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And then came the day on which the first locomotive, decked out with flags, branches, ribbons, and flowers, pulled a whole trainful of jubilation from Marburg to Klagenfurt. Thirty young girls from the Styrian wine-centre were on the train in their festal finery, going to dance with the lads of Klagenfurt. All sang and shouted for joy because the new time had come, the time of youth.
It was thus that the Czechoslovaks the most docile of them all disregarding the injunctions of the Conference, took possession of contentious territory, and remained in possession of it for several months, and that the Jugoslavs occupied a part of the district of Klagenfurt and for a long time paid not the slightest heed to the order issued by the Supreme Council to evacuate it in favor of the Austrians, and that the Poles applied the same tactics to eastern Galicia.
"Why do you suppose that there is so much talk now of an independent little state centering around Klagenfurt?" one of them asked me. "I will tell you: for the sake of some avaricious capitalists. Already arrangements are being pushed forward for the establishment of a bank of which most of the shares are to belong to X." Another said: "Dantzig is needed for politico-commercial reasons.
Our route from Klagenfurt led back through Villach to Tarvis and thence over the Predil Pass to the Friuli plain and Udine, a journey which we expected to accomplish in a single day; but there were delays in re-crossing the Line of the Armistice and other and more serious delays in the mountains, caused by torrential rains which had in places washed out the road, so that it was already nightfall when, emerging from the gloomy defile of the Predil Pass, we saw before us the twinkling lights of the Alpini cantonment at Caporetto, that mountain hamlet of black memories where, in the summer of 1917, the Austro-German armies, aided by bad Italian generalship and Italian treachery, smashed through the Italian lines and forced them back in a headlong retreat which was checked only by the heroic stand on the Piave.
He bled me, ordered me to keep my bed, and to continue the digitalis. At the end of two days I renewed my solicitations to continue our journey. We proceeded through Austria and Stiria, and entered Carinthia without any accident; but on our arrival at the village of Feldkirchen, a little way from Klagenfurt, we were overtaken by a counter order from Vienna.
They further justified this occupation by asserting that Jugoslavia was entitled to Carinthia on ethnological grounds and that the inhabitants of Klagenfurt were clamoring for Jugoslav rule.
Bonaparte wooed the stupefied Carinthians with his softly worded proclamations, and his advancing columns were unharassed by the peasantry while he pushed farther on, capturing Klagenfurt, and seizing both Triest and Fiume, the only harbors on the Austrian shore. He then returned with the main body of his troops, and, crossing the pass of Tarvis, entered Germany at Villach.
At Klagenfurt and Völkermarkt they danced all the girls away before his very nose, and it was just the winter, toward which he had looked forward with joyful anticipation, which became the way of the cross for him, where each stopping-place meant the end of a love and loyalty.
Suddenly my troubled thoughts were still. An unwonted rapture filled my heart. I sat and read till the supper bell rang. They were speaking at table of a red glaring meteor, which had just been seen in the air, southeast from Klagenfurt; and had suddenly disappeared with a dull, hollow sound. It was the very moment at which I had taken my final resolution to leave my native land.
So great was the tension existing in Klagenfurt that a commission had been sent by the Peace Conference to study the question on the spot, its members communicating with the Supreme Council in Paris by means of American couriers, slim young fellows in khaki who wore on their arms the blue brassard, embroidered with the scales of justice, which was the badge of messengers employed by the Peace Commission.
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