Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [174]
Lloyd George warned Wilson and Clemenceau that “we must impose our will now; we can no longer hurl vain orders.” But the fighting went on. The Rumanians refused to move back toward the east. Brătianu feared, he said, a simultaneous attack by Kun and the Russian Bolsheviks, perhaps even one from Bulgaria which, he claimed, was armed to the teeth. In July, the Hungarians provided him with an excuse to start advancing again when Kun, in a last desperate gamble, tried to throw the Rumanians back across the Tisza River, about a hundred kilometers east of Budapest. The Rumanians counterattacked in force. Several units of the Hungarian army that were in touch with the opposition around Admiral Horthy stopped fighting, and the Hungarian lines collapsed. Kun fled to Austria and then the Soviet Union. He was arrested there during Stalin’s purges, charged with conspiring with the Rumanian secret police, and executed in the autumn of 1939. 32
On August 3, 1919, Rumanian troops entered Budapest. The Yugoslavs and the Czechoslovaks took the opportunity to advance farther into Hungarian territory along their borders. In spite of repeated complaints from the Allies, all of Hungary’s enemies stayed firmly where they were through the autumn of 1919. A series of weak Hungarian governments proved unable to deal either with them or with the Horthy forces, who were going from strength to strength in the countryside. “If the three great powers had been able to keep armies,” the American military representative in Budapest wrote in his diary, “and could have sent them immediately to any place where trouble was brewing, it would have been entirely different, but the Supreme Council’s prestige went aglimmering when a steady stream of ultimata had no effect whatever upon that miserable little nation of Rumania.” The Peace Conference was by now winding down. Wilson was back in the United States, trying vainly to get the League approved by Congress, Lloyd George was spending most of his time in London, and Clemenceau was preparing to run for president of France.33
The Rumanians, who were now occupying most of Hungary, looted whatever Kun and his regime had left. Telephones, prized stallions, fire engines, shoes, carpets, automobiles, grain, cattle, and even railway cars and locomotives vanished eastward. Queen Marie cheerfully told an American officer, “You may call it stealing if you want to, or any other name. I feel that we are perfectly entitled to do what we want to.” When the Allied military mission in Budapest objected, the Rumanians protested that they were only taking supplies for their army. After all, Brătianu said, Rumania had saved civilization from Bolshevism.34
By November the powers, mainly Britain and France, had had enough. Rumania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were all ordered to withdraw their troops immediately from territory designated as Hungarian under the peace terms. Rumania complied with bad grace and much procrastination. When a new, more stable government took office in Hungary, the Allies finally decided that they could make peace. On December 1, Hungary was invited to send its representatives to Paris, and on January 5, 1920, a train left Budapest. As it passed through the country, crowds waited beside the tracks to wish its passengers well.35
Count Albert Apponyi, the delegation’s elderly leader, came from a family that traced its ancestry back to a migration from Central Asia in the twelfth century. His own political views were stuck somewhere in the eighteenth. He was kindly and courteous, enormously cultivated, deeply religious and a Hungarian patriot. He went to Paris with few hopes: “I could not refuse this saddest of duties, though I had no illusions as to there being any possibility of my securing some mitigation of our lot.” Hungary had virtually nothing with