Note 32 — VI (continued 3)

There are in the Banat some ultra-patriotic Magyars, such as the man at Antanfalva (Kovačiča) who, having lost something between his house and the post office, insisted on advertising for it in the Buda-Pest papers. But the Yugoslav rule was so satisfactory that, two or three years after the Armistice, I found in the large Hungarian village of Debelyacsa—where the intelligentsia called the sympathetic Serbian notary by his Christian name—not one of the inhabitants proposed to remove to Hungary. No doubt the goodness of the soil had something to do with this decision, but, more, the liberal methods of the Serbs. No military service was as yet exacted—all that the Magyars had been asked to do was to work for two months in obliterating the ravages of war. The priest and the schoolmaster who had come from Hungary before the War still exercised their functions, and—in contrast with what had previously been the case—both the Magyar and the Serbian language were taught, the latter from the third class upwards. Altogether there was perfect harmony between the Magyars and the Serbs; when I was there the only racial question which occupied the Magyar farmers was the resolve of their intelligentsia to have, as centre-half in the football team, not a Magyar but a more skilful Jewish player.