Part 6 (2/2)

Within a month Messrs. Wilson, Lloyd-George, Clemenceau and Orlando had made themselves virtually the dictators of the Peace Conference, deciding behind closed doors matters of vital moment to the national welfare of the small states without so much as taking them into consultation. Prime Minister Bratianu, who went to Paris as the head of the Rumanian peace delegation, told me, his voice hoa.r.s.e with indignation, that the ”Big Four,” in settling Rumania's future boundaries, had not only not consulted him but that he had not even been informed of the terms decided upon. ”They hand us a fountain pen and say 'Sign here,'” the Premier exclaimed, ”and then they are surprised if we refuse to affix our signatures to a doc.u.ment which vitally concerns our national future but about which we have never been consulted.”

We Americans, of all peoples, should realize that a small nation is as jealous of its independence as a large one. As a matter of fact, Rumania and her sister-states of Southeastern Europe, who still bear the scars of Turkish oppression, are super-sensitive in this respect, the fact that they have so often been the victims of intriguing neighbors making them more than ordinarily suspicious and resentful toward any action which tends to limit their mastery of their own households. Hence they regard that clause of the Treaty of St. Germain providing for the protection of ethnical minorities with an indignation which cannot easily be appreciated by the Western nations. The boundaries of the new and aggrandized states of Southeastern Europe will necessarily include alien minorities--this cannot be avoided--and the Peace Conference held that the welfare of such minorities must be the special concern of the League of Nations. Take the case of Rumania, for example. In order to unite her people she must annex some compact ma.s.ses of aliens which, in certain cases at least, have been deliberately planted within ethnological frontiers for a specific purpose. The settlements of Magyars in Transylvania, who, under Hungarian rule, were permitted to exploit their Rumanian neighbors without let or hindrance, will not willingly surrender the privileges they have so long enjoyed and submit to a regime of strict justice and equality. On the other hand, Rumania can scarcely be expected to agree to an arrangement which would not only impair her sovereignty but would almost certainly encourage intrigue and unrest among these alien minorities. How would the United States regard a proposal to submit its administration of the Philippines to international control? How would England like the League of Nations to take a hand in the government of Ireland? That, briefly stated, is the reason why both Rumania and Jugoslavia objected so strongly to the inclusion of the so-called racial minorities clause in the Treaty of St.

Germain. Looking at the other side of the question, it Is easy to understand the solicitude which the treaty-makers at Paris displayed for the thousands of Magyars, Serbs and Bulgars who, without so much as a by-your-leave, they have placed under Rumanian rule. No less authority than Viscount Bryce has made the a.s.sertion that in Transylvania alone (which, by the way, has an area considerably greater than all our New England states put together), which has been taken over by Rumania, fully a third of the population has no affinity with the Rumanians.

Similarly, there are whole towns in the Dobrudja which are composed of Bulgarians, there are large groups of Russian Slavs in Bessarabia, and considerable colonies of Jugoslavs in the eastern half of the Banat which, very much against their wishes, have been forced to submit to Rumanian rule. Whether, now that the tables are turned, the Rumanians will put aside their ancient animosities and prejudices and give these new and unwilling citizens every privilege which they themselves enjoy, is a question which only the future can solve.

Another question, which has agitated Rumania even more violently than that of the racial minorities clause, was the demand made by the Great Powers that the Rumanian army be withdrawn from Hungary and that the livestock and agricultural implements of which that unhappy country was stripped by the Rumanian forces be immediately returned. Here is the Rumanian version: Hungary went Bolshevist and a.s.sumed a hostile att.i.tude toward Rumania, Czechoslovakia and Jugoslavia, the three countries which will benefit by her dismemberment according to the principle of nationality. Hungary attacked these countries by arms and by anarchistic propaganda. The Rumanians, the Czechoslovaks and the Jugoslavs, wis.h.i.+ng to defend themselves, asked permission of the Supreme Council to deal drastically with the Hungarian menace. The reply, which was late in coming, was couched in vague and unsatisfactory language.

Emboldened by the vacillatory att.i.tude of the Powers, the Hungarians began a military offensive, invading Czechoslovakia and crossing the lines of the Armistice in Rumania and Jugoslavia. In order to prevent a spread of this Bolshevist movement the three countries prepared to occupy Hungary with troops, whereupon a command came from the Supreme Council in Paris that such aggression would not be tolerated. This encouraged Bela Kun, the Hungarian Trotzky, and made him so popular that he succeeded in raising a Red army with which he crossed the River Theiss and invaded Rumania. Whereupon the Rumanian army, being unable to obtain support from the Supreme Council, pushed back the Hungarians, occupied Budapest, overthrew Bela Kun's administration and restored order in Hungary. But the Supreme Council, feeling that its authority had been ignored by the little country, sent several messages to the Rumanian Government peremptorily ordering it to withdraw its troops immediately from Hungary. Here endeth the Rumanian version.

Now the real reason which actuated the Supreme Council was not that it felt that its authority had been slighted, but because it was informed by its representatives in Hungary that the Rumanians had not stopped with ousting Bela Kun and suppressing Bolshevism, but were engaged in systematically looting the country, driving off thousands of head of livestock, and carrying away all the machinery, rolling stock, telephone and telegraph wires and instruments and metalwork they could lay their hands on, thereby completely crippling the industries of Hungary and depriving great numbers of people of employment. The Rumanians retorted that the Austro-German armies had systematically looted Rumania during their three years of occupation and that they were only taking back what belonged to them. The Hungarians, while admitting that Rumania had been pretty thoroughly stripped of animals and machinery by von Mackensen's armies, a.s.serted that this loot had not remained in Hungary but had been taken to Germany, which was probably true. The Supreme Council took the position that the animals and material which the Rumanians were rus.h.i.+ng out of Hungary in train-loads was not the sole property of Rumania, but that it was the property of all the Allies, and that the Supreme Council would apportion it among them in its own good time. The Council pointed out, furthermore, that if the Rumanians succeeded in wrecking Hungary industrially, as they were evidently trying to do, it would be manifestly impossible for the Hungarians to pay any war indemnity whatsoever. And finally, that a bankrupt and starving Hungary meant a Bolshevist Hungary and that there was already enough trouble of that sort in Eastern Europe without adding to it. The Rumanians proving deaf to these arguments, the Supreme Council sent three messages, one after the other, to the Bucharest government, ordering the immediate withdrawal from Hungarian soil of the Rumanian troops. Yet the Rumanian troops remained in Budapest and the looting of Hungary continued, the Rumanian government declaring that the messages had never been received. Meanwhile every one in the kingdom, from Premier to peasant, was laughing in his sleeve at the helplessness of the Supreme Council. But they laughed too soon. For the Supreme Council wired to the Food Administrator, Herbert Hoover, who was in Vienna, informing him of the facts of the situation, whereupon Mr. Hoover, who has a blunt and uncomfortably direct way of achieving his ends, sent a curt message to the Rumanian government informing it that, if the orders of the Supreme Council were not immediately obeyed, he would shut off its supplies of food. _That_ message produced action. The troops were withdrawn. I can recall no more striking example of the amazing changes brought about in Europe by the Great War than the picture of this boyish-faced Californian mining engineer coolly giving orders to a European government, and having those orders promptly obeyed, after the commands of the Great Powers had been met with refusal and derision. To take a slight liberty with the lines of Mr. Kipling--

_”The Kings must come down and the Emperors frown When Herbert Hoover says 'Stop!'”_

Up to that time the United States had been immensely popular in Rumania.

But Mr. Hoover's action made us about as popular with the Rumanians as the smallpox. He and we were charged with being actuated by the most despicable and sordid motives. The King himself told me that he was convinced that Mr. Hoover was in league with certain great commercial interests which wished to take their revenge for their failure to obtain commercial concessions of great value in Rumania. A cabinet minister, in discussing the incident with me, became so inarticulate with rage that he could scarcely talk at all.

But the United States is not the only country which has lost the confidence of the Rumanians. France is even more deeply distrusted and disliked than we are. And this in spite of the fact that the upper cla.s.ses of Rumania have held up the French as their ideal for the past fifty years. Indeed, wealthy Rumanians live in a fas.h.i.+on more French than if they dwelt in Paris itself. This sudden unpopularity of the French is due to several causes. After having expected much of them, the people were amazed and bitterly disappointed at their apparent indifference toward the future of Rumania. Then there were the unfortunate incidents at Odessa, the withdrawal of the French forces from that city before the advance of the Bolsheviks, and the regrettable happening in the French Black Sea fleet These things, of course, contributed to loss of French prestige. Another contributory factor has been the lack of enterprise of French capitalists, causing those who control the financial and economic development of Rumania to seek encouragement and a.s.sistance elsewhere. But the underlying reason for the deep-seated distrust of France is to be found, I think, in France's attempt to maintain the balance of power in Southeastern Europe by building up a strong Jugoslavia. Now the Rumanians, it must be remembered, hate the Jugoslavs even more bitterly than they hate the Hungarians--and they are far more afraid of them. This hatred is not merely the result of the age-long antagonism between the Latin and the Slav; it is also political. The Rumanians have watched with growing jealousy and apprehension the expansion of Serbia into a state with a population and area nearly equal to their own. After having long dreamed of the day when they would themselves be arbiters of the destinies of the nations of Southeastern Europe, they see their political supremacy challenged by the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, behind which they discern the power and influence of France. When the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire began, Rumania demanded and expected the whole of the great rich province of the Banat, with the Maros River for her northern and the Danube for her southern frontier.

”But that would place our capital within range of the Rumanian artillery,” the Serbian prime minister is said to have exclaimed.

”Then move your capital,” the Rumanian premier responded drily.

As a result of this controversy over the Banat the relations of the two nations have been strained almost to the breaking-point. When I was in the Banat in the autumn of 1919 the Rumanian and Serbian frontier guards were glowering at each other like fighting terriers held in leash, and the slightest untoward incident would have precipitated a conflict! Although, by the terms of the Treaty of St. Germain, Jugoslavia was awarded the western half of the Banat, Rumania is prepared to take advantage of the first opportunity which presents itself to take it away from her rival. When I was in Bucharest a cabinet minister concluded a lengthy exposition of Rumania's position by declaring:

”Within the next two or three years, in all probability, there will be a war between Jugoslavia and Italy over the Dalmatian question. The day that Jugoslavia goes to war with Italy we will attack Jugoslavia and seize the Banat. The Danube is Rumania's natural and logical frontier.”

This would seem to bear out the a.s.sertion that there exists a secret alliance between Italy and Rumania, which, if true, would place Jugoslavia in the unhappy position of a nut between the jaws of a cracker. I have also been told on excellent authority that there is likewise an ”understanding” between Italy and Bulgaria that, should the former become engaged in a war with the Jugoslavs, the latter will attack the Serbs from the east and regain her lost provinces in Macedonia. A pleasant prospect for Southeastern Europe, truly.

While we were in Bucharest we received an invitation--”command” is the correct word according to court usage--to visit the King and Queen of Rumania at their Chateau of Pelesch, near Sinaia, in the Carpathians. It is about a hundred miles by road from the capital to Sinaia and the first half of the journey, which we made by motor, was over a road as execrable as any we found in the Balkans. Upon reaching the foothills of the Carpathians, however, the highway, which had been steadily growing worse, suddenly took a turn for the better--due, no doubt, to the invigorating qualities of the mountain atmosphere--and climbed vigorously upward through wild gorges and splendid pine forests which reminded me of the Adirondacks of Northern New York. Notwithstanding the atrocious condition of the highway, which constantly threatened to dislocate our joints as well as those of the car, and the choking, blinding clouds of yellow dust, every change of figure on the speedometer brought new and interesting scenes. For mile after mile the road, straight as though marked out by a ruler, ran between fields of wheat and corn as vast as those of our own West. In spite of the fact that the Austro-Germans carried off all the animals and farming implements they could lay their hands on, the agricultural prosperity of Rumania is astounding. In 1916, for example, while involved in a terribly destructive war, Rumania produced more wheat than Minnesota and about twenty-five times as much corn as our three Pacific Coast states combined. At frequent intervals we pa.s.sed huge scarlet thres.h.i.+ng machines, most of them labeled ”Made in U.S.A.,” which were centers of activity for hundreds of white-smocked peasants who were hauling in the grain with ox-teams, feeding it into the voracious maws of the machines, and piling the residue of straw into the largest stacks I have ever seen. As we drew near the mountains the grain fields gave way to grazing lands where great herds of cattle of various breeds--brindled milch animals, ma.s.sive cream-colored oxen, blue-gray buffalo with elephant like hides and broad, curving horns, and gaunt steers that looked for all the world like Texas longhorns--browsed amid the lush green gra.s.s.

Though the villages of the Wallachian plain are few and far between, and though it is no uncommon thing for a peasant to walk a dozen miles from his home to the fields in which he works, the whole region seemed a-hum with industry. The Rumanian peasant, like his fellows below the Danube, is, as a rule, a good-natured, easy-going though easily excited, reasonably honest and extremely industrious fellow who labors from dawn to darkness in six days of the week and spends the seventh in harmless village carouses, chiefly characterized by dancing, music and the cheap native wine. Rumania is one of the few countries in Europe where the peasants still dress like the pictures on the postcards. The men wear curly-brimmed shovel hats of black felt, like those affected by English curates, and loose s.h.i.+rts of white linen, whose tails, instead of being tucked into the trousers, flap freely about their legs, giving them the appearance of having responded to an alarm of fire without waiting to finish dressing. On Sundays and holidays men and women alike appear in garments covered with the gorgeous needlework for which Rumania is famous, some of the women's dresses being so heavily embroidered in gold and silver that from a little distance the wearers look as though they were enveloped in chain mail. A considerable and undesirable element of Rumania's population consists of gipsies, whence their name of Romany, or Rumani. The Rumanian gipsies, who are nomads and vagrants like their kinsmen in the United States, are generally lazy, quarrelsome, dishonest and untrustworthy, supporting themselves by horse-trading and cattle-stealing or by their flocks and herds. We stopped near one of their picturesque encampments in order to repair a tire and I took a picture of a young woman with a child in her arms, but when I declined to pay her the five lei she demanded for the privilege, she flew at me like an angry cat, screaming curses and maledictions. But her picture was not worth five lei, as you can see for yourself.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A PEASANT OF OLD SERBIA

The Serbian peasant is simple, kindly, hospitable, honest, and generous, and, though he could not be described ... as a hard worker, his wife invariably is]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GYPSY WHO DEMANDED FIVE LEI FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF TAKING HER PICTURE]

The Castle of Pelesch is just such a royal residence as Anthony Hope has depicted in _The Prisoner of Zenda_. It gives the impression, at first sight, of a confusion of turrets, gables, balconies, terraces, parapets and fountains, but one quickly forgets its architectural shortcomings in the beauty of its surroundings. It stands amid velvet lawns and wonderful rose gardens in a sort of forest glade, from which the pine-clothed slopes of the Carpathians rise steeply on every side, the beam-and-plaster walls, the red-tiled roofs, and the blazing gardens of the chateau forming a striking contrast to the austerity of the mountains and the solemnity of the encircling forest.

We had rather expected to be presented to Queen Marie with some semblance of formality in one of the reception rooms of the chateau, but she sent word by her lady-in-waiting that she would receive us in the gardens. A few minutes later she came swinging toward us across a great stretch of rolling lawn, a splendid figure of a woman, dressed in a magnificent native costume of white and silver, a white scarf partially concealing her ma.s.ses of tawny hair, a long-bladed poniard in a silver sheath hanging from her girdle. At her heels were a dozen Russian wolf hounds, the gift, so she told me, of the Grand Duke Nicholas, the former commander-in-chief of the Russian armies. I have seen many queens, but I have never seen one who so completely meets the popular conception of what a queen should look like as Marie of Rumania. Though in the middle forties, her complexion is so faultless, her physique so superb, her presence so commanding that, were she utterly unknown, she would still be a center of attraction in any a.s.semblage. Had she not been born to a crown she would almost certainly have made a great name for herself, probably as an actress. She paints exceptionally well and has written several successful books and stories, thereby following the example of her famous predecessor on the Rumanian throne, Queen Elizabeth, better known as Carmen Sylva. She speaks English like an Englishwoman, as well she may, for she is a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She is also a descendant of the Romanoffs, for one of her grandfathers was Alexander III of Russia. In her manner she is more simple and democratic than many American women that I know, her poise and simplicity being in striking contrast to the manners of two of my countrywomen who had spent the night preceding our arrival at the castle and who were manifestly much impressed by this contact with the Lord's Anointed. When luncheon was announced her second daughter, Princess Marie, had not put in an appearance. But, instead of despatching the major domo to inform her Royal Highness that the meal was served, the Queen stepped to the foot of the great staircase and called, ”Hurry up, Mignon. You're keeping us all waiting,” whereupon a voice replied from the upper regions, ”All right, mamma. I'll be down in a minute.” Not much like the picture of palace life that the novelists and the motion-picture playwrights give us, is it? I might add that the Queen commonly refers to the plump young princess as ”Fatty,” a nickname which she hardly deserves, however. In her conversations with me the Queen was at times almost disconcertingly frank. ”Royalty is going out of fas.h.i.+on,” she remarked on one occasion, ”but I like my job and I'm going to do everything I can to keep it.” To Mrs. Powell she said, ”I have beauty, intelligence and executive ability. I would be successful in life if I were not a queen.”

Unlike many persons who occupy exalted positions, she has a real sense of humor.

”Yesterday,” she remarked, ”was Nicholas's birthday,” referring to her second son, Prince Nicholas, who, since his elder brother, Prince Carol, renounced his rights to the throne in order to marry the girl he loved, has become the heir apparent. ”At breakfast his father remarked, 'I'm sorry, Nicholas, but I haven't any birthday present for you. The shops in Bucharest were pretty well cleaned out by the Germans, you know, and I didn't remember your birthday in time to send to Paris for a present.'

'Do you really wish to give Nicholas a present, Nando?' (the diminutive of Ferdinand) I asked him. 'Of course I do,' the King answered, 'but what is there to give him?' 'That's the easiest thing in the world,' I replied. 'There is nothing that would give Nicholas so much pleasure as an engraving of his dear father--on a thousand-franc note.'”

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