Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [173]
The Hungarians temporarily rallied. Even conservative army officers found Béla Kun preferable to the Rumanians. The regime, for its part, dropped the language of the proletarian revolution and appealed simply to patriotism. Volunteers rushed to join the army. The Italians, motivated largely by their hostility to Hungary’s other hostile neighbor, Yugoslavia, sold Kun guns and ammunition. According to a British observer, they also passed on information about Allied plans. By the middle of May Hungarian forces had pushed the Czechs back and driven a wedge between them and the Rumanians.27
In Paris, the peacemakers failed to take this in at first. Wilson was inclined to think the Hungarians the innocent party but asked an awkward, and all too familiar, question: “Do we have a way of stopping the movement of the Rumanians?” Lloyd George and Clemenceau could only suggest talking firmly to Brătianu. They were, it must be admitted, distracted by the breach with the Italians over Fiume. When the Council of Four saw its experts’ recommendations on Hungary’s borders with Rumania and Czechoslovakia in the second week of May, it approved them with scarcely any discussion. 28
The fighting went briskly on, forcing the peacemakers to take notice. In June a British journalist recently arrived from Hungary was invited to lunch with Lloyd George and his military adviser, Henry Wilson, to explain the situation. He found the British prime minister in a cheerful mood; together, they looked at a map of Central Europe. Lloyd George now blamed the Czechoslovaks and the Rumanians for the conflict. “I think,” he added, “the Hungarians are the best of the lot out there. They are the most powerful race and have always kept the others in order.” They talked about Allied intervention against Béla Kun. Henry Wilson asked gloomily, “Where are the troops to come from?” Lloyd George maintained that Bolshevism would die out of its own accord. He had enjoyed this chat; it would be helpful when he talked to his colleagues later that day. “It was quite obvious,” the journalist concluded, “that the Big Four had hardly given the countries east of Germany a thought, being far too occupied with the principal offender to bother about the lesser minions.”29
The Council of Four sent off its warnings and orders, just as it had done with the Poles, and with as little success. The Rumanians were told that they must not occupy Budapest. Brătianu took a high moral line: “We wanted in a spirit of solidarity with the Entente to march on Pest in order to help in the re-establishment of order.” This was a familiar claim; so was his repeated charge that the Allies were treating Rumania with ingratitude after its great services during the war. The Hungarians were ordered to stop fighting. Kun replied that Hungary was willing to stop if Rumania and Czechoslovakia did.30
The Allies found it difficult to agree on what to do next. The French military were for sending in an army made up of Rumanian, Yugoslav and French troops to occupy what was left of Hungary; the Americans pointed out that, once in, the Rumanians might never leave. Lloyd George suggested that they might threaten to cut off supplies to Rumania. On June 12, the Council of Four settled for telegrams to Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Rumania, informing them of what their new borders were to be and ordering them to withdraw their troops into their own territory. There was to be no more land-grabbing; the Allies would not be induced to change their decisions