Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [152]
At Czechoslovakia’s tail in the east, Beneš asked for the largely Ukrainian-speaking territory on the south side of the Carpathians on the grounds that the locals, largely Ruthenians, were very like the Slovaks. It would be unkind, he felt, to leave them under Hungarian rule when Czechoslovakia was prepared to take them under its wing. (Conveniently, Ruthenian immigrants in the United States had voted for joining Czechoslovakia.) Adding in that piece of territory would also give Czechoslovakia a border with Rumania, a friendly state.16
He had a couple of further requests, suggestions really. There were some Slavs living in the southern part of Germany, just east of Dresden, who had begged Czechoslovakia to protect them. This was essentially a moral question and he left it to the Peace Conference. Then there was Czechoslovakia’s need for friends, surrounded as it was on three sides by Germans and Hungarians. Perhaps there could be a corridor of land running southward between Austria and Hungary to link his country with Yugoslavia. “Very audacious and indefensible,” was Lloyd George’s view. The corridor, which never materialized, reflected Masaryk’s old dreams of a Slav federation. The Poles, Yugoslavs and Czechoslovaks, Beneš assured the French, were all aware of how much they had in common. Although a dispute over the territory of Teschen was already removing Poland from that happy equation, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were to remain on friendly terms.17
The Czechs had many arguments to back their claims: their glorious past, their deep love of freedom, their sober, industrious virtues. They stood against Bolshevism when the lesser peoples around them were succumbing. They were at the same time the most advanced part of the Slavs and a bastion of Western civilization. His people, claimed Beneš, had always felt a special mission to defend democracy against the German menace. “Hence the fanatical devotion of the Czechs which had been noticed by all in this war.” The Czech demands were modest and reasonable. “The Nation,” said Beneš, “after 300 years of servitude and vicissitudes which had almost led to its extermination, felt that it must be prudent, reasonable and just to its neighbours; and that it must avoid provoking jealousy and renewed struggles which might again plunge it into similar danger.” His government, he insisted, “wished to do all in their power to assist a just and durable peace.” Lloyd George, almost alone, was unimpressed. “He larded his speech throughout with phrases that reeked with professions of sympathy for the exalted ideals proclaimed by the Allies in their crusade for international right.” When Kramář, as second Czech delegate, asked to add his views, Clemenceau, despite his sympathy for Czechoslovakia, cut him short: “Oh, we’ll appoint a special commission and you can talk to them for a couple of hours. Now we had better have a cup of tea.” 18
The Czechs passed lightly over any difficulties. Slovakia, they admitted, would contain some 650,000 Hungarians, but 350,000 Slovaks would still be left outside. The Hungarians could not complain; they had tried, with little success, to turn Slovaks into Hungarians and forced thousands to emigrate. Yes, Beneš said, there were German speakers living along the borders with Austria and Germany, in the west of old Bohemia (what the Germans themselves called the Sudetenland, “Southland”). But the prewar Austrian figures of several million were quite untrustworthy; the Czech ones, by contrast very carefully done, showed only