They Were Divided (37 page)

The only concession the great powers would allow, it seemed, was that Turkey must be induced to grant essential reforms in her administration of Macedonia. The news of this important
climb-down
also came too late: it arrived in Cetinje only on the
afternoon
of the day on which Nikita had already declared war on Turkey and sent his troops to invade her borders.

Balint could not conceive how all this muddle had been
possible
. It was not to be believed that Vienna had not known in advance what was being plotted in Montenegro. Even if the Ballplatz’s own intelligence service had failed to pass on the news, they could easily have been informed by merely reading
The
Times
,
for the great London newspaper had published, as early as the end of August, the full text of the Balkan Pact. To imagine that, when Turkey had been defeated, anyone would be able to induce the victorious armies to retreat behind the ancient
boundaries
was an absurdity hard to credit. There must, therefore, be some other explanation, and it could only be that the central European powers took a Turkish victory for certain and that Vienna was looking forward to the defeat of the Balkan states. At any rate it was clear that this was the view of the Prussian
Marshal von der Goltz who had himself, a few years before, planned the reorganization of the Turkish armies.

The Sublime Porte thanked the great powers for their interest and promises of support, but clearly did not have much faith in them; while the Balkan states paid no heed at all. Then the war started and the Turks were chased from the field.

Barely ten days had passed before the Bulgarian army had reached Adrianople and the Serbs, skirting the borders of Montenegro, had arrived at Uskub and entered Albania. They laid siege to Scutari and were now nearing the Adriatic at Durazzo. The Greeks were at Salonika. The race was on and it was no longer a question of where the Turks would take up a stand but rather which Turkish stronghold would fall first.

It was at this point that at last the Dual Monarchy seemed to wake up to what was happening. Though indifferent to the fate of Macedonia and Rumelia, that of Albania was a very different matter. A Balkan Albania was not at all what Vienna could
contemplate
or permit, for it would be an intolerable invasion of Austria’s own interests if Serbian power was allowed so to extend itself. Strong protests issued from the Ballplatz and also, though in a lesser degree, from Italy who was alarmed at the prospect of Serbian control of the eastern shores of the Adriatic.

The newspapers reported these disconcerting developments with excited glee and, as Franz-Josef was at that moment in Budapest, his foreign minister Berchtold hurried there to be with him, as did the Heir, Franz-Ferdinand, and Schemua, the head of the Austrian general staff. The latter left on the following day for Berlin, and three days later Conrad left for Bucharest with a personal letter, written in his own hand, from Franz-Josef to King Carol. At the same moment a semi-official statement appeared which announced that Austria-Hungary, should it be necessary, would use force to ensure the independence of Albania. More was to follow.

A large portion of the Austro-Hungarian army was put on the alert and a million men were sent to the Russian border on the pretext of a trial mobilization.

Today there was even more disturbing news. At Mitrovica and Prizren in Serbia the Austro-Hungarian consulates had been invaded by the mob, Austrian flags torn down and the premises looted.

Balint sat at his desk staring moodily before him. The news of the previous few days had been alarming enough, but this was far
worse, for an attack on any power’s consulates, if it had been as reported, inevitably meant war, for no power, unless bent on
hara-kiri,
would let such a provocation pass.

He gazed out of the window with eyes hooded by anxiety.

Outside all was bathed in brilliant sunshine. The lawn which sloped down in front of the house was still as green as in summer but the leaves on the trees were already turning brown or reddish bronze. In front of the window a leaf, saffron-yellow with sharply serrated edges, floated in the slight breeze like the trembling flight of a giant butterfly.

It had come from the maple which grew at the corner of the house and for a while continued to float there, hesitating,
balancing
in the air, brightly lit by the autumn sun, until finally it fell to the ground to join, with an almost imperceptible rustle, its already fallen sisters. And, as it fell, another took its place before the window, held for a moment in the air until it too fell to the ground. Balint fancied for a moment that these dying leaves were conscious of their beauty as they prepared themselves for the death they knew would follow.

The garden was so peaceful that it was hard to believe that anywhere in the world there could exist hatred or war or
destruction
. It was as if such beauty must exist everywhere and as if peace must be universal.

Watching this Balint felt his heart constrict.

It was not only anxiety for his beloved country and for the fate of its simple people; something else worried him deeply. What was to become of his mother if war did break out?

Lately Countess Roza had been having sudden attacks of
dizziness
. She had done her best to prevent anyone knowing, but Balint had divined her secret and was sure that something of the sort must have occurred the previous night, for in the morning she had sent him a message saying that she would not be going to church with him but intended to spend the morning in bed and to get up only at lunch time. There had to have been a serious reason for this, for Roza Abady, when at Denestornya, laid great store on being seen in her pew every Sunday morning. Balint had questioned her maid but the girl had not seemed to know anything and, though he had tried to see his mother himself, she had merely sent word that she wanted to sleep until midday and did not want to be disturbed.

Now all his thoughts were concentrated on what would become of her if there was a general mobilization and he had to go to
war. If that happened he would certainly be away for several months, with no news of her and in a constant state of worry.

He was so agitated that he got up and walked about the room for a while before sitting down and taking up the newspapers again. He could find only one item that seemed even slightly
reassuring
. Sir Edward Grey had offered to mediate in the dispute and try to find a formula for restoring peace. That England was prepared to take this line seemed, at least, hopeful.

Then he turned to the home pages, but found nothing
reassuring
there.

Since Parliament had reassembled in mid-September, the loose coalition of the parties in opposition had changed its tactics. While most of its members had absented themselves from the summer debates, now they reappeared in force, for in their
private
meetings held in early autumn it had been all too clear that their policy of boycotting Parliament had passed almost
unnoticed
in the country. Something else would have to be tried. They were now again present in force, making provocative declarations which they read out with a lot of noise, scandalizing the more conservative members with noisy interruptions, blowing whistles and toy trumpets before again retiring
en
masse
.
Their well-
publicized
attitude was that all the sessions held since June 4th had been illegal and therefore invalid, and so there was nothing
scandalous
about their repeated clashes with whoever presided at the debates and with the parliamentary guards. On one occasion a large band entered the Chamber so tightly clasped together that they were able to occupy the floor of the House without the guards being able to reach those who should have been excluded. They stood there, between the ministers’ seats and the
stenographers
’ desks, from noon until the evening; and this heroic
opposition
lasted until eight p.m. when they decided to leave.

Later they tried something else. The guards had become more adept at keeping out those who were proscribed by the exclusion decrees, so the opposition cliques started to search for new ways round them. Someone found out that the kitchen staff could move freely in and out of the Parliament restaurant where no guards were posted. The plan was soon made: into the building by the kitchen entrance and up in the kitchen lift, which carried the paprika chicken and the veal fricassee to the restaurant floor close to the Chamber itself! What a surprise for everybody! There they’d be, and there they’d stay until in due course they were hustled out again, as they undoubtedly would be; but what did
that matter when the great Tisza, to his shame and annoyance, would for once have been outwitted? The plan was put into action at once … and failed. They were seen sneaking in, it seems, or perhaps one unwisely talkative member let out the secret which reached the officials in time. Whatever the reason, they were stopped before getting to their places, and the escapade was the talk of the day just when the Serb army was standing before Durazzo and the spectre of a world war was stalking the Danube basin and the foothills of the Carpathians.

At this same time other absurdities were being perpetrated in the Hungarian capital, and the newspapers lost no time in passing on the news to their readers.

The opposition leaders – Kossuth, Justh and Andrassy – seemed suddenly to become aware that all was not as it should be in the Balkans and felt they owed it to the people to make public their point of view. The opposition had to have a voice, they said; to make a stand, let their views be known. And in this they were, of course, right to recognize that they had gained nothing from their passivity and their refusal to attend debates. The
general
public had failed to appreciate the great moral lesson of their abstention and had not even realized that in this great
dispute
the opposition itself was really the injured party! It was, of course, the same realization that had brought them back into Parliament, which had prompted the renewed rash of
obstructionist
tactics, and led Zoltan Desy openly to attack Lukacs claiming that the Minister-President was the ‘world’s biggest “Panamist”’, though few people knew what he meant by the epithet except that it was rude. This had all been good clean fun and, they said, completely justifiable, even heroic … until now, when the Balkan crisis seemed to deserve something more.

The opposition had to have a voice, they said; to take a stand, make a speech! Some cogent expression of opinion was necessary, something to show how original they were and how different from the government in power, how statesman-like, how much more intelligent and understanding!

It would not be enough merely to take part once more in the parliamentary debates on foreign affairs, and in any case if once they gave Tisza an opportunity to allow their members to speak it would be tantamount to recognizing his authority, to accepting his appointment as Speaker and his right to interpret the Rules of the House in his own way, all of which they had until now steadfastly refused to do. Why, someone might even interpret
such a move as accepting the legality of Tisza’s position, and that was unthinkable.

Instead they searched around to find another solution which, to them at least, appeared very droll and witty.

The opposition therefore proclaimed that ‘Parliament’ – their own self-styled Parliament, not the one that met in the official House – was the only true parliament and would hold its sessions in the ballroom of the Hotel Royal. There, they declared, the real Parliament would meet, complete with Speaker and Legal Authorities seated on a dais high above the members, a President, two Vice-Presidents and other necessary Officers of State.

The first member to speak was Albert Apponyi. In a speech redolent of sweet reason, he outlined recent political events in the capital and declared that all those gathered together that day in the hotel ballroom were the country’s true representatives and that in their name, and that of the Hungarian nation, he saluted the heroic struggle of the Serbs, Greeks and Bulgarians. He talked about the right of all nations to determine their own affairs, and of the right to independence, and he therefore proposed that Hungary should make a noble gesture to those enslaved peoples and stretch out the ‘hand of friendship’ to Belgrade. This was the tenor of the motion he urged the delegates to accept.

Other speakers followed him. Among them Lovaszy and Lajos Hollo went even further. Both had for some time been
outspoken
critics of Austria-Hungary’s foreign policy. Now they came out as outright partisans of Serbia, stating that Viennese pretensions to the status of a world power were ridiculous and based on nothing but foolish vanity. It was nothing to Hungary, they said, how affairs in the Balkans were settled; and nothing but folly to intervene in any way: it would be mere meddling in other people’s affairs. It was here that it was stated for the first time, although still in somewhat veiled terms, that the alliance with Germany was a harmful one and served only Germany’s interests. The general feeling that surged through all the speeches, and which was expressed in vague terms of brotherly sympathy for oppressed nations, was that the Hungarians were loved throughout the Balkans while the Austrians were
universally
loathed. Apponyi’s motion was accepted unanimously, and everyone thought that by doing so they had made a ‘heroic’
protest
against the pretensions of Vienna.

Balint put down his paper with a gesture of contempt, deeply shocked by everything that he had read. This pseudo-Parliament
was crazy, he thought, and it was nothing short of sheer folly to act so lightly when at any moment Hungary might be involved in a war and the nation forced to fight for its very existence.

It was unbelievable, Balint reflected, that those so-called
political
leaders, Apponyi, Kossuth and Andrassy, could have been so irresponsible as to permit such a declaration without realizing what an effect it was bound to have abroad. It was tantamount to an invitation to Russia to attack their beloved country, and it would encourage all the petty Balkan states to underrate the power of the Dual Monarchy and to scorn its warnings and authority. And in Paris and St Petersburg it would look as if the Austro-Hungarian empire was on the point of disintegration with a revolution in Hungary as the first step. How was it possible that none of them had paused to think of such consequences?