THE HABSBURG EMPIRE
In the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR, - As your reviewer gave my book Some Memories of the Peace Conference a very kind notice in your issue of June 9th, it may seem rather churlish to call attention to one passage which he writes regarding my references to Austria Hungary. He says," Colonel Beadon . . like many other people . . . hardly realizes that the Habsburg Empire split into fragments through the efforts of the subject races. The Allies did not wish to break it up and could not even had they wished have put it together again."
But the whole tenor of the chapter I included on Austria- Hungary was to this very effect, i.e., that the Conference did not destroy the Habsburg Empire. I have only space for one sentence of what I wrote : " We were faced with the accomplished fact that the Empire had already fallen to pieces and it remained either to assemble those pieces in some appropriate manner or to attempt to consolidate each fragment so that it could assume a new national allegiance or take its place independently within the European family " (p. 198). And this I elaborated.
Thus, I am sure quite undesignedly, your reviewer inferS. that I offered opinions the exact opposite of which I hold and tried to express in my book as responding to the facts
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