Page 261 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo II

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Civilians and the Italian Military mission in Budapest in 1919

ALBErTo BEChErELLI

Between May and September 1919, at the end of the First World War, the Italian Military
Mission commanded by Colonel Guido Romanelli (Siena 1876 - S.Vito al Tagliamento 1973)
carried out a diplomatic and humanitarian assignment in Béla Kun’s and following Ruma-
nian military occupation’s Hungary, with the task of checking the real implementation of the
measures that were being decided in Versailles. The Mission was one of the few, if not the
only one, representative of the winning nations of the Entente in the Hungarian Soviet Re-
public, but above all, as Romanelli wrote in his memoirs, in those months the Mission uncon-
sciously was “un organo di collegamento tra l’Ungheria ed il resto del mondo, una valvola di
sfogo alla duplice stretta, che soffocava e paralizzava la libertà di movimenti di un’intera
1
popolazione: la politica di accerchiamento dell’Intesa e la tirannia bolscevica”. Civilians
relied on the Mission for protection and consolation, for the Hungarians it became a “tutelary
deity”, a friendly hand to which apply to receive protection from every menace, reparation
2
from the wrongs and even as a consolation for the widespread pain: the assignment, more-
over, put in evidence the strong personality and the philanthropic vocation of the man who
was charged to lead it, in a period of dramatic and essential events at the same time, for inde-
pendence and for demarcating borders of the magyar State. In autumn 1918 the defeats of the
imperial army on the Italian and Balkan front had determined Austro-Hungarian Empire’s
fate, that on November the 3 had to sign an armistice at Villa Giusti in Padua – compulsory
rd
for both of the members of the Dual Monarchy – that signed the end of the battle on the Ital-
ian front; despite this event, ten days after, in Belgrade, the French commander of the Allied
Force in Balkans, General Louis Franchet d’Espery, probably by his own decision (as the
government from Paris often said), signed another pact for the Danube-Balkan zone, with
just the spokesmen of the new Hungarian Government, in this way accepting the existence of
an independent Hungary and creating a serious break into the Entente. The decision of
3
Frenchet d’Espery, indeed, had legitimated the political changes that took place some days
before in Budapest. Charles IV of Habsburg, who became king on 30 December 1916, des-
perately tried to save the Empire with a new confederated project (16 October 1918) and a

1 “A connection between Hungary and the rest of the World, a relief valve for the two holds that were snuffing
out and paralyzing the freedom of a whole population: the Intent’s policy and the Soviet oppression”, G.
RomanElli, Nell’Ungheria di Béla Kun e durante l’occupazione romena. La mia missione (maggio-novembre
1919), edited by A. BiaGini, Roma, Ufficio Storico Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito, 2002, p. 109. The text,
written by the italian officer in 1923, was published the first time in 1964 in Udine, an edition now of difficult
availability. Also Andrea Carteny wrote about humanitarian aspects of the Italian Military Mission in Buda-
pest in his contribution L’Ungheria nel 1919. La Missione militare e umanitaria del Colonnello Romanelli,
in a. CaRtEny, Da Budapest a Bucarest. Saggi di storia e cultura, Roma, Periferia, 2007, pp. 3-16.
2 G. RomanElli, Nell’Ungheria di Béla Kun..., p. 105.
3 See La missione del colonnello Romanelli e la politica estera italiana, in a. VaGnini, Momenti di storia
ungherese. Politica e diplomazia, Roma, Nuova Cultura, 2008, pp. 3-27.