Gheorghe Rusescu

Gheorghe Rusescu was a Romanian cavalry officer who for thirty years of service remained one of many regimental and brigade commanders, and who passed into history thanks to a single evening. On 3 August 1919, two days after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he rode into Budapest at the head of some four hundred cavalrymen with two guns and forced the defenceless Hungarian government to accept the Romanians in the capital. He was the first commander of the victorious army to enter the city in the Hungarian–Romanian War. To Romanian cavalrymen he became a symbol of daring; to his superiors he was an insubordinate officer who had stolen their glory; and to the Hungarians he was one of the faces of an occupation that poisoned relations between the two countries for twenty years. Little is known about his life after 1919, and Romanian writers call him “the forgotten hero”.

A cavalryman from a military family

He was born on 9 September 1867 in Bucharest, the son of C. A. Rusescu and Eufrosina Rusescu. The sources do not say whether this date is reckoned according to the Julian calendar then in use in Romania or has already been converted to the Gregorian; in the former case his Gregorian birthday would be 21 September. According to Romanian biographers he chose a soldier’s career following family tradition. He was educated at the school for soldiers’ sons in Craiova, and in 1886–1888 at the Military School of Infantry and Cavalry in Bucharest, from which he graduated as a second lieutenant. He later also completed the special cavalry school and the Higher War School, which prepared officers for staff service and senior command.

He rose slowly, like most officers of an army that had not fought a war for more than thirty years after the War of Independence of 1877–1878: he became a lieutenant in 1892, a captain in 1898, a major in 1906 and a lieutenant colonel in 1913. He served in various cavalry regiments and on the staffs of higher commands. Romanian sources count among his most important pre-war posts the command of the 9th Călărași Regiment (the territorial cavalry) and of the 6th Roșiori Regiment (the line cavalry, whose name comes from their red uniforms). In 1906 he received the Officer’s Cross of the Order of the Crown of Romania, and in 1913 the Officer’s Cross of the Order of the Star of Romania.

In 1913 he took part in the Second Balkan War. Romania entered it against Bulgaria, and its army crossed the Danube and advanced almost to Sofia, meeting hardly any resistance. The campaign brought Romania Southern Dobruja, but it also exposed shortcomings in the army’s organisation, above all in the medical service, as cholera broke out in the camps.

The Great War

When Romania entered the First World War on the side of the Entente in August 1916, Colonel Rusescu commanded the 6th Roșiori Regiment, whose peacetime garrison was at Tecuci in southern Moldavia. The regiment formed part of the 4th Roșiori Brigade together with the 11th Roșiori Regiment. In the autumn of 1916 it fought in the offensive in Transylvania and then, when German and Austro-Hungarian forces went over to the counter-attack, in the defence of the passes in the Eastern Carpathians, in the First Battle of Oituz.

At the end of 1916 Romania was facing disaster. The troops of Field Marshal August von Mackensen had crossed the Danube, and German armies from Transylvania had forced their way through the passes into Wallachia. From 1 December 1916 to 4 January 1917 (18 November – 22 December by the Julian calendar) Rusescu commanded the 1st Cavalry Division. These were the days of the Battle of Bucharest, the last attempt to halt the enemy before the capital, whose capture on 6 December ended the campaign, and of the retreat of the remnants of the army into Moldavia (PL). The available sources do not show what part the division under his command played in the individual engagements.

In 1917, while the Romanian army was being rebuilt in Moldavia with the help of a French military mission, Rusescu took command of the 4th Roșiori Brigade. According to Romanian studies the brigade fought in the summer of 1917 in the Battle of Mărășești, the Romanian army’s greatest victory of the war, which halted the German offensive against Moldavia. On 1 September 1917 Rusescu was promoted to brigadier general on the battlefield, and in 1918 he received the Commander’s Cross of the Order of the Star of Romania with swords.

The ride to Budapest

In 1919–1920 Rusescu again commanded the 4th Roșiori Brigade, with which he took part in the campaign against Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic. In the summer of 1919 the brigade belonged to the forces of General Gheorghe Mărdărescu, who commanded all Romanian troops on the Hungarian front. After repulsing the Hungarian offensive across the Tisza, the Romanians crossed the river on the night of 29–30 July and advanced into the interior. On 1 August the Soviet Republic collapsed and Kun fled to Austria. On 2 August Rusescu’s brigade took Albertirsa and cut the railway from Cegléd to Budapest.

According to Romanian studies the brigade’s task was to block the Hungarians’ lines of retreat to the south, but when on the morning of 3 August Rusescu learnt that the Hungarian Red Army was capitulating, he detached a force of three cavalry squadrons, two machine-gun sections and two horse-artillery guns, some four hundred men, and led it on the capital. He ignored a request from Italian officers to halt operations. In the evening, in pouring rain, he was stopped at the eastern edge of the city by a delegation from the government of the Social Democrat Gyula Peidl. Rusescu replied that not only would he not withdraw, he would enter the city at once; he had his guns laid ready to fire and threatened a bombardment. The government, which no longer had any troops at all, gave way. At around 8 p.m. the Romanian cavalry rode into Budapest and occupied the hussar barracks, and the general set up his quarters in the Dunapalota Hotel on the Danube. The next day the main forces arrived, and the victors held a parade on Andrássy Avenue.

Mărdărescu received the news of his subordinate’s exploit with fury. According to Romanian authors he considered that Rusescu had acted without orders, neglected his task and robbed him of the honour of capturing the enemy capital. Rusescu was disciplined and removed from command of the brigade. Romanian tradition adopted 4 August, the day the main forces entered, as the date of the capture of Budapest. Only later did the Chief of the General Staff, General Constantin Christescu, describe Rusescu’s raid as “a bold act befitting a cavalryman”. Hungarian studies, for their part, present the matter differently, stating that the entry into the capital on 3 August took place on Mărdărescu’s orders, despite the Great Powers’ call to halt the advance. The sources do not make it possible to establish which version is closer to the truth, and it is possible that both contain part of it: Rusescu may have acted without an explicit order but in the spirit of the command’s general decision to pay no heed to Paris.

The occupation of Budapest lasted until 14 November 1919. In late November and early December the brigade was transported back to Tecuci, where the townspeople gave it a triumphal welcome. By a royal decree of 26 May 1920 both its regiments, the 6th and 11th Roșiori, were awarded the Order of the Star of Romania with swords for their colours.

After the war

Rusescu’s career stalled after 1919. In 1924 he passed into the reserve as a brigadier general, and in 1931 or 1932, by then retired, he was given the rank of major general and the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Ferdinand I (PL) with the ribbon of Military Virtue. He was married twice and had seven children. No monument was raised to him, nor was he honoured in any special way, and his name appeared mainly in local reminiscences from Tecuci and in disputes over who deserved the credit for the capture of Budapest.

The date of his death is uncertain. Some sources give the year 1956, with a question mark, while other available sources give no date at all. If that date is correct, Rusescu lived through the Second World War, Romania’s switch to the Allied side in 1944 and the communist regime, under which the Romanian expedition against the Hungarian Soviet Republic was spoken of reluctantly.

Significance

Rusescu was not a great commander, and apart from the evening of 3 August 1919 his biography differs little from those of hundreds of Romanian army officers of his generation. That one evening, however, wrote him into the history of Romanian–Hungarian relations. For the Romanians the capture of Budapest confirmed their victory and the union with Transylvania, and in the interwar period it became one of the founding myths of “Greater Romania”. For the Hungarians it was a symbol of humiliation which, alongside the Treaty of Trianon, fed Hungarian revisionism. That revisionism pushed Admiral Miklós Horthy’s Hungary towards Hitler’s Germany, and in 1940 it produced the Second Vienna Award, which gave Hungary northern Transylvania. The dispute in which Rusescu was for a few hours a leading figure was thus one of the threads that led East Central Europe into the Second World War.

His story also shows how the memory of a war takes shape. For decades Romanian tradition was dominated by the version of Mărdărescu, who took the parade, wrote a book about the campaign and became Minister of War. Rusescu, the first to ride into the city, was more widely remembered only in recent decades, on the successive anniversaries of the capture of Budapest, when the Romanian media, military archives and the local press in Tecuci began to write about “the forgotten hero”.