Hissing Hell

If the senior Regent of Yugoslavia, "Brother-in-law Paul" to the honeymooning Duchess of Kent, had hurried straight home from her wedding in London instead of dallying in Paris, the Yugoslav Government might not have made last week a monstrous blunder well calculated to set assassinated King Alexander revolving in his grave.

Yugoslavia had won wide sympathy with her claim before the League of Nations that King Alexander's killer was schooled and steeled for his work at the "murder farm" for Croat terrorists at Janka Puszta in Hungary (TIME, Dec. 3). Last week just before this charge was to come up for judgment in Geneva with every prospect of a dressing-down for Hungary, Premier Uzunovitch of Yugoslavia and his militarists at Belgrade suddenly went hog-wild. They would punish Hungary instanter, beginning with some 27,000 Hungarians on Yugoslavian soil.

Anywhere in Eastern Europe policemen obey brutal orders with special gusto. Last week Yugoslav police burst into the homes of Hungarian residents, many of whom had lived in what is now Yugoslavia all their lives, roughly bawled, "Get out! To the station! March! You Hungarian pigs must go back to your Hungarian sty!" Crippled oldsters, a boy with a broken leg, pregnant mothers and suckling babes were piled into freight cars along with the ablebodied. In some cases certificates of deportation were hastily scribbled. A little girl of four was hustled into Hungary officially described as "dangerous to the Yugoslavian State." One train packed with deportees chuffed off, mockingly placarded: "A Yugoslavian present for the Hungarian feast day of St. Nicholas!"

For lantern-jawed General Julius Goemboes, the Hungarian Premier whose proudest boast is that he restored flogging as a punishment in the Hungarian army, those Yugoslav deportations were indeed a Christmas present. They tended to shift world sympathy away from Yugoslavia to Hungary. Strutting Premier Combos, who last month had himself made a Field Marshal, was in ecstasies of wrathful opportunism. He had the genius to accuse Yugoslavia of mobilizing troops to capture Hungary's second city, the pretty frontier town of Szeged, and the further genius to clarion that the Hungarian General Staff, in view of Hungary's disarmament under the Treaty of St. Germain, had decided "to evacuate Szeged, if attacked, without resistance."

Yugoslav troops, as correspondents quickly established, were not mobilizing to attack Szeged or any other part of Hungary last week. Rushing from Paris to Belgrade, studious, introspective Yugoslav Regent Paul appeared to have some success in restraining Premier Uzunovitch. Deportations slowed down, almost ceased, after about 2,500 of the 27,000 Hungarians had been ousted. Meanwhile, however, in Geneva there was hissing Hell to pay.

In the League Council Chamber statesmen of nearly all the Eastern European countries snarled at each other like tomcats. Literally shoulder-to-shoulder the Foreign Ministers of the Little Entente (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Rumania) spat defiance through their normally cool-headed spokesman, Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Dr. Eduard Benes. In effect he charged that Hungary, having failed to get back the territories she lost by the Treaty of St. Germain, is now breeding terrorists to assassinate the leaders of those Little Entente countries which were largely carved out of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Already King Alexander and Rumanian Premier Duca have fallen (TIME, Jan. 8) and Dr. Benes charged that 20 minor assassinations have recently been perpetrated by terrorist gangs in Little Entente countries "They seek to strike a blow at the historical development of Danubian Europe!" he thundered. Dr. Benes was then considered by panic-hungry newshawks to "threaten war" with this climactic sentence: "If in the future anybody strikes at the unity of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Rumania, catastrophe will surely come!" The Hungarian alibi last week was that King Alexander's assassination was prepared by hyphenated subjects of His Majesty in the U. S.*

France, as the patron of the Little Entente, and Italy, as the patron of Austria and Hungary, were thus placed last week in an awkward fix. Devoutly French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval, who expects to visit Benito Mussolini this month, wished to avoid quarreling with Italy's spokesman at Geneva, Baron Pompeo Aloisi. The two Big Fellows, however, each had to make a pretense of championing their Little Fellows.

Cried M. Laval: "Whoever wishes to displace a single frontier stone troubles the peace of Europe!" Cracked back the Italian baron: "My country was the first to affirm that the treaties should be adapted to new requirements!" Having thus ostentatiously "quarreled," France and Italy joined Britain in steamrolling through the League Council a compromise resolution, accepted by Yugoslavia and Hungary, which saved faces all around but left the entire dispute approximately where it had started. Terms: 1) Hungary should punish any of its authorities whom it might find to have contributed "at any rate through negligence" to Alexander's assassination; 2) a League committee of ten should study proposals for a "Permanent International Penal Court" to combat terrorism.

*In Pittsburgh, non-English speaking Councilman Ante Valenta of the so-called Supreme Council for Croatian Independence, croaked through an interpreter: "We sentenced Alexander to die years ago--that fiend who butchered our relatives, tortured our friends and murdered the national hero of Croatia, Stefan Raditch! [TIME, July 2, Aug. 20, 1928]. All schemes for the overthrow of the Yugoslavian Government receive plenty of financial and moral support here. We were so happy we could sing, when we heard that a patriot had slain the oppressor of our people!"

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