As one might have expected, the withdrawal from Bosnia was followed by
a repetition of the reign of terror in that beautiful land of woods
and villages, where the Imperial and Royal authorities had been
engaged for years in showing foreign journalists exactly what they
wanted them to see. There had been some doubt as to whether
Bosnia-Herzegovina came under the crown of Austria or that of Hungary.
The Magyars had been gradually getting the upper hand in the
administration, and now, in the autumn of 1914, it was they who
undertook to deal with those subjected Bosniaks. Again we are
furnished with evidence galore, not this time by picture postcards but
by the cemeteries at Arad, the Hungarian (now it is a Roumanian) town
on the Maro[vs]. It was in the casemates of the Arad fortress, many of
which had not been opened from the days of Maria Theresa, that
thousands of poor Bosniak civilians were interned. In one of the
cemeteries I counted 2103 black wooden crosses, in another between 600
and 700, in another about a thousand. These dead witnesses are more
eloquent than the living. "On October 31, 1915," says an inscription
on a cross in the largest cemetery, "there died, aged 95, Milija
Arzi['c]." She may have been a fearful danger to the Magyar State.
Cross No. 716 says merely "Deaf and Dumb," so does No. 774. Jovan
Kruni['c], No. 706, was 11/2 year old. There are children even
younger. The Magyars seem to have applied to Bosnia that label which
the monkish mediaeval map-makers applied to the remoter peoples: "Here
dwell very evil men." If, however, the commandant, Lieut.-Colonel
Hegedues--a magyarized version of the German _held_, which means
"hero"--and his subordinates, Sergeants Rosner and Herzfeld, would
claim that they did their best, they have some excuse in the fact that
although the 10,000 interned people began to arrive in July, the
first two doctors--who were also captives--did not appear until
January 1915. In the absence of medical advice the sergeants may have
thought it was an excellent plan, in November, to drive the prisoners
into the Maro[vs] for a bath and then to walk them up and down the
bank until their clothes were dry; Hegedues may have thought it was
most sanitary to have dogs to eat the corpses' entrails and sometimes
the whole corpse. Dr. Stephen Pop, a Roumanian lawyer in Arad
(afterwards a Minister at Bucharest), displayed his humanity by
drawing up a terrible indictment of the conditions. "You should be
glad," said Tisza, the reactionary Premier, to him, "very glad that
you can breathe the free air of Hungary." The casemates were provided
with less than three centimetres of straw, which was not removed for
months. Spotted fever, pneumonia and enteritis were the chief
epidemics: those who were guilty of some offence, such as receiving a
newspaper, would be put among the spotted fever cases. Sometimes the
dead were left for two or three days with the living. Such was the
state of the bastions and their underground passages that the Magyar
soldiers came as rarely as they could manage. It was, said Hegedues, a
provisional arrangement to have about a thousand people in one of
these passages or lunettes, with no lavatory. But it was not only the
nonagenarians--several of whom were at Arad--that found their life was
a very provisional affair. You could be killed in different ways: the
dying were occasionally wrapped in a sheet and rocked against a wall.
When they groaned the soldiers laughed, and said that this was
"Cheering King Peter." In fact the Magyars behaved with rare
generosity to their prisoners, we are told in the _Oxford Hungarian
Review_ (June 1922), by Mr. Aubrey Herbert, M.P., a gentleman who
persists in writing of that which he does not know. A woman called
Lenka (or Helen) Mihailovi['c], who had kept the canteen in the
fortress during fifteen years, was expelled in January 1916 for having
helped to clothe some naked children. People used to give Rosner, the
sergeant, a tip in order to be allowed to visit the canteen. Their
ordinary food was the reverse of appetizing. Constantine, the son of
Ilja Jovanovi['c], a boy who used to be employed at the fortress (and
who had not been permitted by the Magyars to learn his own language),
saw the children being fed, very often, on salt fish--no matter
whether they were ill or not--and sometimes on the intestines of
horses. The Serbian grave-diggers used to cook themselves a dish of
grass, salt and water. They were too weak to work, and they had work
enough: on February 1, 1915, for instance, twenty-nine people were
buried. A certain captain (afterwards Major) Lachmann, an Austrian
officer, arrived in Arad and heard the apprehensions that an epidemic
might spread from the fortress. This had, in fact, been debated by the
town council; and Lachmann was eventually responsible for a commission
of inquiry. But Hegedues, although he was degraded and condemned to
prison, made a successful appeal, for his father-in-law was a
field-marshal, one Pacor.
A few improvements were made in the casemates towards the end of 1917,
as a Spanish commission was expected. But it never came. Some of the
long galleries have, since the Armistice, been furnished with windows
and electric light; but about four months after the Armistice I found
them full of dead flies and heavy with an abominable stench. Amid the
debris were many lamps, such as one uses in a mine. There was a
proclamation, dated 1918, which tried to lure deserters back; it
promised that no punishment would be inflicted on them if they should
return, but that robbery or murder would meet with capital punishment,
either by shooting or by strangling. The floor was littered with all
kinds of paper, with scraps of furniture, a few chains and some prison
books, which dated back for years. These gave details of all the
punishments and were written in a very ornamental script, as though
the clerks had taken a pleasure in their work. The Arad fortress had
been partly used as a prison for a long time; but Misko Tatar, a
Magyar, who stayed there sixteen years for having murdered his
fiancee, his mother and his sister, as well as one Kocian, who
remained for more than eighteen years--he had murdered the proprietor
of a canteen, his wife and child in the Bocche--and Rujitatzka, a
Croat, who together with another man had been accused of theft, had
killed their escort and thrown his body into the Danube--none of these
culprits could remember having heard of such punishments as the
Bosniak civilians had to bear. The iron ring from which people used to
be suspended for a couple of hours could still be seen on a large
tree. If the relatives or friends could pay a fine this penalty was
discontinued. Another method was to fasten a man's right wrist to his
left ankle and the left wrist to the right ankle. He would then be
left for a week; every night a blanket was thrown over him. But there
is something very strange in the composition of the Magyars. When the
revolution broke out and the prisoners, after all the years of horror,
were gaining their freedom, an acquaintance of mine, a certain
Gavri['c], whose job for three and a half years had been the
comparatively pleasant one of cleaning boots, was on the point of
leaving the prison. There he was met by the director's daughter. "And
you an intelligent person!" she said. "Are you not ashamed of
yourself?" The Hungarian newspapers wrote that Hegedues was dead, which
may or may not have been true; and in another paper, _The Hungarian
Nation_, printed in English, in February 1920, the Rev. Dr. Nally
said: "May we not still cling to the hope that chivalrous England will
give a helping hand to the nation whose weakness is that she is too
chivalrous?" One Englishman--whom the reader may or may not consider
worth quoting--is with the Magyars. "No country," says Lord
Newton,[85] "treated their prisoners of war so well as the Hungarian,
and I know it, because looking after prisoners of war was my job." "My
husband," says Lady Newton,[86] "had interested himself in their
cause"--of "this delightful race," she terms them in the previous
sentence--"and had been able to do their country some slight service,
and for this they simply could not sufficiently show their gratitude
towards ourselves. From the prince to the peasant the Hungarian is a
_grand seigneur_, with all the instincts of a great gentleman and the
manners of a king." May I mention that at the same time, I believe, as
Lord and Lady Newton were being entertained, a poor Slovak was being
differently treated. Having left his home in Hungary to serve in the
Czecho-Slovak army, and having settled in Czecho-Slovakia, after the
War he got word that his mother was dying. He thereupon applied for
and received a Hungarian visa, and on entering that territory he was
arrested! A long time afterwards the Czecho-Slovak Legation at
Buda-Pest was vainly trying to have him liberated.