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was a rich prize, partly because it lay at one end of the great Silesian coalfield, but also because it was a major railway junction, where the main north–south and east–west lines in the center of Europe met. In Paris, Dmowski claimed it for Poland on ethnic grounds. (Out of a total population of half a million, the Poles probably outnumbered the Czechs two to one.) The Polish majority, he said, were particularly well educated and consequently profoundly nationalistic. Beneš challenged his figures: a lot of the Poles were temporary inhabitants, drawn by a higher standard of living or so influenced by Czech language and culture as to be no longer Polish at all. He pointed to the costumes the people of Teschen wore, and their architecture. And Teschen’s coal was essential for Czech industry, as was a railway line which, since it linked the two halves of Czechoslovakia, could not safely be left under Polish control. Delegates from Teschen itself who asked for an independent state never had a chance.26

Like many of the other issues that overloaded the agendas in Paris, this one could have been settled with relative ease. Masaryk and Paderewski had met the previous summer in Washington and agreed that it should be discussed in a friendly way once the war was over. In Teschen itself local Poles and Czechs worked out a division of responsibilities when the Austrian administration collapsed. The new Polish government, unwisely in retrospect, announced that elections to the new parliament in Warsaw would include the Polish part of Teschen. The Czech government in Prague overreacted and in late January 1919 ordered all Polish troops to leave Teschen at once. The Czechs, also unwisely, persuaded several Allied officers to give the impression that this order came from the Allies. Shots were fired and what had been a tense situation became a crisis as both governments rushed reinforcements in. An American professor who visited Masaryk in Prague found him tired and nervous. “Somehow,” reported the American, “I gathered the impression that in the affair he had been led rather than he had taken the lead himself, and he was evidently unhappy about the whole matter.”27

In Paris, where the peacemakers were busy with the League of Nations and the Russian question, this outbreak of hostilities between two friendly powers was an unwelcome interruption. “How many members ever heard of Teschen?” Lloyd George was famously to ask the House of Commons later that year. “I do not mind saying that I had never heard of it.” The Supreme Council summoned the Poles and Czechs. Each side blamed the other, and Beneš used the occasion to produce all the reasons—“statistical, ethnological, historical and economic”—as to why Teschen belonged to Czechoslovakia. Lloyd George called him sharply to order. The peacemakers set up a special inter-Allied commission, which both sides accepted with reluctance.28

The commission managed to get a cease-fire of sorts, but finding a solution was more difficult. Lloyd George confessed that he rather sympathized with the Poles. So, said Wilson, did he. He had been touched when a group of Polish peasants appeared in his office to implore him not to make them part of Czechoslovakia. They had walked, they told him, sixty miles to the nearest railway station to get to Paris. The French, who generally backed Poland, on this occasion supported the Czechs, reasoning that Poland could survive easily without Teschen but Czechoslovakia, a crucial part of the cordon sanitaire against Bolshevism, could not. Beneš did his best to raise the Bolshevik specter; he warned that the cease-fire was only encouraging dark anti-Czechoslovak forces in Berlin, Vienna and Budapest. The Czech authorities had already unmasked their spies and agitators and discovered their leaflets and maps.29

The inter-Allied commission gave little useful advice to the peacemakers. An ethnic division of Teschen, it pointed out, would leave the border going right through the middle of the coalfields. It suggested alternatives that were bound to upset the Poles or the