Above and below: "The Paris-Belgrade-Bucharest Horseback Ride of Mlle Dorange / The Gracious Amazon Photographed in Belgrade / Mlle Dorange, who is carrying out a Paris-Vienna-Budapest-Belgrade-Bucharest horseback ride, arrived in the Yugoslav capital Sunday, coming from Indjia, near Novi-Sad, where she passed the night. She left there [Belgrade] two days ago."
Source: Excelsior, June 15, 1928, p. 8 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Gallica).
8. Bucharest, 1928 (continued)
Budapest to Belgrade (Map 6-7)
It took Rachel a week to travel from Budapest to Belgrade where whe arrived on the morning of June 11. She averaged 54 kilometers a day over the 379 kilometer trip. Most of the trip – 296 kilometers – was within Hungary and Rachel was presumably accompanied by a Hungarian military escort.
When she was in Belgrade she had a Yugoslav staff officer with her, so she most likely had a Yugoslav cavalry escort from the Hungarian border to Belgrade.
She reportedly passed the previous night at Indija, but this is unlikely. Indjia is 58 kilometers, or a full day's journey from Belgrade, and in order to have arrived in Belgrade in the morning she would have had to travel overnight, something that she never did. So she must have spent the night somewhere just short of Belgrade.
Rachel was "almost unnoticed" when she entered Belgrade, but was greeted by the usual cluster of reporters and by several members of the Belgrade Jockey Club. She was also received by the French ambassador, Émile Dard.
Rachel complained that "she had encountered a series of inconveniences between the Hungarian border and Belgrade, as she was stopped at every turn by gendarmes and had to show her identification."
Rachel seems to have been a true "innocent abroad," oblivious to the dangerous political, social and economic crises that bubbled beneath the surface in the lands she passed through unless they inconvenienced her personally.
The Europe she saw was still suffering from the aftereffects of World War I. The enormous damage and loss of life inflicted by the war were all too evident in the ruined villages and towns and the enormous war cemeteries that dotted the landscape.
Moreover, not only did the "war to end wars" fail to resolve the issues that caused it, but the peace process created new issues that contributed to the outbreak of World War II.
One result of the peace process was the emergence of two new nations, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Both nations were made up of more or less incompatible entities, each with its own language, culture, history and political aspirations. In the case of Yugoslavia the two largest entities were Croatia and Serbia whose respective national ambitions were in open conflict.
The identity checks that inconvenienced Rachel were the result of tensions that had been simmering since 1921 when the Serb majority in the Yugoslav parliament imposed a new constitution that suppressed the traditional rights of other nationalities.
These tensions boiled over six days after Rachel left Belgrade on June 14. On June 20, during a debate in parliament, a member of the Serb majority pulled out an automatic pistol and shot five members of the opposition Croatian Peasant Party. Two of them were killed outright, two were wounded, and the Peasant Party leader, Stjepan Radić, died of his wounds several weeks later.
Czechoslovakia dissolved itself peacefully into its two component nations, Slovakia and the Czech Republic (or Czechia) in 1993, but Yugoslavia's tumultuous history only came to an end after a series of bloody civil wars that lasted from 1991 to 2001.