Making a Nation to Order

From the young officers who wore on their shoulders the silver greyhound of the American Courier Service we heard many discouraging tales of the annoyances and discomforts for which we must be prepared in traveling through Hungary, the Banat and Jugoslavia. But, to tell the truth, I did not take these warnings very seriously, for I had observed that a profoundly pessimistic attitude of mind characterized all of the Americans or English whose duties had kept them in the Balkans for any length of time. In Salonika this mental condition was referred to as “the Balkan tap”—derived, no doubt, from the verb “to knock,” as with a hammer—and it usually implied that those suffering from the ailment had outstayed their period of usefulness and should be sent home.

Thrice weekly a train composed of an assortment of ramshackle and dilapidated coaches, called by courtesy the Orient Express, which maintained an average speed of fifteen miles an hour, left Bucharest for Vincovce, a small junction town in the Banat, where it was supposed to make connections with the south-bound Simplon Express from Paris to Belgrade and with the north-bound express from Belgrade to Paris. The Simplon Express likewise ran thrice weekly, so, if the connections were missed at Vincovce, the passengers were compelled to spend at least two days in a small Hungarian town which was notorious, even in that region, for its discomforts and its dirt. All went well with us, however, the train at one time attaining the dizzy speed of thirty miles an hour, until, in a particularly desolate portion of the great Hungarian plain, we came to an abrupt halt. When, after a half hour’s wait, I descended to ascertain the cause of the delay, I found the train crew surrounded by a group of indignant and protesting passengers.

“What’s the trouble?” I inquired.

“The engineer claims that he has run out of coal,” some one answered. “But he says that there is a coal depot three or four kilometers ahead and that, if each first-class passenger will contribute fifty francs, and each second-class passenger twenty francs, he figures that it will enable him to buy just enough coal to reach Vincovce. Otherwise, he says, we will probably miss both connections, which means that we must stay in Vincovce for forty-eight hours. And if you had ever seen Vincovce you would understand that such a prospect is anything but alluring.”

While my fellow-passengers were noisily debating the question I strolled ahead to take a look at the engine. As I had been led to expect from the stories I had heard from the courier officers, the tender contained an ample supply of coal—enough, it seemed to me, to haul the train to Trieste.

“This is nothing but a hold-up,” I told the assembled passengers. “There is plenty of coal in the tender. I am as anxious to make the connection as any of you, but I will settle here and raise bananas, or whatever they do raise in the Banat, before I will submit to this highwayman’s demands.”

Seeing that his bluff had been called, the engineer, favoring me with a murderous glance, sullenly climbed into his cab and the train started, only to stop again, however, a few miles further on, this time, the engineer explained, because the engine had broken down. There being no way of disputing this statement, it became a question of pay or stay—and we stayed. The engineer did not get his tribute and we did not get our train at Vincovce, where we spent twenty hot, hungry and extremely disagreeable hours before the arrival of a local train bound for Semlin, across the Danube from Belgrade. We completed our journey to the Jugoslav capital in a fourth-class compartment into which were already squeezed two Serbian soldiers, eight peasants, a crate of live poultry and a dog, to say nothing of a multitude of small and undesired occupants whose presence caused considerable annoyance to every one, including the dog. We were glad when the train arrived at Semlin.

Late in the summer of 1919, as a result of the reconstruction of the railway bridges which had been blown up by the Bulgarians early in the war, through service between Salonika and Belgrade was restored. As the journey consumed from three to five days, however, the train stopping for the night at stations where the hotel accommodation was of the most impossible description, the American and British officials and relief-workers who were compelled to make the journey (I never heard of any one making it for pleasure) usually hired a freight car, which they fitted up with army cots and a small cook-stove, thus traveling in comparative comfort.

Curiously enough, the only trains running on anything approaching a schedule in the Balkans were those loaded with Swiss goods and belonging to the Swiss Government. In crossing Southern Hungary we passed at least half-a-dozen of them, they being readily distinguished by a Swiss flag painted on each car. Each train, consisting of forty cars, was accompanied by a Swiss officer and twenty infantrymen—finely set-up fellows in feldgrau with steel helmets modeled after the German pattern. Had the trains not been thus guarded, I was told, the goods would never have reached their destination and the cars, which are the property of the Swiss State Railways, would never have been returned. It is by such drastic methods as this that Switzerland, though hard hit by the war, has kept the wheels of her industries turning and her currency from serious depreciation. I have rarely seen more hopeless-looking people than those congregated on the platforms of the little stations at which we stopped in Hungary. The Rumanian armies had swept the country clean of livestock and agricultural machinery, throwing thousands of peasants out of work, and, owing to the appalling depreciation of the kroner, which was worth less than a twentieth of its normal value, great numbers of people who, under ordinary conditions, would have been described as comfortably well off, found themselves with barely sufficient resources to keep themselves from want. To add to their discouragement, the greatest uncertainty prevailed as to Hungary’s future. In order to obtain an idea of just how familiar the inhabitants of the rural districts were with political conditions, I asked four intelligent-looking men in succession who was the ruler of Hungary and what was its present form of government. The first opined that the Archduke Joseph had been chosen king; another ventured the belief that the country was a republic with Bela Kun as president; the third asserted that Hungary had been annexed to Rumania; while the last man I questioned said quite frankly that he didn’t know who was running the country, or what its form of government was, and that he didn’t much care. As a result of the decision of the Peace Conference which awarded Transylvania to Rumania and divided the Banat between Rumania and Jugoslavia, Hungary finds herself stripped of virtually all her forests, all her mines, all her oil wells, and all of her manufactories save those in Budapest, thus stripping the bankrupt and demoralized nation of practically all of her resources save her wheat-fields. I talked with a number of Americans and English who were conversant with Hungary’s internal condition and they agreed that it was doubtful if the country, stripped of its richest territories, deprived of most of its resources, and hemmed in by hostile and jealous peoples, could long exist as an independent state. On several occasions I heard the opinion expressed that sooner or later the Hungarians, in order to save themselves from complete ruin, would ask to be admitted to the Jugoslav Confederation, thereby obtaining for their products an outlet to the sea. In any event, the Hungarians appear to have a more friendly feeling for their Jugoslav neighbors than for the Rumanians, whom they charge with a deliberate attempt to bring about their economic ruin.