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to throw off pursuers, until they reached the secluded gate of a monastery. Inside, Bonsal found a wan Hlinka, lying in a monk’s cell reading his prayer book. The priest talked of his disillusionment with Czechoslovakia. The Hungarians had not been so bad after all. “We have lived alongside the Magyars for a thousand years,” he said. “All the Slovak rivers flow towards the Hungarian plain, and all our roads lead to Budapest, their great city, while from Prague we are separated by the barrier of the Carpathians.” Slovaks were true Catholics; Czechs, whatever they said, were infidels. Bonsal could not offer much hope that the peacemakers would undo what they had just done. “God has punished me,” said Hlinka sadly, “but I shall continue to plead before God and man for my people who are innocent and without stain.”34

In the 1920s, Father Hlinka built up a party, the Slovak Populists, which became the most important political force in Slovakia. In May 1938 a group of American Slovaks triumphantly bore back to Europe the original of the Pittsburgh agreement of 1918 and, at a huge meeting in Bratislava, Hlinka demanded that the government fulfill the promises Masaryk had made. Masaryk had died the year before and Hlinka was dead by the autumn, when the Munich agreement opened the door so long closed. Czechoslovakia, abandoned by its allies, harassed on all sides by enemies, capitulated to the demands of Hlinka’s successor, Father Josef Tiso, and gave Slovakia full autonomy within what was left of the Czechoslovak state. Hitler, scenting blood, urged Tiso into claiming full independence. In March 1939, as Nazi armies marched into the Czech lands, a new state of Slovakia was born. Not all Slovaks welcomed the way this happened or the Nazi godfather who blessed it.35

Tiso barely outlived his creation. In 1946 he was executed for treason in a reconstituted Czechoslovakia, which, this time, had Stalin as a patron. The new country was smaller than, and different from, the one the peacemakers had approved in 1919; the Ruthenian parts had gone, swallowed up into the Soviet Union, and the Germans had fled, with considerable encouragement from the Czechs. As president, an old and sick Beneš struggled, and failed, to keep his country out of the Soviet web that was being constructed across the center of Europe. He died in September 1948, after the coup that carried the communists to power, but too early to witness the full misery to come. Masaryk’s son Jan, who was foreign minister, died in that coup, probably pushed out a window by communist agents. On January 1, 1993, the rest of the construction of 1919 came to pieces as Slovakia and the Czech Republic announced their divorce.

19

Austria

ON JUNE 2, 1919, a brief ceremony took place in the great hall of the old royal château at St.-Germain-en-Laye on the outskirts of Paris. Delegates from Austria, representing a morsel of what had once been a great empire, received their peace terms at a table covered with a red carpet, as the rows of allied delegates stared at them. The Czech prime minister, who knew several of the Austrians from the time they had all been colleagues, ostentatiously turned his back. The walls were decorated with pictures of animals, now extinct, from the Stone Age. “Several among us,” remarked Mordacq, Clemenceau’s aide, “could not help but notice that.” 1

Austria-Hungary, the vast collection of territories painstakingly assembled since the thirteenth century by the Habsburgs, was already disintegrating before 1914. At its heart the link between the Austrian territories (which included Slovenia, Bohemia and Moravia as well as the German lands) and the kingdom of Hungary (which ruled over Slovakia and Croatia) had become as tenuous as the hyphen which joined their two names. The Habsburgs had always found it wise to compromise with Hungary. In 1867, weakened by defeat at the hands of Prussia, they made the greatest compromise of all: the empire was now the Dual Monarchy, a partnership between two states, each with its own parliament. They still had the same