PARIS 1919 (43 page)

The Czechs passed lightly over any difficulties. Slovakia, they admitted, would contain some 650,000 Hungarians, but 350,000 Slovaks would still be left outside. The Hungarians could not complain; they had tried, with little success, to turn Slovaks into Hungarians and forced thousands to emigrate. Yes, Bene
said, there were German speakers living along the borders with Austria and Germany, in the west of old Bohemia (what the Germans themselves called the Sudetenland, “Southland”). But the prewar Austrian figures of several million were quite untrustworthy; the Czech ones, by contrast very carefully done, showed only one and a half million Germans to probably three times as many Czechs. These Bohemian Germans knew that their future lay in Czechoslovakia. They did not want to see their businesses submerged by the more powerful German economy. If some of them talked of joining a greater Germany or perhaps even Austria, that was simply because they were being terrorized by outside agitators. Anyway, and this in his view was the strongest argument, Czechoslovakia could not survive without the Sudetenland's sugar refineries, glassworks, textile mills, smelters and breweries. And the Czechs needed the old frontiers, which ran along mountains and hills, to defend themselves. “In Bohemia,” commented an American expert cynically, “they demand their ‘historic frontiers' regardless of the protests of large numbers of Germans who do not wish to be taken over in this way. In Slovakia they insist on the rights of nationality and pay no heed to the ancient and well marked ‘historic frontiers' of Hungary.”
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Since the Allies had largely accepted the new state as it was, the commission set up to report on Czechoslovakia had a relatively easy job. Its members worked amicably, assisted, said Seymour, by the informality (which allowed them to smoke) and by the fact that the British and Americans met privately, as they were doing on most issues, to agree on common positions before the meetings. Occasionally they had trouble with the chief British representative, Sir Joseph Cook of Australia, whose complete lack of knowledge did not stop him from having very strong opinions. Nicolson spent much time coaching him. Because Italy's interests were not directly involved, the Italian representatives were not obstructive as they were over Yugoslavia's borders. Nor were they particularly helpful. Their chief representative, an old diplomat, was fond of saying, “I ask myself whether it is not wiser, at this stage, to put at least two possibilities before ourselves.”
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The borders that caused everyone the most difficulty were between Slovakia and Hungary. The population, mainly Slovak and Hungarian, was very mixed; and east of the Danube there were no clear geographic features. The French supported Czech claims to territory that was primarily Hungarian; the British and the Americans did not. Everyone agreed that the corridor to Yugoslavia was impractical. After considerable bargaining and many compromises, the commission wound up its work at the end of the first week of March. The chairman asked for the final view of the British delegation. “Well,” said Cook, “all I can say is that we
are
a happy family aren't we?” There was a silence as the interpreter provided a French translation.
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The report, which gave the Czechs some, but not all, of the additional territory they wanted from Germany, Austria and Hungary, was approved piecemeal as each of the treaties was drawn up. On April 4 the Council of Four, which was in the middle of strenuous disputes over the German terms, briskly agreed that it would be better on the whole to keep to the old boundaries of the Bohemian kingdom. On May 12, with equal dispatch, it approved the old boundaries between Czechoslovakia and Austria. Some of the peacemakers worried briefly about the German minority, three million strong, within Czechoslovakia. Lansing fretted about ignoring the principle of self-determination. Wilson is supposed to have exclaimed in surprise, “Why, Masaryk never told me that!” but in the end he gave the Sudeten Germans little thought. While Lloyd George later claimed to have had serious misgivings, he did not raise them at the time. Clemenceau had none: as he told the Council of Four, “the Conference has decided to call to life a certain number of new states. Without committing an injustice, may it sacrifice them by imposing on them unacceptable frontiers toward Germany?” No one, after all, much wanted to add the German territories to those of the defeated enemies. Most probably agreed with Masaryk when he said impatiently, “Whole nations are now oppressed by the Germans and the Magyars—is that nothing?” And the Czechs impressed the peacemakers by giving various guarantees to their minorities: their own schools, freedom of religion, even proportional representation, so they could have their own representatives. Czechoslovakia was going to be the Switzerland of central Europe.
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The Sudeten Germans themselves protested ineffectually in 1918 and 1919. Largely prosperous farmers and solid bourgeois, they were divided between despising their new Czech rulers and fearing the left-wing revolutions sweeping through Germany and Austria. Czechoslovakia at least offered stability. In any case, Germany, engrossed in its own problems, showed little interest in them at the time. The German delegation in Versailles mentioned them only once in passing in its written comments to the peacemakers. The German foreign minister, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, offered the Sudeten Germans his sympathy but made it clear that Germany would not risk its negotiating position with the Allies by looking out for people who had, after all, never been part of Germany. Linking up with Austria was an equally unlikely solution for the Sudeten Germans in 1919, given the way the German speakers were situated in a crescent along the Austrian and German borders. Moreover, in 1919 Austria itself scarcely seemed likely to survive.
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The Czech government did keep many of its promises. In districts with significant numbers of Germans, they could use their own language for official matters. There were German schools, universities, newspapers. But Czechoslovakia was still a Slav state. Its banknotes showed young women dressed in folkloric Czech or Slovak costumes. Germans— along with Hungarians and Ruthenians—never felt they entirely belonged.
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Perhaps that would not have mattered, if the Depression had not hit Sudetenland industries particularly hard and if Hitler had not made the cause of the lost Germans his own. At Munich in 1938, the Sudeten Germans provided him with the excuse to destroy Czechoslovakia.

Czechoslovakia's borders with Hungary took longer to settle, partly because the treaty with Hungary was delayed, first by the communist revolution at the end of March and then by the outbreak of more fighting. Assuring the peacemakers that their only intention was to combat Bolshevism, the Czechs moved in to seize Hungarian territory shortly after the revolution. With Foch's approval, their forces occupied crucial railways on Hungarian soil and then moved ahead, beyond what Foch had authorized, to take the last remaining Hungarian coalfield. The Hungarians counterattacked at the beginning of June. The Czechs immediately appealed to the peacemakers. They were amazed and hurt that anyone should think they had provoked the Hungarians. “I know nothing about a Czech offensive,” said Kramář. “All I know relates to the advance of Hungarian Bolshevism, mixed and confused with Magyar chauvinism.” Bene
painted a picture of a peaceful Czechoslovakia, unaware of the menace to the south: “We were busy with our domestic reforms and forthcoming elections.” Czech forces had been concentrated largely on the German border, ready to leap into action if Germany refused to sign its treaty. “It was then that the Magyars, seeing Slovakia completely defenceless, advanced.” The Czechs took the opportunity to make fresh demands on Hungarian territory: additional railway lines, for example, and a bridgehead on the south bank of the Danube. The Allies, by now seriously worried about the conflict, rejected most of these. “We must be fair even to the Hungarians,” said Lloyd George, “they are only defending their country.” The one exception was the largely German town of Bratislava on the Danube, which was given to Czechoslovakia on the grounds that it needed a river port. Even so, Czechoslovakia ended up with a substantial piece of what had been Hungary, and over a million ethnic Hungarians.
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Czechoslovakia also had trouble with Poland, over the little triangle of Teschen, where Upper Silesia met the western edge of Galicia. As part of Austria-Hungary, Teschen was up for grabs. It was a rich prize, partly because it lay at one end of the great Silesian coalfield, but also because it was a major railway junction, where the main north–south and east–west lines in the center of Europe met. In Paris, Dmowski claimed it for Poland on ethnic grounds. (Out of a total population of half a million, the Poles probably outnumbered the Czechs two to one.) The Polish majority, he said, were particularly well educated and consequently profoundly nationalistic. Bene
challenged his figures: a lot of the Poles were temporary inhabitants, drawn by a higher standard of living or so influenced by Czech language and culture as to be no longer Polish at all. He pointed to the costumes the people of Teschen wore, and their architecture. And Teschen's coal was essential for Czech industry, as was a railway line which, since it linked the two halves of Czechoslovakia, could not safely be left under Polish control. Delegates from Teschen itself who asked for an independent state never had a chance.
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Like many of the other issues that overloaded the agendas in Paris, this one could have been settled with relative ease. Masaryk and Paderewski had met the previous summer in Washington and agreed that it should be discussed in a friendly way once the war was over. In Teschen itself local Poles and Czechs worked out a division of responsibilities when the Austrian administration collapsed. The new Polish government, unwisely in retrospect, announced that elections to the new parliament in Warsaw would include the Polish part of Teschen. The Czech government in Prague overreacted and in late January 1919 ordered all Polish troops to leave Teschen at once. The Czechs, also unwisely, persuaded several Allied officers to give the impression that this order came from the Allies. Shots were fired and what had been a tense situation became a crisis as both governments rushed reinforcements in. An American professor who visited Masaryk in Prague found him tired and nervous. “Somehow,” reported the American, “I gathered the impression that in the affair he had been led rather than he had taken the lead himself, and he was evidently unhappy about the whole matter.”
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In Paris, where the peacemakers were busy with the League of Nations and the Russian question, this outbreak of hostilities between two friendly powers was an unwelcome interruption. “How many members ever heard of Teschen?” Lloyd George was famously to ask the House of Commons later that year. “I do not mind saying that I had never heard of it.” The Supreme Council summoned the Poles and Czechs. Each side blamed the other, and Bene
used the occasion to produce all the reasons—“statistical, ethnological, historical and economic”—as to why Teschen belonged to Czechoslovakia. Lloyd George called him sharply to order. The peacemakers set up a special inter-Allied commission, which both sides accepted with reluctance.
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