What did 102 days of Romanian Budapest cost?

20 July – 3 August 1919

Kun's Red Army strikes across the river — and six days later the Romanians are crossing it the other way, 84,000 strong.

On 20 July 1919 the Hungarian Red Army attacked the Romanian bridgeheads on the Tisza. By 24 July the Romanian northern group counterattacked, retaking Kunhegyes and Fegyvernek; on 26 July the Hungarians blew the Szolnok bridge behind them and the east bank was Romanian again. Then, on the night of 29–30 July, 119 battalions — 84,000 men with 392 guns and 60 cavalry squadrons — crossed near Fegyvernek by surprise, under cover of decoy attacks. On 31 July the Hungarian Army fell back toward Budapest; on 1 August the Revolutionary Governing Council resigned and Béla Kun fled toward Austria. The road to the capital lay open, and nothing in the armistice papers said where it ended.

3–4 August 1919

400 horsemen in the evening, a whole army by noon — and a parade through a capital whose government has just evaporated.

On the evening of 3 August General Gheorghe Rusescu rode into Budapest at the head of 400 horsemen — three squadrons of the 6th Cavalry Regiment. Until noon on 4 August those 400 soldiers with two guns were the only authority in a city of nearly a million; then the bulk arrived, the flag went up over Buda, and the parade marched past General Moșoiu. The drive had cost 123 officers and 6,434 soldiers, and by 8 August the bag counted 1,235 Hungarian officers and 10,000 men taken, with 350 guns and 87 airplanes. The advance halted at Győr. Budapest, which had changed regimes twice in a week, now had a Romanian garrison and no instructions from Paris on what to do with it.

August – November 1919

Patrols, quotas, fixed prices — and four Allied generals writing down every wagon.

General Marcel Olteanu, military governor from August to November, had to make the city work: Romanian patrols policed the streets and Romanian offices ran the administration until Allied pressure handed both back — Budapest's 3,700 policemen received all of 600 carbines. To feed the troops and bill the war, the command fixed prices and set quotas: at Debrecen wheat was fixed at 90 crowns against a market 120–140, a farmer kept one year's seed plus 120 kg of bread-stuffs and 75 kg of potatoes per mouth, and meat shrank to three days a week. Watching it all was the Inter-Allied Military Mission — Bandholtz, Gorton, Graziani, Mombelli — in open discord with Bucharest. On 5 October Bandholtz stopped the removal of the National Museum's treasure at the museum steps; on 12 September Brătianu had already resigned rather than bow to Paris; on 23 October Sir George Clerk arrived to arrange the exit.

14 November 1919 – 4 June 1920

The Romanians march out on the 14th, Horthy rides in on the 16th — and seven months later the map is redrawn at Trianon.

Under the Clerk agreement of 5 November the Romanian troops evacuated Budapest on 14 November; two days later Admiral Miklós Horthy entered at the head of the National Army and accused the capital of betraying Hungary by backing Bolshevism. The last Romanian units left Hungarian soil in the spring — the sources disagree whether 25 February or 30 March 1920, and this page does not choose. Then, on 4 June 1920, in the Grand Trianon at Versailles, Benárd and Drasche-Lázár signed the treaty that redrew Hungary's borders; it took effect on 26 July 1921. Its Article 181 set up the very procedure under which Budapest would bill Bucharest: damage registration closed on 30 September 1921 and the Hungarian note went to Paris in 1922. The ledger outlived the occupation by years.