PARIS 1919 (23 page)

On February 1, Br
tianu produced the full list of Rumania's demands: the Banat, Transylvania, Bessarabia on the Russian border, and the Bukovina in the north, all of which he claimed were historically and ethnically part of Rumania. The Allies acquiesced on Bessarabia and the Bukovina; they had little enthusiasm for handing the one back to a Bolshevik Russia and the other over to what looked then like a Bolshevik Hungary. Transylvania was a much larger piece of land and a more complicated issue. The Allies assumed that they would deal with that at their leisure when they got around to doing the Hungarian treaty.

Br
tianu warned that the Great Powers must settle Rumania's claims before matters got out of hand and “serious developments” took place. “Roumania was in need of the moral support of the Allies, if she was to remain what she had been hitherto—a rallying point for Europe against Bolshevism.”
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This, of course, was a popular argument in Paris, but in the case of Rumania, which lay between the new Bolshevik Russia and revolutionary Hungary, a powerful one. Geography helped Rumania in another way: it was too far away for the Allies to enforce their will. Rumania had been an ally during the war, although a notoriously unreliable one, and promises, as awkward now as those to Italy, had been made by Britain and France.

The Rumania that Paris knew was the cultivated and worldly one of Princess Marthe Bibesco, whose salon was famous in Paris before the war, or of her beautiful young cousin, who married into an ancient French aristocratic family and as Anna de Noailles became one of the most famous poets of her generation. The Rumanian upper classes loved France: they bought educations in Paris for their children, and clothes and furniture for themselves. And the French reciprocated in their own offhand way; Rumania, it was said, was a fellow Latin country, the Rumanians descendants of Roman legionaries and Rumanian a Latin language. In the nineteenth century, France had supported the cause of Rumanian independence from the Ottomans; in 1919, the French government envisaged a strong Rumania as both a counterbalance against Germany and as a crucial link in the cordon sanitaire against Russian Bolshevism. The Rumanians themselves made much of their Western connections: they were the heirs of the Roman empire, part of Western civilization. Conveniently for the peace negotiations, they could argue that all the old Roman province of Dacia including part of Transylvania, which belonged to Hungary, should be restored to them.

There was another Rumania, though, with a more complicated history: the Rumania that had been invaded and settled over the centuries by peoples from the east; that had been divided up among the kingdoms that had come and gone in the center of Europe, and that, as Moldavia and Wallachia, had been under the sway of the Ottoman empire since the early sixteenth century. The Rumanian aristocrats who spoke such beautiful French and who came to Paris to buy their clothes had portraits of their grandparents in caftans and turbans.

Their society was deeply marked by the years under corrupt Ottoman rule. Rumanians had a saying: “The fish grows rotten from the head.” In Rumania almost everything was for sale: offices, licenses, passports. Indeed, a foreign journalist who once tried to change money legally instead of on the black market was thrown into jail by police who thought he must be involved in a particularly clever swindle. Every government contract produced its share of graft. Although Rumania was a wealthy country, rich in farmland and, by 1918, with a flourishing oil industry, it lacked roads, bridges and railways because the money allocated by government had been siphoned off into the hands of families such as Br
tianu's own. Rumanians tended to see intrigues everywhere. In Paris they hinted darkly that the Supreme Council had fallen under the sway of Bolshevism or, alternatively, that it had been bribed by sinister capitalist forces.
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Visitors to Rumania from Western Europe were struck by its exotic, even Oriental, flavor, from the onion domes of the Orthodox churches to which most of the inhabitants belonged, to the cabdrivers who wore blue velvet caftans and came from a sect where men were castrated after they had produced two children. Before the war Bucharest, the capital, was charming but backward. Most of its buildings were low and rambling, its unpaved streets busy with street vendors selling live birds, fruit, pastries or carpets. Dark-eyed Gypsy girls hawked their flowers; in the nightclubs their men played Gypsy music or the popular “Tu sais que tu es jolie.” Well-to-do families lived with their own livestock in compounds guarded by Albanians.
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Rumania, for all its claims to an ancient past, was a relatively new country. Moldavia and Wallachia had gained a limited independence from the Ottomans by the mid-nineteenth century and complete independence by 1880. Together they formed a reverse L, with the richer, more developed province of Wallachia running east–west along the south side of the Transylvanian Alps, and Moldavia to the east of the Carpathians. In 1866 they had gained their own German prince, later King Carol, who had dodged the Austrian attempts to stop him by taking a Danube steamer disguised as a traveling salesman. His wife was a famous mystic who wrote poetry and romances under the pen name Carmen Sylva.

The Rumanians themselves were the Neapolitans of central Europe. Both sexes loved strong scents. Among the upper classes, women made up heavily, and men rather more discreetly, but even so the military authorities had to restrict the use of cosmetics to officers above a certain rank. Even after Rumania entered the war, foreign observers were scandalized to see officers strolling about “with painted faces, soliciting prostitutes or one another.” Noisy, effusive, melodramatic, fond of quarreling, Rumanians of all ranks threw themselves into their pastimes with passionate enthusiasm. “Along with local politics, love and love-making are the great occupation and preoccupation of all classes of society,” said a great Rumanian lady, adding: “Morality has never been a strong point with my compatriots, but they can boast of charm and beauty, wit, fun, and intelligence.” Even the Rumanian Orthodox Church took a relaxed view of adultery; it allowed up to three divorces per individual on the grounds of mutual consent alone.
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Before Br
tianu arrived in Paris, Rumania's spokesman had been the distinguished and charming Take Ionescu. Cheerful, dapper and well fed, he had studied law at the Sorbonne and spoke excellent French. His equally cheerful English wife, Bessie, was the daughter of a boardinghouse keeper in Brighton. Ionescu had been pro-Ally since the start of the war and played a considerable part in bringing Rumania in on the Allied side. On Rumania's claims, he was more moderate than his prime minister. “His attitude,” reported an American delegate, “is very friendly towards the Serbs: the Bulgars, he says, have behaved very badly; of the 28,000 Rumanian prisoners taken by the Bulgarians only 10,000 survived captivity.” On the Banat, Ionescu was for doing a deal: “they must be friends with Serbia and he does not want to hog the whole Banat, but will give them the southwestern portion.”
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And in fact a deal had been made in October 1918. Ionescu had met with the Yugoslavs and hammered out an agreement, actually close to the one that was reached months later, giving Rumania the largest part of the Banat and Serbia the rest. The deal had been attacked in the Rumanian press as a betrayal of the Rumanian nation and was finally scuppered by Br
tianu, partly at least because he hated Ionescu. When Rumania's delegation was chosen for the Peace Conference, Br
tianu made sure that Ionescu was omitted.
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The Rumanian claim to the Banat stressed, inevitably, ethnic factors. It also laid heavy emphasis on Rumania's record in the war. This was not perhaps the wisest choice. Rumania, sensibly, had stood aside when the war started. Br
tianu, who was then prime minister, told his colleagues that they must wait for the most favorable bid. Less sensibly, the Br
tianu government had made this too obvious, behaving, said a French diplomat, “like a peddler in an oriental bazaar.” When the Allies appeared to be gaining the upper hand in the summer of 1916, Rumania finally decided to enter the war, extracting as its price a promise that it would get the whole of the Banat, Transylvania and most of the Bukovina. Privately the Russians and the French agreed that they would review the whole package when peace came.
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