace Conference was by now winding down. Wilson was back in the United States, trying vainly to get the League approved by Congress, Lloyd George was spending most of his time in London, and Clemenceau was preparing to run for president of France.
³³

The Rumanians, who were now occupying most of Hungary, looted whatever Kun and his regime had left. Telephones, prized stallions, fire engines, shoes, carpets, automobiles, grain, cattle, and even railway cars and locomotives vanished eastward. Queen Marie cheerfully told an American officer, “You may call it stealing if you want to, or any other name. I feel that we are perfectly entitled to do what we want to.” When the Allied military mission in Budapest objected, the Rumanians protested that they were only taking supplies for their army. After all, Br
tianu said, Rumania had saved civilization from Bolshevism.
³⁴

By November the powers, mainly Britain and France, had had enough. Rumania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were all ordered to withdraw their troops immediately from territory designated as Hungarian under the peace terms. Rumania complied with bad grace and much procrastination. When a new, more stable government took office in Hungary, the Allies finally decided that they could make peace. On December 1, Hungary was invited to send its representatives to Paris, and on January 5, 1920, a train left Budapest. As it passed through the country, crowds waited beside the tracks to wish its passengers well.
³⁵

Count Albert Apponyi, the delegation's elderly leader, came from a family that traced its ancestry back to a migration from Central Asia in the twelfth century. His own political views were stuck somewhere in the eighteenth. He was kindly and courteous, enormously cultivated, deeply religious and a Hungarian patriot. He went to Paris with few hopes: “I could not refuse this saddest of duties, though I had no illusions as to there being any possibility of my securing some mitigation of our lot.” Hungary had virtually nothing with which to bargain. By the time Kun fled, its borders had already been largely set and the Allies had already signed treaties with its neighbors.
³⁶

The Hungarians received a cold but correct welcome from the French and were taken off to the Château de Madrid, a resort hotel in the Bois de Boulogne. They were treated better than the Germans had been; they could wander through the Bois, even go to local restaurants. They received their peace terms in a brief ceremony at the Quai d'Orsay. Clemenceau curtly informed Apponyi that he could make a statement the following day but there would be no verbal negotiations, only written ones. On leaving the room, the French prime minister gave a loud contemptuous laugh.
³⁷

Apponyi's statement was, in Lloyd George's opinion, a tour de force. He spoke in fluent French, then switched to equally impeccable English and concluded with flawless Italian. He pointed out that Hungary was being punished more severely than any other of the defeated nations. It was losing two thirds of its territory and its population, it was being cut off from its markets and its sources of raw materials, and it was expected to pay heavy reparations. Three and a half million Hungarians were going to end up outside Hungary. If the principle of self-determination was a fair one, and he thought it was, then surely it should apply to the Hungarians. At the very least, there should be plebiscites held in the territories being taken from Hungary. (Unwisely, the count weakened his case by complaining that Hungarians were being condemned to live under the rule of inferior civilizations.
³⁸
)

In reply to a question from Lloyd George, Apponyi unfurled a large ethnographic map that he had brought with him, and the peacemakers gathered around. Lloyd George whispered to Apponyi, “You were very eloquent.” Even Clemenceau was polite. As the Hungarians went back to their hotel to prepare their written commentary, there was some feeling of hope. In Britain, critical questions were being asked in Parliament about the Hungarian terms. Several important French businessmen were interested in reopening economic relations between France and Hungary and informal talks had already started. The Italian government, under a new prime minister, swung around from its previous hostility and urged its allies to take Hungarian protests into account. It was not enough. In the end, the British and the French were not prepared to redo the treaties; the Italians were not willing to force the issue. The peacemakers may have been influenced, too, by a memorandum from Rumania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia which argued that any attempt to redraw the borders would be a betrayal. What ultimately weighed against Hungary was sheer inertia. As a young English observer told Károlyi in 1919, “The Entente governments had many more important things to worry about than the fate of ten million people in Hungary.”
³⁹