Septimus Despencer

From Little Missions, Septimus Despencer 1932

The three years following the armistice of 1918 were spent by the writer in almost continuous travel in what are called the 'Succession States',—that is to say, the new countries which have established themselves, or been established, in the room and on the ruins of the Hapsburg Monarchy. At close quarters I watched the twilight of the gods I had known—and loved—and saw the new heaven and earth emerge from the conflagration in which they were consumed. viewed from a distance, from Paris for example in the year of the Peace Conference, the spectacle wore a very different aspect. Paris was none too well informed, particularly in he early part of 1919, as to what was happening in Central and Eastern Europe ; and all the inter allied organizations, the supreme Council and the supreme Economic Council und was das alles sich' benennen möchte, were greatly hampered by the lack of dispassionate figures and facts. A great deal was happening. Each of the new States was endeavouring to establish faits accomplis, before the Conference came to fix the new frontiers. Almost everyone was in a state of war with someone else : republics rose and fell : waves of occupation advanced and receded : and many believed the Russian Revolution was about to overwhelm Europe as far as the Alps.

Under these circumstances some of the interallied bodies took to sending small commission or individual officers to report on the situation in particular countries or areas. Someone—so far as I know, it was myself—gave to these expeditions the name of 'Little Missions'. Hence the title of this book. Quorum pars magna fui. In the course of 1919 and 1920 I travelled en petite mission nearly 250,000 kilometers, concluded seven international agreements (of the kind known as 'compensation treaties' (see Chapter 8), and was involved in four distinct wars, not one of which was ever reported in the English or American Press !

Chapters 2, 8 and o have appeared, substantially in their present form, in the Atlantic Monthly, whose permission to republish is gratefully acknowledged. The rest of the book is new : but occasional phrases, paragraphs, and in a few cases whole pages, are borrowed from articles which have appeared in the (British) Contemporary Review or the alas ! defunct Edinburgh Review, to each of which acknowledgment is also gratefully made.

S. D.      

( pages 5 - 6 )

* * *

The Hapsburg dynasty not only bond the present with the past. It also bound together the disparate and frequently disjunctive elements of the present ; and for this reason its disappearance was a very different matter from the disappearance of the dynasties in Northern Europe. the changes after the war in Germany, though they gave rise to social readjustments which involved great misery for certain classes, cannot be said to have made any cleavage in the life and character of the German race. The elimination of the Hohenzollerns in particular made scarcely any change in the system under which Germany was governed. The German Emperor was only the First Bureaucrat of his country ; the bureaucracy did not—after the first moment—cease to function when he was removed. But the Hapsburg Emperor was very much more than the head of his bureaucracy. He was the symbol of an idea, and the pivot of a system, on which the lives and activities of ten distinct and different races from the Alps to the Carpathians and from the Danube to the Mediterranean were built up.

What idea ? It was the idea which is struggling for emergence in this first half of the twentieth century—the idea that the nation is not the be-all and the end-all of political thought, that it is possible and on many grounds desirable to transcend the limits of nationality, and that political units can exist and prosper of a non-national or international basis. The idea, and the dynasty which symbolized and incorporated it, dated back indeed to the Middle and Dark Ages and the internationalism of the Catholic Church : but they had shown such power of adaptation and had survived so many vicissitudes, including the epidemic of nationalism in the nineteenth century, that many believed they were destined to bear new fruits in the twentieth century. The strain of five years of " world war ' was too much. Nationalism won its last victory. The dynasty collapsed, and the ten peoples—German, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Ruthene, Croat, Clovene, Serb, Italian, and Roumanian—who had live together under its ægis were regrouped in six separate and competing States.

( page 32 )

London : Edward Arnold 1932.

Butler, Ralph. Title(s) Little missions, by Septimus Despencer [pseud.] Publisher Lond., Arnold, c1932. Paging 215 p. 19 cm. Subject Headings Reconstruction (1914-1939) Europe.
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