The Phoenix Land

by Miklos Banffy

  Hohler accepted my proposed solution, and so I, having obtained my government’s approval, gave it to him in writing.

  This document put an end to all the unholy complications brought about by the king’s putsch. It is true that Benes’s attempts at blackmail had not wholly come to an end, for he now claimed that we pay the cost of the Czechoslovak mobilization. This was going too far, even for the Council of Ambassadors, and was sternly rejected.

  One evening during that awful time I received a strange communication.

  It was very late. I had stayed all day at my desk in the Foreign Ministry; had I been anywhere else, anxiety would have been the end of me. I needed to be there so as to be at hand if any news came in on which I would have to take immediate action. I was there each day from morning until late at night, remaining long after my secretary and cabinet chief had gone home. It was sheer worry that kept me there, for it was always possible that one of our neighbours might have provoked a border incident and used this as a pretext to invade us. I had withdrawn the border guards from the frontier to lessen this danger. I had prevented our mobilization, as I have already mentioned; but the consequence was that had Benes or the Yugoslavs attempted a strike, I alone would have been responsible for our defenceless state, and I could never have borne to have had that on my conscience.

  Those were terrible nerve-shattering hours.

  It was one of those awful evenings – I fancy it was during the first week of the Czech mobilization that someone knocked at my door and entered. It was one of the older clerks who was doing duty on the switchboard. I asked what he wanted, and he told me that a highly confidential communication had come in from Vienna and that it was something he could tell only to me and face-to-face. I replied that we could not be more alone as we were the only two people in the building.

  So he read me what had arrived.

  Our chargé d’affaires in Vienna reported that he had received a visit from an individual who had declared his intention of killing Benes and had come to the Hungarian representative simply because he had no money with which to make his escape and so was asking us for a million crowns (due to inflation this was not a large sum in those days). The chargé d’affaires asked what he should do.

  I shuddered as I heard this. All the same, I asked a few questions. Who was this man? Where did he come from? Did they know him?

  My clerk was unable to give me a proper answer. The message had been very cryptic. The name of the man had not been disclosed, which was not surprising; and all they had said was that he was a German-Moravian and a passionate supporter of the emperor, which is why he had decided to do this. He only needed the money to escape afterwards. Vienna asked only for one word: yes or no. Nothing else: but they wanted it at once. There was to be nothing in writing and so no trace of our complicity. But they wanted an immediate reply.

  I made my decision at once. I said ‘No!’ and this was wired to Vienna that evening.

  I tell this now not to represent myself as a Cato-like hero or as deserving a halo like the early Christians who, if struck on the right cheek, promptly proffered the left. Neither do I maintain that Benes owed his life to me. Few assassinations succeed where the assassin is not ready to lose his own life. And when they do succeed, like Caserio Princip and other fanatics, it is when they have no care for their own safety. We have seen recently that none of the attempts at killing Hitler have been successful because in each case the assassins tried to save their own skins, not that I thought of this at the time.

  Although I at once rejected the proposal, it did flash through my mind how advantageous it would be for us if Almighty God, in his infinite mercy, were to remove Benes from this Vale of Tears. But somehow assassination is alien to the Hungarian character. In our entire history there has only been one instance of it, in the fourteenth century, when Kis-Károly, Carol the Small, of Naples had been crowned king by a group of hereditary magnates in the aftermath of the long-drawn-out disputes over the succession following the death of Lajos I and was killed by followers of the Queen Mother Erzsébet in February 1386. In other countries there have been countless instances, but not in Hungary. Maybe it is a sign of weakness, or a lack of fiery temper, or even an incapacity for hypocrisy. It is also possible that if one Hungarian becomes enraged with another for some political reason and rants about it loudly and without restraint, someone will get to hear about it – even if he imagines he has spoken out only in secret, and he will find himself arrested before further trouble can be made.

  I repeat that I do not recount this so as to blow my own trumpet. I write it because it is true, and because it forms part of the picture of these troublesome times.

  Later I found out who this mysterious would-be assassin was. He was a junior clerk who had tried to be many things in his life, including a private tutor and a dockworker, and who was an excitable and ambitious man. Restless and fanatic he seems to have ended his days in a lunatic asylum. I was told his name, but I have now forgotten it.

  In drawing up the balance sheet of King Karl’s mad adventure we must not lose sight of all the damage it did.

  In foreign affairs it spoilt forever our relationship with the new states and put an end to any possibility of later understanding. It was due to the king’s putsch that the ‘Little Entente’ was formed. Before that happened we had been on fairly good terms even though we had not signed treaties to prove it and we all still had complete freedom to act as we might wish. This had been clearly shown by our discussions in Marienbad. From then on, instead of having a friendly alliance with Austria and Czechoslovakia, we had to contend with the anti-Hungarian ‘Little Entente’ under the leadership of Benes. It was no longer possible for us to discuss mutual problems with each state individually, because all issues had to be submitted to all three, with the result that nothing ever got decided.

  The putsch also caused great damage to the Hungarian army, which was then in the process of being reorganized. Many of our best and most experienced officers left the service because of their divided loyalties between the new oath to Horthy and their former oath to the king. Instead we found ourselves with a much less effective cadre, for very few of the new officers had had any wartime experience.

  There were also divisions in all ranks of society. The Catholic lesser clergy and most of the great landowners, and those with average sized estates, became Legitimists. This was especially true in western Hungary. The clergy hoped, through the influence of Queen Zita, to obtain important places in the hierarchy of the Church, while the aristocrats, with only a few exceptions, refused to accept any public duties, thus aping the example of the French Legitimists, when Louis-Philippe, Napoleon III and the Third Republic came to power after the fall of the Bourbons. The young Hungarians of noble families went even further. The French at least were willing to serve in the army or as diplomats, because they believed that thereby they were serving their country rather than its present government. The young Hungarian aristocrats, on the other hand, stopped short of this and, because they were the most talented of their generation, had command of other languages, were in better financial circumstances and had more knowledge of the world, and were therefore at that time the most suited to a diplomatic career, their abstention had a most unhappy effect on our representation abroad. By taking this attitude they also did damage to themselves and, in their idleness, found little else to do but amuse themselves gambling and drinking – and not a few ruined themselves doing it.

  Our immediate loss was the Burgenland. As I have already written, the Venice Agreement stipulated that, until the plebiscite that was finally to establish our new borders, our armed forces would remain there under the command of General Ferrario. But after Lehár had led them away to Budapest with his lies, they had all dispersed and had been replaced by foreign troops, mostly Italian carabinieri, and this had made the locals believe that Hungary had abandoned them. Although the plebiscite still went well in and around Sopron, the modifications of the proposed new fronti
er, according to the famous Lettre d’Envoi for which we had hoped after Venice, were now lost to us. Instead of a rational border which would have been much to our advantage, we found ourselves bound to accept the nonsensical rearrangement of the frontier lands as occupied two years later by Austria, which was to prove so much to the detriment of the local inhabitants.

  I do not hold poor King Karl personally responsible for all this. He was a naïve man: weak as putty in the hands of those who wanted to obtain power through him. Truly responsible were those who turned his head with news which they knew not to be true; who were well aware of the realities of the situation in the country; and who, as experienced politicians, could not have failed to understood the ruin that restoration would have brought with it.

  They were the real culprits, and no amount of justification can ever absolve them of their guilt.

  Notes

  94. Viktor Ranzenberger and Gyula Ostenburg. They commanded the reserve gendarme battalions in Sopron and Torony.

  95. This conversation took place on 16 October. Windischgrätz reveals that ‘towards the end of August’ King Karl had told him that he was at that time planning ‘a fresh trip to Western Hungary to the loyal troops under Lehár and Osztenburg’. So much for Sigray not knowing what was in the wind!

  96. Windischgrätz writes that Bethlen had agreed that his speech at ‘a national memorial service’ would include the statement that it was the policy of the government to recall Hungary’s crowned apostolic king. This seems to be what Andrássy and other loyal supporters of King Karl had reported to him, but which had not been strictly accurate. Windischgrätz also writes that the ‘Emperor and Empress’ had precipitated their arrival in Hungary on the strength of a favourable report from Rakovszky, Sigray and Lehár!

  97. The Czirákys were closely related to many of Hungary’s most influential aristocratic families.

  98. A possible further reason may well lie in the fact that Countess Sophie Chotek, who became the morganatic wife of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and who was assassinated at Sarajevo with her husband, had formerly been a lady-in-waiting to Archduke Friedrich’s wife, Isabella. It seems to have been Zita’s influence that was responsible for the new Emperor Karl’s demotion of Archduke Friedrich from the head of the Austro-Hungarian army in 1917.

  99. This looks like an inadvertent mistake in view of the larger numbers already mentioned.

  100. This phrase appears in English in Bánffy’s text.

  101. In his memoirs, Prince Windischgrätz gives his own somewhat disingenuous apologia for his part in these events and what was to follow.

  102. The Budapest editors suggest that here Bánffy really means Soós.

  103. Not far from the city centre.

  104. Then one of the outlying suburbs of Budapest.

  105. There seems to be some confusion here between the jurist Guyla Térfy and Béla Térfi who became minister of agriculture later that year.

  106. The property of Count Ferenc Esterházy. Tata itself lies a few miles from Kómarom on the Danube and on the main road to Austria.

  107. Windischgrätz’s version is that ‘a group of Horthy adherents under Colonel Simenfálvy made a surprise attack in the middle of the night and arrested all the principal personages’!

  108. This was claimed by Windischgrätz to have been said to him by Briand in Paris sometime before the Treaty of Trianon had even been signed – this was 4 June 1920, some ten months before the first putsch in April 1921.

  109. Near Lake Balaton in western Hungary.

  110. This is Bánffy’s wording. The context here suggests he means the Council of Ambassadors.

  111. The king, who was not strong and suffered from periodic bouts of ill health, was to die there the following year.

  Chapter Seven

  The king’s adventure was over, and less dramatic times followed. Nevertheless, I had plenty to do. There were so many documents I had to study and much I had to store in my memory that, for days at a time, I would be at my desk from morning to night, often until as late as ten or eleven o’clock. The Burgenland crisis and the king’s putsch had meant that for over two months decisions on every essential measure had been postponed, and so speed was vital to clear up the backlog.

  Our first task was to establish our embassies abroad. This had already been started before, but now we had to decide about two of the most important – London and Washington. There were also a number where our ambassadors had resigned after the king’s putsch and where new men had to be found.

  This was also the time for our first discussions with the Soviet Union over the release of 26,250 Hungarian prisoners of war. The other ranks had been sent home in 1919 and 1920, but the officers had not yet been released. An agreement in principle had been reached by the Teleki government, but no details had been decided. We had to make contact through the Soviet Embassy in Vienna. After much discussion we finally reached agreement in Riga. If I remember rightly it was on the basis of nine to one – nine of our officers for every one of those Soviet soldiers who had been thrown into prison after the fall of the Communist regime in Budapest. Although some of these – ten or twelve, I fancy – who had been given long or short prison terms, the majority had been condemned to death. I was much relieved that these men had been saved and would be able to take up a normal life again in Russia because I am, and always have been, opposed to the death penalty for political offences. Freedom of opinion is a basic human right, and although it may be justified to deprive a man of his liberty for the sake of public order, I consider it barbaric to deprive him of life. That can never be a matter of justice: only of political revenge.

  It was at this time that we signed the peace treaty with America. This was done with much ceremony. We gathered at the American Embassy, which was then situated in the town house of the Széchenyi family on Andrássy Street. The treaty document had been prepared on a splendid sheet of parchment and was signed by the American ambassador and myself. The seals were applied, and it was this part of the ceremony that revealed how backward the old European countries could seem, compared with the technical advances of the New World.

  First we had to melt the sealing wax, which was not easy as the seal itself was the size of a pocket-watch, and this meant that the wax had to be stirred while being heated so as to remain fluid. Khuen-Héderváry did the stirring with exemplary zeal, but even so the first two attempts were unsuccessful, and the wax had to be re-heated again and again until the deed was finally done. Not so the Americans who produced a clever little machine that was just placed on the document and, in one second, the Stars and Stripes and the American eagle were stamped on the page.

  I was somewhat ashamed of our old European backwardness, all the more so as there were several American reporters there who took photographs throughout the ceremony and who seemed to find our archaic methods infinitely comical112.

  When the signing was over this important event was brought to an end with a number of impressive speeches declaring that from then on everlasting peace would reign between our two countries. These were not empty words, for we all believed it.

  At that time nobody could imagine that the day would come when a Hungarian foreign minister would be mad enough to declare war on the most powerful country in the world113.

  Our most serious problem in appointing new ambassadors lay in deciding who should represent us in London and Washington.

  I would have preferred to have György Festetics for London. His mother had been a daughter of the Duke of Hamilton, and so he had many relations in England. We had served together when I had been sent to England, and he was a highly experienced man with very sound judgment. Unfortunately, he would not accept the post. Despite this, I remained on good terms with his father who, even after the Legitimist putsch, continued to support my efforts. As it was, I found myself obliged, for want of a better man, to appoint Lászlo Szapáry, the former governor of Fiume, an ex-diplomat who was now quite elderly. At first he did his work well, bu
t after a while declined into senility, fell in love with a young typist and started to neglect his work. He had to be recalled; but this happened after my time.

  My choice for Washington was Lászlo Széchenyi. It was true that he had never held any official post but, as his father had been ambassador in Berlin for many years and his brother Dénes had been the last Austro-Hungarian ambassador in Denmark, he had grown up in an atmosphere of diplomacy. Lászlo was a realist and had a steady nerve. He had often been in the United States, which he knew well, and his wife was Gladys Vanderbilt, of the family of railway millionaires. For me this was a most important point in his favour since it would make a great deal of difference to the style of our embassy if it could rely on the support of her brothers’ millions.

  I could not admit this at the time, for Gladys was immediately suspicious that her husband had been chosen because of her. This, of course, was true; but it was not only because she was rich.

  Gladys Vanderbilt was not only very beautiful she was also one of the most intelligent women I have ever met. She had a good heart, and in spirit she had become remarkably Hungarian. Even if she had not had a penny of her own she would still have been a wonderful support for her husband. After long correspondence the appointment was finally agreed; and in this Lászlo’s elder brother Dénes was a great help, for together we explained to her that her husband would have been chosen even if she were not his wife. Her last worry was that her husband had no experience in office matters, but this was resolved when I assured her that the highly professional János Pelényi would remain with him in Washington until Széchenyi had fully learned his trade.