communicated the details of this agreement to Lieutenant-Colonel Vyx, who at once reported the matter to Paris. I myself heard nothing about the Hodža-Bartha arrangement, either from Prague or Budapest, and this circumstance considerably complicated the situation.
My attention had been drawn to this fundamental question at the Quai d’Orsay at my very first negotiations there on the evacuation of Slovakia (after November 20th), and several times towards the end of November and at the beginning of December, when the Prague Government had exchanged telegrams with Károlyi and had sent Tusar to Vienna and Dr. Emil Stodola (later Dr. Hodža) to Budapest. When on November 29th I again discussed these questions with M. Pichon, he reminded me of it in emphatic terms. The American delegation who approached me officially in the matter was equally dissatisfied, and demanded that we should not enter into any negotiations either with Vienna and Budapest or with Berlin.
I drew the attention of Prague to this opinion of the Allies first of all telegraphically, and then in a series of detailed letters between November 27th and 29th. I also informed Prague telegraphically of the American démarche, when it was repeated on December 10th, during the stay of President Masaryk in Paris.
A second matter which was equally unpleasant was the Budapest agreement on a provisional line of demarcation. At the Quai d’Orsay and among the military authorities they were annoyed with us because we had no right whatever to make any arrangements with the Magyars on territorial questions, such a proceeding being possible only if carried out jointly by the Allies. In addition to this, they began to object to the demands of my line of demarcation because Károlyi was claiming that between him and the representatives of the Czechoslovak Government there had been a special agreement about a line of demarcation which was said to correspond approximately to the legitimate demands of both sides.[1] Károlyi argued that it was therefore impossible to expect the Magyars to evacuate the whole territory as far as the line which I had demanded in November and which Paris had then sanctioned. It will be seen that Károlyi was successfully
- ↑ The provisional agreement applied to Slovakia without Bratislava, without the Danube plain, without Košice or its environs, and without the most eastern portion of Slovakia.
