The Inside Story of the Peace ConferenceDillon, Emile Joseph
History
The Inside Story of the Peace Conference
Dillon, Emile Joseph
Paris Peace Conference (1919-1920)
The Rumanians presented a stiff ultimatum to the new Hungarian Cabinet.
They were determined to safeguard their country and its neighbors from a
repetition of the danger and of the sacrifices it entailed; in other
words, to dictate the terms of a new armistice. The Powers demurred and
ordered them to content themselves with the old one concluded by the
Serbian Voyevod Mishitch and General Henrys in November of the preceding
year and violated subsequently by the Magyars. But the objections to
this course were many and unanswerable. In fact they were largely
identical with the objections which the Supreme Council itself had
offered to the Polish-Ukrainian armistice. And besides these there were
others. For example, the Rumanians had had no hand or part in drafting
the old armistice. Moreover it was clearly inapplicable to the fresh
campaign which was waged and terminated nine months after it had been
drawn up. Experience had shown that it was inadequate to guarantee
public tranquillity, for it had not hindered Magyar attacks on the
Rumanians and Czechoslovaks. The Rumanians, therefore, now that they had
worsted their adversaries, were resolved to disarm them and secure a
real peace. They decided to leave fifteen thousand troops for the
maintenance of internal order.[160] Rumania's insistence on the delivery
of live-stock, corn, agricultural machinery, and rolling-stock for
railways was, it was argued, necessitated by want and justified by
equity. For it was no more than partial reparation for the immense
losses wantonly inflicted on the nation by the Magyars and their allies.
Until then no other amends had been made or even offered. The Austrians,
Hungarians, and Germans, during their two years' occupation of Rumania,
had seized and carried off from the latter country two million five
hundred thousand tons of wheat and hundreds of thousands of head of
cattle, besides vast quantities of clothing, wool, skins, and raw
material, while thousands of Rumanian homes were gutted and their
contents taken away and sold in the Central Empires. Factories were
stripped of their machinery and the railways of their engines and
wagons. When Mackensen left there remained in Rumania only fifty
locomotives out of the twelve hundred which she possessed before the
war. The material, therefore, that Rumania removed from Hungary during
the first weeks of the occupation represented but a small part of the
quantities of which she had been despoiled during the war.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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