who were doing their duty.  In Budapest preparations are going forward for equipping fifteen workmen’s battalions.”  In other words, the downfall of Bolshevism had begun.  The Rumanians were on the point of achieving it.  Their troops on the bank of the river Tisza[147] were preparing to march on Budapest.  And it was at that critical moment that the world-arbiters at the Conference who had anathematized the Bolshevists as the curse of civilization interposed their authority and called a halt.  If they had solid grounds for intervening they were not avowed.  M. Clemenceau sent for M. Bratiano and vetoed the march in peremptory terms which did scant justice to the services rendered and the sacrifices made by the Rumanian state.  Secret arrangements, it was whispered, had been come to between agents of the Powers and Kuhn.  At the time nobody quite understood the motive of the sudden change of disposition evinced by the Allies toward the Magyar Bolshevists.  For it was assumed that they still regarded the Bolshevist leaders as outlaws.  One explanation was that they objected to allow the Rumanian army alone to occupy the Hungarian capital.  But that would not account for their neglect to despatch an Inter-Allied contingent to restore order in the city and country.  For they remained absolutely inactive while Kuhn’s supporters were rallying and consolidating their scattered and demoralized forces, and they kept the Rumanians from balking the Bolshevist work of preparing another attack.  As one of their French critics[148] remarked, they dealt exclusively in negatives—­some of them pernicious enough, whereas a positive policy was imperatively called for.  To reconstruct a nation, not to say a ruined world, a series of contradictory vetoes is hardly sufficient.  But another explanation of their attitude was offered which gained widespread acceptance.  It will be unfolded presently.

The dispersed Bolshevist army, thus shielded, soon recovered its nerve, and, feeling secure on the Rumanian front, where the Allies held the invading troops immobilized, attacked the Slovaks and overran their country.  For Bolshevism is by nature proselytizing.  The Prague Cabinet was dismayed.  The new-born Czechoslovak state was shaken.  A catastrophe might, as it seemed, ensue at any moment.  Rumania’s troops were on the watch for the signal to resume their march, but it came not.  The Czechoslovaks were soliciting it prayerfully.  But the weak-kneed plenipotentiaries in Paris were minded to fight, if at all, with weapons taken from a different arsenal.  In lieu of ordering the Rumanian troops to march on Budapest, they addressed themselves to the Bolshevist leader, Kuhn, summoned him to evacuate the Slovak country, and volunteered the promise that they would compel the Rumanians to withdraw.  This amazing line of action was decided on by the secret Council of Three without the assent or foreknowledge of the nation to whose interests it ran counter and the head of whose government was