Henri Pozzi, 1935
The Bulgarian Scene - V. The Valley of the Vardar << Contents >> Pan-Slavism - II. Czechoslovakia and Roumania
Of all the nations beaten in the Great War, none has been so harshly treated as Hungary. The sentence passed upon her after the War was a sentence of death.
The extent of her kingdom has been reduced from 282,870 square kilometres to 91,114; her population, from 19,000,000 to less than 8,000,000. Roumania has taken from her 102,787 square kilometres, and 5,270,000 inhabitants, of whom 2,820,000 were non-Roumanians; Czechoslovakia has taken 62,937 square kilometres and 3,600,000 inhabitants, of whom less than 20,000 were Czechs; Serbia has taken 20,956 kilometres and 1,600,000 inhabitants (not including Croatia) of whom only 360,000 were Serbs.
Hungary has lost two-thirds of her arable lands; four-fifths of her iron and coal mines; all her salt beds and copper mines; three-quarters of her forests and vineyards; two-thirds of her livestock; her principal railroads and all her best rolling-stock. In addition to this all her hydro-electric resources have disappeared as a result of the attribution to the Czechs and Roumanians of her mountain districts and torrents.
To complete the disaster and to put her irremediably hors de combat, the Czechs arranged that Burgenland (5,055 square kilometres and possessing 400,000 inhabitants, of whom 250,000 were non-Austrians) should be handed over to Austria.
Never since the break-up of Poland has a people been so torn asunder.
"We must have no pity on Hungary," said Andre Tardieu, who presided over the sub-commission charged with the establishment of peace conditions. In these words did the confidential collaborator of Clemenceau express the unanimous sentiment of the Allied nations. Hungary was regarded as being the one nation who, more than another, was responsible for the War, and Count Tisza, the Prime Minister of Hungary in 1914, was regarded as the archvillain of the European catastrophe.
No man has been more despised, more hated by the Allies. A storm of vituperation rose against him from one end of the world to the other when Dr. Benes published his famous pamphlet in Paris in 1917, entitled Destroy Austria-Hungary. In that pamphlet he revealed that the man who had forced the War at the tragic Council at Vienna on July 8th, 1914, was Tisza. By that pamphlet the destiny of Hungary was sealed.
I can still see Dr. Benes in the office of Mr. Edgar Roels, * commenting on the essential passages of his brochure, indicating the sources of his information, and withal forcibly condemning the mentality of the man whom he was about to assassinate morally.
* Chief of the Foreign Section of Le Temps
The Czechs should put up many monuments to Dr. Benes, for it was his tongue and his pen that won for them a war in which others fought.
A few weeks after the publication of Dr. Benes' pamphlet, Take Jonescu, the President of the Roumanian Council, supported it, saying that he too possessed proof that Count Tisza was responsible for the War.
The last blow against the Hungarian statesman was reserved for the Serbs, who revealed with overwhelming detail that it was Count Tisza who had prepared and had his police execute the attack at Sarajevo.
"The manifest sympathies of the Archduke for the Czechs," the Serbs declared, "his marriage with the Czech Countess Hohenberg had rendered him odious to the Hungarian officials. Assured that the future Austrian Emperor and King of Hungary would sacrifice the interests and the predominance of Hungary for those of his Czech proteges, Count Tisza had resolved that he should never come to the throne. Therefore, in order to facilitate the task of the assassins, he gave the counter-instructions to the authorities of Sarajevo which resulted in the laxness of supervision around the imperial couple, and permitted the success of the attack of Gavrilo Princip."
At the moment that M. Vesnitch, the Serbian Minister at Paris carried this appalling accusation to the ears of those who wished to hear it, the ink was hardly dry upon the paper on which Colonel Dragoutine Dimitrievitch-Apis, former Chief of the Intelligence Service of the Serb general staff, wrote in his cell at Salonika these terrible words: "It is I, and I glory in it, who desired and realised in accord with my chiefs, the death of the Austrian."
The truth about Count Tisza's part in the War is as follows. It was not until June 30th, 1914, two days after the Sarajevo murder that Count Tisza was received by the Emperor Francis Joseph and learned from him that the Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Berchtold, had decided to seize the occasion in order to crush Serbia. Tisza formally opposed this project in the name of Hungary. Its realisation, he believed, would inevitably provoke Russian intervention in favour of Belgrade, and so inaugurate a European conflagration.
In a memorandum to the Emperor, the text of which figures in the Red Book published by the Austrian Revolutionary Government, Tisza again declared his opposition on July 1st, as follows:
"I did not hide from Count Berchtold, with whom I discussed this affair," he wrote, "that I considered his project to be a fatal error, and that I intended to have no participation in it. First of all, we do not possess enough proof of Serbia's guilt in the Sarajevo attack to be able to render her responsible ; and if we provoked a war after the conciliatory reply of Belgrade, the entire world would regard us as disturbers of peace, and we should enter the war under most unfavourable auspices."
On July 2nd Count Tisza spoke in the same tone to the German Ambassador, Tschirschky.
On July 7th, at the Council which assembled to authorise immediate military action against Serbia, Count Berchtold announced that he had written to the German Kaiser announcing his intentions, and that the Kaiser had entirely approved. Still Tisza was not satisfied, and once again he rose up in vehement protest against the Austrian project:
"I shall never consent," he cried, "to our attacking Serbia without previous diplomatic negotiations, although it appears to me that the contrary has unfortunately been resolved upon by Berlin." This opposition was finally renewed by Tisza on July 8th, in a second memorandum to the Emperor. The next day, July 9th, at Budapest, the Hungarian ministers unanimously approved their chief's action, and invited him to urge moderation upon Vienna with all his power. On July 14th, however, Tisza suddenly capitulated and fell in with the opinions of Count Berchtold. That day Tisza approved of the dispatch to Serbia of the ultimatum which eventually gave rise to the War.
Of this "conversion" numerous explanations have been furnished.
It was only after the Hungarian revolution that the true reasons for his volte face were revealed by the publication of certain papers from the secret archives of the Russian Government.
Two motives led Tisza to modify his attitude: one was the news that the Russian mobilisation had commenced (and it is known to-day that the news was true) and the other was the telegraphic circular by which Sazonoff informed all the governments, in the name of Czar Nicholas II, "That Russia repelled in advance any moderating action which might be attempted at Petrograd."
Thenceforth Hungary had no longer any choice. She was compelled to manifest her solidarity with Austria and with Germany, who alone would aid her to defend her territory which was menaced by the imminent Russian invasion.
But even then Tisza consented only on condition that all the Powers should be notified that in no case would Austria-Hungary annex any part of the territory of conquered Serbia. This notification, it is true, never took place, either as a result of the negligence or the deliberate intention of Ballplatz, but its text, discovered in the archives of Vienna, permits no doubt as to the reality of the gesture.
Benes lied when he affirmed in 1917 that the responsibility of the War lay upon Tisza. The Serbians who share with Sazonov the responsibility for having willed, prepared, and executed the assassination of Sarajevo, lied still more abominably when they accused the Hungarian Prime Minister of having himself organised the attack.
The reprobation stirred up in the world by these two accusations paralysed the defence of Hungary at Trianon against the greed of her Czech, Roumanian, and Serbian neighbours.
The excesses on the part of those who carved the flesh of Hungary were so flagrant, the lies and the pretexts so evident, that when the United States signed a separate peace with Hungary (they were not participants in the treaty of Trianon) they did it without taking the new frontiers into consideration at all.
It will, therefore, be realised that Hungary has been judged in an atmosphere of falsity, and because of this there was not a man in the Allied countries who did not at the time applaud her ruin. The appeals for moderation made by the few people who foresaw at that time the economic ruin and the European disaster that must ensue, were lost in the general apathy and antipathy.
The general attitude in Europe to-day is that Hungary has merely suffered the fate that she would have inflicted on others. By what right dare Hungary protest that her populations have been placed by the peace treaty under foreign domination? Was it not she who started the butchery of 1914 in an attempt to annex Serbia to her Croatia?
The men who made peace in the autumn of 1919, and in the spring of 1920 were led to believe this. All the protestations of the Hungarian delegates at Trianon, all their offers to disprove the lies told against them, all the entreaties made to the territorial commission sent to Hungary to fix boundaries, were shattered on this state of mind as on a rock.
The decision of those upon whom the fate of Hungary depended had been made in advance of the Conference of Trianon, where little more was done than to ratify the agreements by which the Czechs, Roumanians and Serbs had divided the remains of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy among themselves as soon as the final defeat of the Austro-Germans was certain.
This division had been resolved upon in the course of meetings held in London, Amsterdam and Paris by the committees of propaganda created with the co-operation of Lord Northcliffe, the Czech revolutionary organisations, and their Anglo-French friends.
The Conference from which the treaty of Trianon resulted was a base comedy. The honest men who imagine that the plenipotentiaries weighed in anguish the pros and cons of the arguments and decided only with proofs in hand, are deluding themselves with childish illusions.
The American Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, abandoned the Trianon Conference, disgusted by what he saw. He wrote subsequently: * "Everybody seemed to talk in whispers and never to say anything worth while except in confidence. The open sessions of the Conference were arranged beforehand. They were formal and perfunctory. The agreements and bargains were made behind closed doors."
* Robert Lansing: The Peace Negotiations, London, 1921.
Mr. Lansing adds that President Wilson relied largely upon the
opinions of Colonel House. What House wished, the President wished also. Let us trace the matter further. Wickham Steed revealed in his Memoirs that Colonel House did nothing without consulting him, and that he, Steed gave him no advice without previously hearing Mazaryk and Benes, chiefs of the Czech delegation. Thus did Mazaryk and Benes practically control the decisions of the Conference which disposed of Hungary's carcass. The Czechs profited voraciously by this exceptional situation as did also their Roumanian and Serbian associates.
They showed so little moderation in their attitude towards Hungary that more than a year before the signature of the treaty of Trianon, Lloyd George had been alarmed by the greediness of the vultures hovering over helpless Hungary.
"There will never be peace in South-Eastern Europe," he wrote on March 25th, 1919, "if every little State now coming into being is to have a large Magyar irredenta within its borders. I would therefore take as a guiding principle of the peace that as far as is humanly possible the different races should be allocated to their motherlands and that this human criterion should have precedence over considerations of strategy, and economics or communications, which can be adjusted by other means." Each day, in the last fourteen years, has demonstrated the wisdom of these words. If Lloyd George had been listened to, fewer ambitions would have been satisfied, fewer politicians and business men who ran about Europe in old broken-down shoes before the War would have attained their present heights of power and wealth. But on the other hand one would hear less sabre-rattling from the Danube to the Aegean.
But Lloyd George was not listened to. The politicians who imposed despotic peace upon Hungary were guided solely by self interest. They were resolved in advance to disregard all appeals to equity, truth and respect even for economic necessities.
"The psychologists of the future," wrote M. de Monzie * in 1923, "will never succeed in determining by what aberration the same men who trumpeted across the world the rights of races and nationalities have taken whole cities away from the Magyars in which every inhabitant, spoke Hungarian, and was Hungarian in origin, at heart and by culture. What devilishness, for example, incited the experts to cede to the Czechs the soil under which mines were being developed, and yet to leave the mineral rights to the Hungarian industrialists? The authors of the treaties of Trianon and of Saint-Germain are really the workers of a new Babel, who do not have the excuse of ignorance or unconsciousness. We shall bear the results of their madness yet."
Here is the story of the "Millerand Letter." It demonstrates the mentality of the "peacemakers" better than anything I know.
* Former French Minister of Education
Informed of the conditions which awaited them at Trianon, the Hungarian delegates declared that they would not sign. Their president, Count Apponyi, resigned. The situation became tense, and explosive. Roumanian troops, assured that there was no resistance to fear, were only waiting for the refusal of Hungary to march on Budapest.
On May 6th, 1920, M. Alexandre Millerand transmitted the text of the treaty to the Hungarian Government. At the same time, by letter, he advised the Hungarians that "if an inquest on the spot revealed the necessity of modifying the frontier lines fixed by the treaty, and if the frontier commissions should consider that the stipulations of the treaties contained an injustice, on no matter what point, Hungary could appeal to the League of Nations. The Allied and Associated Powers," M. Millerand added, "are agreed that the League of Nations, if one of the interested parties demand it, will be able to offer its
services to obtain such changes of frontiers as the commission will have esteemed desirable."
The result of this letter was that the Hungarians agreed to sign the treaty, yet there are certain nations who have never ceased to conduct themselves as if the "Millerand Letter" was only a scrap of paper. For example:
The Frontier Commission operating in Banat decided to restore the district of Murakoz to Hungary, since it was exclusively peopled by Hungarians. The League of Nations was informed of this decision and confirmed it. Serbia, however, being in occupation at Murakoz, formally refused to accept the judgment of Geneva. The Conference of Ambassadors, backing the resistance of the Government of Belgrade, notified the League of Nations by a letter from its President, M. Raymond Poincare that "the frontier should be established in the regions of Murakoz in conformity with the stipulations of the Treaty of Trianon."
Here is a still better example:
At the same moment that the "Millerand Letter" left Paris for Budapest, secret instructions were sent from the Conference of Ambassadors * enjoining the commissioners not to agree to anything "of a nature leading to the least change of the frontiers which had been established at Trianon on the strength and data of documents."
Mr. Lloyd George said in 1928 of the "data and documents" presented at the Peace Conference in support of Czech, Roumanian and Serbian claims: "I must admit that at the time of the peace negotiations we were supplied from certain quarters with false data, and it was upon the basis of this false data and upon evidence that was neither satisfactory nor true, but which showed Europe's situation at that time in an entirely false light to the eyes of the Allied Powers, that we decided upon frontiers and races."
Each word is like a red-hot needle.
* The text of which was revealed in 1922 by the Journal Official of the League of Nations.
One more example:
The boundary commissions which fixed the boundaries stipulated by the Treaty never had an official confirmation of the "Millerand Letter." How many Frenchmen, how many Englishmen, are there who have even heard about all this? I do not refer here to the masses. I am thinking only of the elite who believe themselves to be "informed." Outside of a few specialists in political and press circles no one knows what shameful underhand methods were resorted to by those whom Clemenceau (who would never pardon the men who had deceived him) called "the jackals of our victory."
"The Little Entente," wrote Mr. Charles Danielou, who was present at the Trianon Conference, "presented new demands every day. Every day they buried their scissors more and more deeply into the body of Hungary. The frontier which Mazaryk first demanded for the Czechs would have been a purely ethnic frontier. The Hungarian cities of Pozsony, Leva, Ipolysog, Rimaszombat, Kassa, for example, would have remained Hungarian as would also the whole of Eastern Slovakia and all of Ruthenia."
But Benes intervened.
He used the friendships which he had made in France and England to tear not only Eastern Slovakia and Ruthenia from Hungary, but also a vast block of purely Hungarian land and population. Thus did he create the Magyar irredenta which Lloyd George foresaw in 1919.
Unscrupulous and fanatic servant of the Pan-Slav idea, Benes indeed intended to use the Allied victory by annihilating Hungary - the obstacle upon which the Slav drive towards the Adriatic had been shattered for centuries.
Another typical example of the contempt shown by these men at Trianon for the great principles which they so glibly invoked, is that of Banat.
Belgrade and Bucharest were both fully determined to have Banat. Their delegates disputed violently before the Conference. Tired of their wrangling, Clemenceau proposed to solve the question by a plebiscite. Plebiscite! At the mere sound of this word a Serbo-Roumanian reconciliation was born, for the simple reason that it was an absolute certainty that the population of Banat would vote in favour of Hungary!
The Serb and Roumanian delegates then informed the Conference that they had recognised, "after a new examination" that Banat should be divided between them, according to a line which they indicated, and which was just the one which had been proposed two years before by Professor Seton-Watson.
This line was adopted: Clemenceau's advisers, statistics in hand, told him that it conformed perfectly to the ethnic facts. Actually, to mention only the Serbian half, it handed over to the Serbs 1,200,000 Germans and Hungarians, and only 400,000 Slavs.
For such work as this there is no possible excuse. This was not diplomacy, it was brigandage.
For centuries Hungary has been forming a unity which had become the most homogeneous in Europe. United by the same economic interests, submitted to the same civilisation, to the same laws, to the same rulers, all the regions removed from Hungary were a part of the same social, political and moral block. The Czech and Serb vultures were not philosophers. They did not even understand that a country is a land where generations of men, bound by a community of interests, of ideas, of traditions and of hopes, have lived, have worked and have died for centuries. Each generation, returning to the earth when its task is finished, increases the solidarity between this land and the men who are the issue of it. It is the soil which makes a common nation of the diverse races which it bears.
I have already warned France of her guilt in this matter. France is the only nation in Europe who could procure the revision of the Treaty of Trianon by pacific means. Prague, Bucharest and Belgrade can do nothing without us, and their resistance is bound to stop if France once says that the treaties must be revised.
And how can France say otherwise? How can she support a tyranny such as is now exercised by the Czechs, the Roumanians and the Serbs over Hungary, when the memory of Alsace-Lorraine is fresh.
Nor is this a mere sentimentalism, for it is not as though we Frenchmen are asked to do something which, if we do not do it, will never be done. On the contrary, I maintain that this thing will happen in a welter of blood and tears if we do not act before it is too late.
Materially we shall have raised against our country the coalition of all the oppressed: morally, we shall have lost the prestige which our sense of justice and our personal disinterestedness have gained for us since the War.
Up to now we have lent our support during the last fourteen years to men of prey who have abused the ignorance and honesty of the masters of the, peace-and especially that of Clemenceau. The unjustly treated nationalities hold us responsible for the persistence of these wrongs. Frenchmen must not be astonished to see the Hungarians, Croats, Macedonians and Bulgars turn towards our adversaries. It is we ourselves who have turned them away from us. We are playing the hypocrite in Central Europe. If we were in the situation that the Hungarians are now in we should do exactly what they are doing.
We educated our youth for forty years in the hope and determination that we should recapture our lost provinces. Like the Hungarians, we prepared ourselves for war for forty years, without menacing anyone, but determined to take advantage of the first occasion that presented itself. Like the Hungarians, we sought friendships and offered our own, all in pursuit of this ideal. Between the years 1871 and 1914, did we Frenchmen not declare before the statue of Strasburg (as the Hungarians to-day declare before the four draped statues in Budapest) "Forget? Never!"
Today, when the French of my generation read the speeches of Benes and Titulesco against the "nationalism" of Hungary, it is like listening to the Germans of pre-War days. Thirty years ago Berlin spoke of us as Bucharest and Prague speak of Hungary today.
Hungary, in case of war, would join the adversaries of those who despoiled her.
Hungary has four Alsace-Lorraines. Where is the Frenchman who would condemn her if, justice denied her, she tears up the treaty of Trianon by force as soon as she sees her way clear.
I have already shown that the official secret documents published since the War have proved that Hungary not only did nothing to provoke the world conflict, but that she did everything in her power to prevent it. Not one of the accusations made against her by the Serb, Czech or Roumanian propagandists has been substantiated by the facts.
France stands alone in her support of the men who fooled the peacemakers. England herself, who had signed with France the treaty of 1920, almost immediately afterwards recognised the trickery of it and showed her regret for having given her signature by refusing, during discussion of the Pact of Locarno, to accede to the demands of the Little Entente or to guarantee the status quo in Central Europe. Her present attitude, the approbation given by her to Mussolini's "Big Four" Pact, with its inevitable consequences of revision, can only surprise those who ignore or who have voluntarily forgotten the Locarno gesture.
Italy also signed the treaty of Trianon because her representatives had been deceived by the manoeuvres of Benes. But Italy has never ceased since almost the day after the peace to denounce the injustices and the perils to peace created by the dismemberment of Hungary.
The Hungarian demands for revision of the treaties is presented to French public opinion by the propagandists of the Little Entente as constituting a menace to peace; as being a concerted attack by Budapest, Berlin and Rome against the "righteous peace" of Eastern Europe.
The facts, however, are quite otherwise. Hungary does not demand the restitution of all that she lost in 1920, nor the re-establishment of the state of things that existed prior to 1914.
At no moment during the last fourteen years has Hungary asked for a total revision of the treaty, nor for a complete re-establishment of the past, nor have the Hungarians shown any desire to see their Czech or Roumanian neighbours dismembered as they themselves had been.
What then does Hungary want?
She demands simply the restitution of the lands and the populations specifically and incontestably Hungarian. Less than 60,000 square kilometres and six million inhabitants are involved, and these have been incorporated into the neighbouring states in violation of the principle of nationalities laid down by the peace treaties.
In the case of those territories where there is no violation of this principle, the Hungarians simply desire that the inhabitants thereof should be permitted to vote for their nationality by plebiscites organised and controlled by international commissions.
Hungary expressly renounces any rights in those territories (Hungarian though they have been for a thousand years) which have a majority of Roumanians, Serbians or Czechs. For the little Hungarian settlements in Transylvania, in Banat, in North Hungary, and in Eastern Slovakia, who are drowned in the great masses of Roumanians, Serbs and Slavs, the Hungarian revisionists seek to obtain no more than the cessation of the violence, the abuses, the persecutions and the efforts of denationalisation that are being made there.
The dangers of war which each day appear more and more menacing in Central Europe are due, not to the claims, the rancour, nor the intrigues of the vanquished, but to the iniquitous fashion in which the treaties of peace have been established and the odious manner in which they have been applied
If it pleases Prague, Bucharest, Belgrade to pursue their policy of imperialism and violence which has placed them on the edge of the abyss--good luck to them!
But no accord, no alliance, no consideration, can justify France in making herself a party to the aims of the Balkan megalomaniacs whose folly and crime must lead to war, sooner or later.
I repeat, I have warned France; warned her that she is tied to a chariot that is being driven fast towards the abyss of war.
I warn England, too, whose blood also runs in my veins, that if she persists in being tied to France, responsible in any degree for the destiny of France who is so tied, then she herself will learn the truth of my warning that war is coming again--for war will come to her also.
The Bulgarian Scene - V. The Valley of the Vardar << Contents >> Pan-Slavism - II. Czechoslovakia and Roumania