They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [54]
Now he started to cough rather more than before.
When Regina got better their relationship was unchanged. Once again she was ready to do anything he asked but she was, if anything, quieter than before. She was also very pale, and her large brown eyes seemed framed in some bluish dew.
Chapter Two
THE GENERAL PEACE that Europe had known since 1878 finally came to an end in the summer of 1911. The year began without any apparent change but then gradually a few hardly noticeable signs appeared whose significance was only understood much later and then only by those whose business it was to search out the truth of what had occurred. Though these little signposts were so scattered and apparently trivial, for the few who understood such things they showed only too clearly that the general air of calm throughout Europe was at best only an illusion. They were like the faint grey mist on the horizon at sunset or the soft mysterious murmur that precedes an earthquake.
Nothing that happened early that year seemed to suggest that the general confidence in a perpetual peace was not entirely justified. When Prince Nikita celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his reign by declaring Montenegro to be a kingdom, and the monarchs of Italy, Bulgaria and Serbia all attended the festivities, it seemed to be no more than a family get-together … and there was nothing to foretell the coming alliance. A few months later there was another outbreak of unrest in Albania – but no one thought there might be any connection with what had transpired in Montenegro, for was there not always unrest in Albania? When, from the other end of Europe, the news came that the Dutch, that most peaceable of nations, were fortifying Vlissingen, there was a universal outcry, with the English press seeing the sinister hand of the Emperor Wilhelm, who no doubt envisaged a new base for his growing fleet that was only an hour or so from the coast of Great Britain and the English Channel. And when, some months later, the Dutch government countermanded their orders, it was everywhere said that this was forced on them by strong protests from England and France. Accordingly when this little tempest blew itself out, just as had the much bigger one provoked by the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina a year or so before, it seemed that all such affairs were but storms in teacups which were bound, sooner or later, to be settled amicably by all concerned. A few discussions over a green baize table, an exchange of diplomatic letters, and all was as it always had been. Even most of the diplomatists thought of international affairs in this way and so it was natural for the general public to follow their example. When it was announced in Vienna that the army was to be increased and the navy given a grand new ship-building programme, most people read the news with indifference, believing it all to be little more than just one more manifestation of folie de grandeur on the part of the Emperor Franz-Josef.
In the Budapest Parliament all went smoothly enough, and even the prolongation until 1917 of the Austro-Hungarian banking law passed off with little more than the expected public bickering between Justh and the People’s Party on one side and the Economic Minister Lukacs and Ferenc Kossuth on the other. However, as this all seemed merely part of the aftermath of the Coalition period, nobody showed any interest. That these old rifts in the former Coalition were now seeing the light of day for the first time, and were shown to be little more than the private disputes of professional politicians, once again only proved to most people that what the former leaders of the Coalition said and what they did were quite different matters.
It was typical of that long period of international calm that one of the French princes, Gaston d’Orléans, Comte d’Eu, should choose that moment to launch an