Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [88]
Rumania’s timing was bad; by the time its troops were ready to move, the Central Powers had rallied. By the end of 1916 over half the country was occupied by Germans and Austrians; during that winter, 300,000 Rumanians out of a total of six million died from disease and starvation. Its allies, unfairly perhaps, blamed Rumania itself for the disaster. Under a new Treaty of Bucharest with the Central Powers in May 1918, Rumania dropped out of the war, an understandable move but one that had implications for its territorial claims. Since in the earlier Treaty of Bucharest in 1916, Rumania had promised not to make a separate peace, the Allies now considered themselves no longer bound by their promises. Clemenceau never forgave Brătianu for his treachery. Brătianu dealt with the awkwardness by resigning and letting his successors (whom he had chosen) take responsibility. He managed to delay ratification of the new treaty in parliament and on November 10, 1918, declared war again on Germany. This, he announced cheerfully, meant that the deal with the Allies still stood. Rumania had made peace only in order to conserve its strength for war: “neither legally, practically, nor morally, were the Rumanians ever really at peace with the enemy.” Just in case, though, he quietly arranged with the Italians, themselves anxious to limit Serbia’s gains, that their two countries would stand together on the need to adhere to wartime treaties.15
The Supreme Council found Rumania’s demands excessive and the wrangling with Yugoslavia over the Banat tedious. (Brătianu complained that some of them had slept during his presentation.) It was with obvious relief that the peacemakers adopted Lloyd George’s recommendation to refer Rumania’s claims, including those to the Banat, to a subcommittee of experts for a just settlement. When it had studied the matter, he added optimistically, and teased out the truth, only a few issues would have to come back before the council. Wilson agreed, with the reservation that the experts should not look at the political side of the problem. (What was “political” was never defined.) Clemenceau, perhaps as a result of Wilson’s intervention, remained virtually speechless and Orlando made an ineffectual plea to settle the borders then and there. And so the future of the Banat, along with other prize pieces of territory in south-central Europe, was shipped off to a special territorial commission, the first of many, which was to have no more success in bringing the different sides together. In time, the Commission on Rumanian and Yugoslav Affairs dealt with all of Yugoslavia’s boundaries, except the ones with Italy which, on Italian insistence, were reserved for the Supreme Council.16
Although the experts on the territorial commissions (eventually there were six in all) could not know it, almost all their recommendations were to go into the various peace treaties unchanged because their leaders simply did not have the time to consider them in detail. The Rumanian commission eventually broadened its scope until its experts determined the future shapes of Yugoslavia, Rumania, Greece and Bulgaria and the future balance of power in the Balkans, between Hungary and its neighbors and between Soviet Russia and south-central Europe. “How fallible one feels here!” Nicolson, one of the British experts, wrote. “A map—a pencil— tracing paper. Yet my courage fails at the thought of the people whom our errant lines enclose or exclude, the happiness of several thousands of people.” 17
The Supreme Council did not explain what made a just settlement. Did it mean providing defensible borders? Railway networks? Trade routes? In the end the experts agreed only that they would try to draw boundaries along lines of