How the Austrians waged war—The Serbian Princes—The tactics of the Montenegrin King—The Magyars and their prisoners—The Southern Slavs in Austria-Hungary—How the War raged in the winter of 1914-1915—The Treaty of London, April 1915—How Bulgaria came into the War—Attempt to buy off the Serbs—Greek transactions—Flight of the Serbs—The faithful Croats—How the Serbs came to their Patriarch's town—The shadow over Montenegro—The broken Serbs at Corfu—The Southern Slavs in the United States—Cash and the Montenegrin Royal family—-The burden of Austria's Southern Slav troops—The faithful Italians—Southern Slavs in the Austrian navy—Advance of the Allies in Macedonia—How the Magyars treated their Serbian subjects—The Southern Slavs pay part of their debt to the Habsburg Monarchy: (a) in Syrmia; (b) in Slovenia.

HOW THE AUSTRIANS WAGED WAR

"Machen Sie Ordnung!" ["Put matters in order"] was the phrase used by Austrian officers in Serbia when they wished a non-commissioned officer to see that such and such Serbian civilians should be hanged or shot. Occasionally an accident occurred, as when a priest near ViŠegrad came to an officer with the request that his plum trees should be spared, since he had nothing else. This officer intended to be kind and, not knowing or forgetting the sense in which those three words were being used, he said to a sergeant, "Machen Sie Ordnung!" and the next morning a prominent citizen of Split, Count Pavlovic, whose post in the Austro-Hungarian army was that of a provost-marshal, saw the priest, his wife and his three little boys hanging from the plum trees. It was and is the fashion to assert that the Austrian army was incomparably less brutal than the Prussian, so that some readers will be disinclined to believe a conversation which Count Pavlovic, particularly as he is a Yugoslav, once had at Donja Tusla in Bosnia with a certain Captain Waldstein, who between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. had sentenced nineteen people to be hanged. These people, by the way, were all over twenty years of age, so that each case had to be tried; persons under that age could, as we have seen, also be hanged, but not as the result of a trial. Pavlovic approached the captain—his rank, to be accurate, was captain-auditor—and asked him how he had lunched after such a morning's work. "I felt," was the reply, "as if I had drunk nineteen glasses of beer." An Austrian army surgeon, Dr. Wallisch, who during the occupation travelled professionally in Serbia and wrote a good deal about it in Viennese papers and Austrian papers in Belgrade, said that "everywhere in this Balkan and patriarchal environment you see educational mansions and spacious barracks.[80] Does not this, better than anything else, show the criminal, premeditated hostility of the Serbs against our Monarchy? They have the longing to learn, which devours the ambitious, and likewise the wish to realise by force of arms this fantastic ideal of an over-excited national sentiment." Yes indeed, this was the ideal of King Peter, in accordance with the device of the poet, Aksentie Teodosijevic: "Towards liberty, in the first place through learning and culture, then with arms." Very few people would be inclined to believe that the invading Austrians could be so petty as to burn all the schoolbooks they came across, and still fewer would credit the fact that Yugoslav patients with gold-filled teeth ran any special risk in Austrian army hospitals. Ivo StaniŠic of the Bocche di Cattaro had fought with the Montenegrins and, in consequence of Nikita's capitulation, had fallen into the Austrians' hands. He was warned by his friends not to go into hospital, where his twelve gold teeth, which he had acquired in the United States, might prove his undoing. He did, as a matter of fact, die there, and the overdose of morphia—witnessed by the well-known architect, Matejorski of Prague—may have been accidental, and the Austrians who took his teeth out may have thought it foolish to leave so much gold in a corpse. Another Bocchesi who underwent the same treatment was one Risto LijeŠevic. Perhaps the Austrians do not deny these incidents, and considering the trouble which they gave themselves to have a long series of open-air brutalities officially photographed and made the subject of picture postcards, one presumes that the dental operations were omitted on account of the bother of indoor photography. The postcards, of which I have a large collection, place on record the procedure used in the wholesale hanging and shooting of Bosnian and Serbian civilians, young and old, men and women. More trouble was taken over the photographs, which are sometimes minute and sometimes artistic in depicting a row of gallows on an eminence with gloomy clouds behind them, than was taken with the manufacture of these gallows, for in many cases they were no more than a seven-foot stake, to the top of which the victim's throat was firmly fastened, holding his or her feet a short distance from the ground. We have in the London Press and in the House of Lords a number of reactionary persons who do not cease regretting the disappearance of Austria-Hungary. The new States, such as Yugoslavia and Czecho-Slovakia, they argue, are very unsatisfactory, if only for the reason that they substitute a lower civilization for a higher. Austrian culture, in their opinion, is so different from that of the new States that you cannot compare them. And when they talk of the Habsburg dynasty it is after the fashion of old Francis Joseph who, in 1891, when the four hundredth anniversary of the great Czech teacher Comenius was being officially celebrated in all the schools of Prussia, commanded that nothing of the sort was to be done in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, because his attention had been drawn by Archbishop Schwarzenberg of Prague to a Latin letter in which the great man uttered some sharp words concerning the dynasty. One is prepared to overlook a great many things which happened in the stress of war, but the postcards which portray fashionably dressed women and girls strolling between the gallows as if at a garden party and merely using their parasols against the sun, do not appear to leave any attributes for a civilization lower than that which they exhibit. The Bosniaks and Serbs who were thus done away with were frequently even less to blame than those ignorant peasants who, being told by their priests that Peter was their King, shouted "Long live King Peter!" as the Austrian troops marched through their villages, and were forthwith hanged for high treason. "Whenever," says Euripides, "I see the wicked fall into adversity I declare that the gods do exist." At Trnovo twenty-eight were executed, including two women and at PalÉ, near Sarajevo, twenty-six, the Austrians killing all the old folk and the children who remained when the Montenegrin and Serbian armies retreated. Those who were not murdered on the spot had a period of imprisonment during which they were fed on white bread; but all that they were asked, prior to their execution, was their name, their father's name and their domicile. Thousands were interned—at Doboj between twenty and thirty died every day of illness or of famine. The fate of the abandoned children in Bosnia was such that when Dr. Bilinski, the Governor (afterwards Minister of Finance in Poland) was told of it he had the decency to weep. His informant was Madame Cuk of Zagreb, so well known to British travellers; this lady was at the head of an organization which removed as many children as possible from Bosnia to other parts of the Dual Monarchy. The diet of grass, cow's dung and a kind of bread, chiefly composed of clay and wood-shavings and the bark of trees, gave to nearly all the children a protruding stomach; they were so weak that they would fall out of the luggage-racks of the railway carriages, and with 500-600 children in three waggons it was necessary to deposit some of them in the racks. At a place called Sunia it was the ladies' custom to have cauldrons of maize and water, as well as bacon, waiting for the travellers, but very often this food brought on a colic, so unaccustomed were the children to fats.[81] If the Austrians intended to put their Bosnian house in order by finishing off the population—"Machen Sie Ordnung"—they made considerable progress. They had hoped, before the War began, to send a punitive expedition into Serbia that would finish off that insolent, small country. Delirious was the enthusiasm of the Viennese at the declaration of War. Fate was giving them the whitest of bread before their execution.

The Austrian statesmen did not embark on the War without taking certain precautions. Count Berchtold, on July 28, submitted for the old Emperor's signature the war declaration, which explicitly stated that the Government was forced to protect its rights and interests by recourse to arms, the more so as the Serbian troops had already attacked the Imperial and Royal soldiers at Temes-Kubin on the Danube. After the Emperor had signed the declaration of war in this form, Count Berchtold struck out the reference to a fight at Temes-Kubin, and sent a letter to Francis Joseph explaining that he had taken it on himself to eliminate this sentence as the reports had not been confirmed. "It is clear," said the Arbeiter-Zeitung,[82] commenting on the Austrian Red-book which revealed this affair, "it is clear that the fight at Temes-Kubin never occurred, but was simply invented by Count Berchtold. That arch-scoundrel not only deceived the people, but also the Emperor. The destiny of the world depended upon whether an eighty-four-year-old man permitted himself to be deceived. For such a crime Berchtold must certainly be sent to prison, or, more justly, to the gallows."

If the punitive expedition into Serbia had been less disastrous, it would perhaps have been accompanied with less barbarity—though the Austrian army was handicapped, owing to the large number of aristocratic, and presumably more gentle, officers who found themselves unable to leave the War Office and similar institutions in Vienna. Yet the Austrians seem to have determined how to act before they came. A special branch of the army occupied itself with the stealing, packing and dispatching of cameras, engravings, ladies' garments, etc. etc.—numerous lists were accidentally left behind in Belgrade, and every sheet at the top left-hand corner was stamped with the words "Sammlungs-Offizier" (i.e. Collection-officer). I do not know what knowledge and what skill are necessary before this rubber stamp is conferred upon a man. Did the Imperial and Royal authorities regard him as a non-combatant? The "Sammlungs-Offizier" might resent such a classification if in private life he had been a courageous burglar. And the Imperial and Royal army, according to certain "Instructions for the conduct of troops" which were found on a wounded officer of the 9th Army Corps, had resolved—irrespective of success or failure in the War—to massacre the Serbs without compunction: "Any person encountered in the open, and especially in a forest, must be regarded as a member of a 'band' that has concealed its weapons somewhere, which weapons we have not the time to look for. These people are to be executed if they appear even slightly suspicious"; and another paragraph says that "I will not allow persons armed, but wearing no uniform, whether encountered singly or in groups, to be taken prisoners. They must be executed without exception." The Austrians knew very well that the Serbs had not received their new uniforms, and that at least one-third of their army was obliged to take the field in ordinary peasant's dress.[83] The fact that the Austrian invasion of north-western Serbia came to such an ignominious end before September is no reason why so large a number of women, children and old men were, as is very well authenticated, cut to pieces, burned alive, despoiled of their eyes, their noses, disembowelled, and so forth. One expects a certain amount of licence from the baser elements of an invading army; but in Serbia—perhaps because this was a punitive expedition—it seems to have been the Imperial and Royal officers who egged on their men.... I have tried, from the Austrian records, to ascertain whether any comparable outrages can be laid at the door of the Serbs. And there is one incident which utterly disgraces some of their Montenegrin brothers: the men of Foca in Herzegovina joined the Montenegrin army when it penetrated to the neighbourhood of Sarajevo. When it was thrown back the Foca comrades—Yugoslavs, of course, and guilty of high treason against Austria—accompanied them to Montenegro; and later on some Montenegrin officers denounced the people of Foca to the Austrians, with the result that fourteen of them were hanged.

On August 24, 1914, after twelve terrible days, the Austrians were dislodged from Šabac and flung across to the northern bank of the Save. More useful to the Serbs than their 6000 prisoners were the 50 cannons and over 30,000 rifles, for the Serbian troops had entered the War with such scanty equipment that many of the regiments with an effective strength of over 4000 men possessed only 2500 rifles. The armed soldiers went into action, while the unarmed waited in reserve, springing forward as their comrades fell, and taking up the weapons of the fallen to continue the fight. Here occurred an incident of which the hero was a boy. He had run away to the army and, to his vast delight, been made a standard-bearer. When an officer perceived that he was continuously exposing himself he told him to hide. "No one will see you," said the officer. "But," answered the boy, "the flag will see." And he was killed. Many of the dead or wounded Austrians were Southern Slavs who had not been able to surrender to their brothers; they were often found with all their cartridges intact, and with their rifles made incapable of shooting.

THE SERBIAN PRINCES

One of the first results of this victory was the invasion, by Serb and Montenegrin troops, of Bosnia. They succeeded in penetrating to within a few miles of Sarajevo, and there they were held up not only by the encircling forts but by the scarcity of their ammunition, for the Russian supplies had not yet come through. "Your Royal Highness," said a corporal one day to Prince George, the impetuous young man who had resigned his position as heir to the throne and was at this moment far more congenially occupied as the chief of an irregular band in the mountains, "we have no more ammunition," said the corporal. "Each man has a knife?" asked George. The corporal nodded. "Then let us go on." The Prince has a great wound across his breast, from one side to the other. He is very much the descendant of Kara George; he dislikes making a secret of his opinions. King Peter, who was present at the inauguration of the Belgrade synagogue, always refrained from entering the Roman Catholic Church, since it was included in the buildings of the Austrian Legation. His elder son was not averse, when relations were strained, from taking an enthusiastic part in anti-Austrian demonstrations, so that the Austrians were delighted to spread a report that this ebullient youth had killed his orderly and must be set aside from the succession. The truth was that George happened to catch this orderly reading a private letter of his; in a sudden fit of rage he struck him a blow, even as Kara George would have done—unluckily the man rolled down some steps and from the resulting injuries he died. A good many Austrian and German writers have said that George is mad; he is certainly less fitted to govern Yugoslavia than is Alexander, his brother. One remembers George, so dark and lean and hawk-eyed, traversing the broad Danube at Belgrade in a most original fashion; as the blocks of ice swept along he made his horse leap from one of them to another. And one thinks of that more patient prince, Alexander, poring for hours over papers of State, gazing up a little wearily through his glasses, wondering for month after month whether the crisis between Government and Opposition in Yugoslavia will ever be solved. George will seek relaxation in driving a motor-car as if the Serbian roads were a racing track; Alexander's relaxation is to hear a new musical play, then to go home and repeat the whole score by heart on his piano.

All through the War Alexander, the Prince Regent—for King Peter felt himself, on account of his age and his rheumatism, unequal to anything save the personal encouragement of his soldiers in the trenches[84]—throughout the War Alexander was with his army. In his eloquent proclamations one sees the student; on the battlefield he conquered his shyness. And now he is a truly democratic King, at whose table very often is some non-commissioned officer or private whose acquaintance he has made in the War. He asked the man to come and see him one day in Belgrade, so that the royal adjutants are always busy with this stream of warriors. The men are well aware that their own peasant costume, with the sandals, is admissible at Court—even at a ball you see some fine old peasant, who is perhaps a deputy (and who does not, like a certain Polish Minister of recent years, remove his white collar before entering the Chamber). You can see him in his thick brown homespun with black braiding, breeches very baggy at the seat and closely fitting round the legs; as he comes in he knocks the snow from off his sandals, and strides, perfectly at ease, across the Turkish carpets. With such a man the King loves greatly to go hunting; last winter in the Rudnik region the inhabitants were being plagued by wolves, so the King went down there with some officers and peasants. Though he is so short-sighted that he constantly wears glasses—if you met him casually you would suppose that this keen-faced young officer was probably a writer of military books—though he is short-sighted he is one of the best shots in Europe. On the Slovenian mountains he has brought down many chamois and, before he succeeded, at a summer resort in Serbia he was always first at target practice. Nor is he less skilled at cards, particularly bridge. He gathers round him the best players in the town. Such are his relaxations after the long round of audiences and hours of other work. During the day he will have very likely undertaken to pay the expenses from his own pocket of another Serbian student, at home or abroad. So many of them are his pensioners. And it may be said without flattery that in the pursuit of knowledge he affords them an example. His subjects number about 14 millions, but when in conversation I happened to allude to a remote border village, his subsequent remarks made me wonder whether he had just been reading an article about the chequered history of that little place. He is, in fact, like his late grandfather of Montenegro, the father of his people. But they have different ideas about the duties of a father; and while Nikita's laugh was pretty grim, the deep whole-hearted laugh of Alexander takes you into the sincere recesses of the man.

During the Bosnian offensive there was launched an expedition over the Save into the goodly land of Syrmia, one of those Yugoslav provinces of which the Austro-Hungarian Empire was to be stripped. This expedition had a varying success, for the assault that was attempted in the neighbourhood of Mitrovica was not skilfully conducted; and the Serbian army, for the first time in the War, was worsted. Then troops in Bosnia, just before the grand attack on Sarajevo, were thrown into confusion by an order from the Montenegrin King who, without vouching any reason, called his army back. The Serbian troops had no other course than to retreat as well; and their enemies delivered, all the rest of September and throughout October, a tremendous thrust against the army that was shielding Valjevo. The Serbs, who were lamentably short of arms, munition, clothing and every sort of hospital equipment, did not care to think of the approach of winter. They hurled themselves against the Austrian swarms—and up to this period they had lost, in dead and seriously wounded, more than 130,000 men.

THE TACTICS OF THE MONTENEGRIN KING

The co-operation between Serbs and Montenegrins for the Bosnian campaign was the occasion of some of Nikita's usual devious diplomacy. He summoned, as we have seen, a superfluous SkupŠtina, whose resolutions would enable him to go to Francis Joseph, his secret ally, with a tale of force majeure. And he telegraphed to his grandson, the Serbian Prince-Regent: "My Montenegrins and myself are already on the frontiers, ready to die in the defence of our national independence." While his ill-equipped warriors pushed on to Budva, arrived before Kotor, seized Foca, Rogatica and other towns, pressing on until they stood before the forts of Sarajevo, the disreputable Royal Family, jealous as ever of Belgrade, were plunging deeper and always deeper into treachery. The Serbian officers, General Jankovic and Colonel (now General) PeŠic, who, mainly at the instance of Russia, had been sent to reorganize the Montenegrin army, saw themselves hampered at every turn by the Court clique at Cetinje. Jankovic, finding that orders were given without his knowledge, returned to NiŠ; and later on, after the fall of Lovcen, Nikita tried to foist upon PeŠic the odium of a surrender which his own machinations had brought about.

THE MAGYARS AND THEIR PRISONERS

As one might have expected, the withdrawal from Bosnia was followed by a repetition of the reign of terror in that beautiful land of woods and villages, where the Imperial and Royal authorities had been engaged for years in showing foreign journalists exactly what they wanted them to see. There had been some doubt as to whether Bosnia-Herzegovina came under the crown of Austria or that of Hungary. The Magyars had been gradually getting the upper hand in the administration, and now, in the autumn of 1914, it was they who undertook to deal with those subjected Bosniaks. Again we are furnished with evidence galore, not this time by picture postcards but by the cemeteries at Arad, the Hungarian (now it is a Roumanian) town on the MaroŠ. It was in the casemates of the Arad fortress, many of which had not been opened from the days of Maria Theresa, that thousands of poor Bosniak civilians were interned. In one of the cemeteries I counted 2103 black wooden crosses, in another between 600 and 700, in another about a thousand. These dead witnesses are more eloquent than the living. "On October 31, 1915," says an inscription on a cross in the largest cemetery, "there died, aged 95, Milija Arzic." She may have been a fearful danger to the Magyar State. Cross No. 716 says merely "Deaf and Dumb," so does No. 774. Jovan Krunic, No. 706, was 1½ year old. There are children even younger. The Magyars seem to have applied to Bosnia that label which the monkish mediÆval map-makers applied to the remoter peoples: "Here dwell very evil men." If, however, the commandant, Lieut.-Colonel HegedÜs—a magyarized version of the German held, which means "hero"—and his subordinates, Sergeants Rosner and Herzfeld, would claim that they did their best, they have some excuse in the fact that although the 10,000 interned people began to arrive in July, the first two doctors—who were also captives—did not appear until January 1915. In the absence of medical advice the sergeants may have thought it was an excellent plan, in November, to drive the prisoners into the MaroŠ for a bath and then to walk them up and down the bank until their clothes were dry; HegedÜs may have thought it was most sanitary to have dogs to eat the corpses' entrails and sometimes the whole corpse. Dr. Stephen Pop, a Roumanian lawyer in Arad (afterwards a Minister at Bucharest), displayed his humanity by drawing up a terrible indictment of the conditions. "You should be glad," said Tisza, the reactionary Premier, to him, "very glad that you can breathe the free air of Hungary." The casemates were provided with less than three centimetres of straw, which was not removed for months. Spotted fever, pneumonia and enteritis were the chief epidemics: those who were guilty of some offence, such as receiving a newspaper, would be put among the spotted fever cases. Sometimes the dead were left for two or three days with the living. Such was the state of the bastions and their underground passages that the Magyar soldiers came as rarely as they could manage. It was, said HegedÜs, a provisional arrangement to have about a thousand people in one of these passages or lunettes, with no lavatory. But it was not only the nonagenarians—several of whom were at Arad—that found their life was a very provisional affair. You could be killed in different ways: the dying were occasionally wrapped in a sheet and rocked against a wall. When they groaned the soldiers laughed, and said that this was "Cheering King Peter." In fact the Magyars behaved with rare generosity to their prisoners, we are told in the Oxford Hungarian Review (June 1922), by Mr. Aubrey Herbert, M.P., a gentleman who persists in writing of that which he does not know. A woman called Lenka (or Helen) Mihailovic, who had kept the canteen in the fortress during fifteen years, was expelled in January 1916 for having helped to clothe some naked children. People used to give Rosner, the sergeant, a tip in order to be allowed to visit the canteen. Their ordinary food was the reverse of appetizing. Constantine, the son of Ilja Jovanovic, a boy who used to be employed at the fortress (and who had not been permitted by the Magyars to learn his own language), saw the children being fed, very often, on salt fish—no matter whether they were ill or not—and sometimes on the intestines of horses. The Serbian grave-diggers used to cook themselves a dish of grass, salt and water. They were too weak to work, and they had work enough: on February 1, 1915, for instance, twenty-nine people were buried. A certain captain (afterwards Major) Lachmann, an Austrian officer, arrived in Arad and heard the apprehensions that an epidemic might spread from the fortress. This had, in fact, been debated by the town council; and Lachmann was eventually responsible for a commission of inquiry. But HegedÜs, although he was degraded and condemned to prison, made a successful appeal, for his father-in-law was a field-marshal, one Pacor.

A few improvements were made in the casemates towards the end of 1917, as a Spanish commission was expected. But it never came. Some of the long galleries have, since the Armistice, been furnished with windows and electric light; but about four months after the Armistice I found them full of dead flies and heavy with an abominable stench. Amid the dÉbris were many lamps, such as one uses in a mine. There was a proclamation, dated 1918, which tried to lure deserters back; it promised that no punishment would be inflicted on them if they should return, but that robbery or murder would meet with capital punishment, either by shooting or by strangling. The floor was littered with all kinds of paper, with scraps of furniture, a few chains and some prison books, which dated back for years. These gave details of all the punishments and were written in a very ornamental script, as though the clerks had taken a pleasure in their work. The Arad fortress had been partly used as a prison for a long time; but Misko Tatar, a Magyar, who stayed there sixteen years for having murdered his fiancÉe, his mother and his sister, as well as one Kocian, who remained for more than eighteen years—he had murdered the proprietor of a canteen, his wife and child in the Bocche—and Rujitatzka, a Croat, who together with another man had been accused of theft, had killed their escort and thrown his body into the Danube—none of these culprits could remember having heard of such punishments as the Bosniak civilians had to bear. The iron ring from which people used to be suspended for a couple of hours could still be seen on a large tree. If the relatives or friends could pay a fine this penalty was discontinued. Another method was to fasten a man's right wrist to his left ankle and the left wrist to the right ankle. He would then be left for a week; every night a blanket was thrown over him. But there is something very strange in the composition of the Magyars. When the revolution broke out and the prisoners, after all the years of horror, were gaining their freedom, an acquaintance of mine, a certain Gavric, whose job for three and a half years had been the comparatively pleasant one of cleaning boots, was on the point of leaving the prison. There he was met by the director's daughter. "And you an intelligent person!" she said. "Are you not ashamed of yourself?" The Hungarian newspapers wrote that HegedÜs was dead, which may or may not have been true; and in another paper, The Hungarian Nation, printed in English, in February 1920, the Rev. Dr. Nally said: "May we not still cling to the hope that chivalrous England will give a helping hand to the nation whose weakness is that she is too chivalrous?" One Englishman—whom the reader may or may not consider worth quoting—is with the Magyars. "No country," says Lord Newton,[85] "treated their prisoners of war so well as the Hungarian, and I know it, because looking after prisoners of war was my job." "My husband," says Lady Newton,[86] "had interested himself in their cause"—of "this delightful race," she terms them in the previous sentence—"and had been able to do their country some slight service, and for this they simply could not sufficiently show their gratitude towards ourselves. From the prince to the peasant the Hungarian is a grand seigneur, with all the instincts of a great gentleman and the manners of a king." May I mention that at the same time, I believe, as Lord and Lady Newton were being entertained, a poor Slovak was being differently treated. Having left his home in Hungary to serve in the Czecho-Slovak army, and having settled in Czecho-Slovakia, after the War he got word that his mother was dying. He thereupon applied for and received a Hungarian visa, and on entering that territory he was arrested! A long time afterwards the Czecho-Slovak Legation at Buda-Pest was vainly trying to have him liberated.

THE SOUTHERN SLAVS IN AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

From the beginning of the War the Imperial and Royal authorities had been exasperated by the Southern Slavs within the Empire. A few extracts from the archives which, after the end of the War, were found at Zagreb, will be of interest:

(A)

[In Serbo-Croat:] Telegram from the Commander of the Balkan Army, received in Zagreb, 3/10/1914

[In German:] His Excellency the Ban Baron
Skerlecz, Zgb. [Zagreb].
sss. Tuzla, 387, 146, 2/10/05.

Res. No. 817/ok. Investigation by Lieut.-Field-Marshal Szurmay has demonstrated that our soldiers have been shot at from houses in Beanija to the west of Semlin and that enemy troops have been given shelter. In accordance with the request of Lieut.-Field-Marshal Szurmay I urgently request that all male inhabitants over fifteen years of age shall be evacuated from this place and from all others in which similar incidents have occurred, that measures be taken without delay in the interior of Croatia, and a stern examination be carried out in association with the Zagreb military command as also with the Army group command of Petrovaradin, acting in conjunction with the Government Commissary Hideghethy. Guilty persons are to be handed over to the military court for legal treatment.

Identical copies to the Ban of Croatia, Slavonia and Government Commissary Baron Tallian and, for his information, to Lieut.-Field-Marshal Szurmay as well as to the Army group command of Petrovaradin.

Potiorek, Field-Marshal.

(B)

Imperial and Royal Army—Director of
Supplies and Transport.

K. No. 114.
To the Royal Government Commissary
Brcko, on the 12th September 1914.
Vukovar.

I have the honour to inform you that during these last days the railway near Mitrovica has been damaged by the artillery of the Serbian army, which would be almost incredible without signals made by the local population, and moreover that between Ruma and Indjija—that is to say in a part occupied by our troops—the permanent way has been injured, which in all probability was done by the people of that district.

These events and anyhow the general atmosphere in Syrmia make it necessary to take the most energetic steps, as indicated in the orders of the Imperial and Royal Prime Minister No. 6538/1914 and of the No. 913 of 1914.

Imperial and Royal 5th Army—Director of
Supplies and Transport.

K. No. 114.

(C)

Imperial and Royal Military Command in Zagreb.

Press Bureau, No. 2590.
To the Higher Command of the Army.
Higher Command of the Balkan Front.
Royal Military Press Bureau.
Zagreb, November 2, 1914.
/Ceteris exmissis/

"Thousands of loyal officers and men have fallen victims to the treachery that has penetrated so deeply into the Fatherland and is directed against our enthusiastic, brave and heroically fighting army. It is evident from all the reports of the wounded that no one has been afraid of the enemy troops, but rather of treachery which comes upon them from the front, the left, the right, the rear, from trees and from houses." ...

"Through treachery the foe was and is still made acquainted with every movement of troops, the enemy artillery is helped in every way through signals, so that it can direct upon us a fire that falls like lightning. Light signals, smoke signals, positions of church tower clocks, herds of cows, flocks of geese, imitations of the noises of animals, yellow and black flags, etc. etc., have indicated the strength and movements of troops." ...

Scheure, Lieut.-Field-Marshal.

(D)

Imperial and Royal Military Command in Zagreb.

Press Bureau, No. 3050.
The Spreading of Disquieting News
among the Population.

To His Excellency the Imperial and
Royal Secret Councillor Dr. Ivan
Baron Skerlecz, Ban of the Kingdom of
Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia.
Zagreb, November 26, 1914.

[This document, signed by Lieut.-Field-Marshal Scheure, draws attention to a secret society in Zagreb which from the beginning of the War is said to have been circulating false reports, not only with reference to "the most incredible news of our troops being defeated," but also as to the attitude of neutral States and of our own tried and excellent commanders, who are said to "have practised treachery, followed by suicide." The Ban's attention is directed to the introduction of hostile newspapers, and he is asked to have the foreign consuls in Zagreb discreetly watched. He is also told that in Zagreb the bank officials are said to have discouraged the citizens from investing in war loans.]

(E)

Imperial and Royal Military Command in Zagreb.

Press Bureau, No. 3297.

[Another note to the Ban, dated December 10, 1914, on the same subject. It is recommended that the persons chiefly responsible for these false reports be apprehended and interned, either on the charge of espionage or on account of having agitated. The Government is asked by the military command to have all such reports assembled, together with an appeal to loyal citizens, in an article which every newspaper should print twice, in successive numbers. At the same time all the newspapers should be told to print inspiring articles, and an article of this kind should be sent in for approval by the Government and the military command. The signature at the bottom of this note is undecipherable.]

(F)

Imperial and Royal Military Command in Zagreb.

Press Bureau, No. 841.
Zagreb, February 1915.

[This is a long and conscientious exposÉ by the military commandant of Zagreb of the political situation there and in Croatia generally. He mentions that when in June 1913 several men deserted from the 4th company of the 53rd Infantry Battalion, which belonged to the 8th Mountain Brigade, it was not thought to have any special significance. "When," says the writer, "I happened to express my astonishment that Croats should desert to Serbia, I received the following answer: 'The Croats are loyal, but the Emperor does not care for us; the Magyars do not understand us and we also do not wish to become Magyars. Therefore the Croats turn to the Serbs, who at least understand their language.' At that time," he continues, "I did not understand these words, but now that I have become more acquainted with this country, I see that they reveal everything. Alas, so many Croats have adopted this popular logic and seem to incline to the Serbs."

He explains that harmonious relations did not exist between the military command and the local government, since the former acted without taking into account the political position of any individual, while the latter acted in the reverse fashion.]

HOW THE WAR RAGED IN THE WINTER OF 1914-1915

In the winter of 1914 the Serbian army had been obliged to withdraw, leaving Valjevo to the Austrians. The retrograde movement had to continue; Belgrade was abandoned at the end of November, and the people from those northern and western parts of the country could not resign themselves to waiting for the enemy, after the manner in which he had behaved. Terror-stricken fugitives began to block the roads and to impede the movements of the army. Everywhere was panic. It is remarkable that the Serbian Government at NiŠ chose this time (November 24) for making to the National SkupŠtina the first Declaration[87] that they proposed to carry on the War until "we have delivered and united all our brothers who are not yet free, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes." (Later on when old King Peter after many trials managed to reach Durazzo he was given a few hours' notice in which to leave that place; he was also thrust out of Brindisi by the Italians because he declined to repudiate this Declaration.) "Machen Sie Ordnung" would soon be heard. Even the army, unaccustomed to defeat, was losing its self-possession. Putnik, the revered old strategist, declared that he could do no more. No longer in his over-heated room, struggling with asthma, could the famous marshal evolve a plan. And then it happened that General MiŠic, placed in command of the first army, determined, after studying the situation, to risk everything on a last throw. MiŠic was a quiet, methodical little man, whose optimism was always based on knowledge—in the intervals between Serbia's former campaigns he had won distinction as Professor of Strategy. He now caused 1400 young students, the flower of the nation, to be appointed non-commissioned officers; he likewise produced a most brilliant scheme of operations, so that the whole army was fired with enthusiasm, and so irresistibly did they attack that by December 13 not a single armed Austrian remained in the country. Ernest Haeckel, the great professor, had said at Jena that the native superiority of the German nation conferred on them the right to occupy the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia, excluding from these parts the weaker and inferior peoples who were living there. On December 15 King Peter made a triumphal entry into Belgrade—a Hungarian flag which had floated from the Palace was employed as a carpet on the steps of the cathedral when the King proceeded thither with his generals to give thanks for the miraculous success of Serbia's army. Once more the famous little town, the "white town" that is throned so splendidly above the plain where two wide rivers meet, was in possession of the Serbs. Against this rampart many human waves have broken—Attila and his Huns encamped on the plain, the Ostrogoths appeared, Justinian built the city walls, then came the Avars and Charlemagne and the Franks, the Bulgars, the Byzantines, the Magyars. The white town, Beli Grad or Beograd, which we call Belgrade—Wizzenburch was the old German name—has a glorious past and surely a magnificent future.

When the Serbs came back to Belgrade in December 1914, the total of Austrian prisoners was more numerous than the Serbian combatants. But 35,000 of these prisoners, together with 250,000 Serbs of all ages and 106 Serbian and Allied doctors, were now to succumb to the plague of typhus, which the Austrian troops had carried from Galicia. Hospitals were hurried out from France and Great Britain; heroic work was done by women and by men; doctors operated day and night—in the hospitals the patients were so closely packed that it was impossible to step between them.

"In Skoplje," says Colonel Morrison, who in civil life is senior surgeon to the Queen's Hospital, Birmingham—"in Skoplje a British unit was installed in a large factory accommodating over 1000 medical and surgical patients. Besides their inherent unsuitability the premises were detestably insanitary and the floor space overcrowded to its utmost capacity. On the ground floor I saw 250 men lying on sacks of straw packed closely together, covered only by their ragged uniform under a blanket. Gangrenous limbs and septic compound fractures were common, the stench being overpowering; yet every window was closely shut." He tells how seven out of the members of the British staff went down with typhus. At Uice he found over 700 patients crammed into rooms containing about 500 beds; many were lying on the bare floor; others were on sacks of straw; others on raised wooden platforms in series of six men side by side. Often one would see an elderly warrior, who had been wounded a week or two previously, being jolted along in an ox-cart with several civilians who were suffering from typhus—all trying to find a hospital that could take them in. And meanwhile it was necessary to reorganize the army: all the men between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five were called to the colours, including those whom the doctors had declared to be totally unfit for military service.

THE TREATY OF LONDON, APRIL 1915

On April 26, 1915, the negotiations were concluded between France, Great Britain, Russia and Italy; the Treaty of London was signed and the Italians had become our Allies. By this Treaty we and France and Russia undertook to give them, if we were victorious, a very large increase of territory—over which, by the way, we none of us had any right of disposal.

["For Serbia and for Montenegro this is a war of defence and of liberation and not of conquest," said the Yugoslav Committee in London (May 1915)—which Committee, by the way, made its first headquarters in Rome, and only transferred itself to London and Paris in view of the frankly hostile attitude of Sonnino and his colleagues. It consisted of the prominent Croats and Slovenes who had managed to escape across the Austrian frontier. "Serbia and Montenegro," said the Committee, "fight to liberate our people from a foreign yoke and to unite them in one sole, free nation.... To perpetuate the separation of these territories in leaving them under the Austro-Hungarian domination or another foreign domination, would be in flagrant violation of our ethnographic, geographic and economic unity; our people would, without any doubt, oppose to it an energetic and justified resistance."] At other times during the nineteenth century the Great Powers made amongst themselves and without consulting the Small Powers certain arrangements which affected the latter, although, as Professor Westlake observes,[88] all the States, so far as their sovereignty is concerned, stand equal before the law. But these arbitrary arrangements had always been made in the interest and for the security and well-being of the weaker State, as, for example, when the Congress of Berlin decided on the independence of Roumania and Serbia, in accordance with the will of the people. This beneficent action on the part of the Great Powers infringed none of the principles of international law, whereas the Treaty of London took away from the smaller Power nearly everything of value it possessed and stripped it of the possibility of future greatness; the spoil was presented by the Great Powers to one of themselves. We may concede, as Mr. C.A.H. Bartlett of the New York and United States Federal Bar points out in his closely reasoned monograph[89]—we may concede that belligerents can by way of anticipation allot enemy land among themselves, yet such a compact cannot properly be exercised by them so as to work injustice to another ally who was not a party to the division of territory. From the first it was well understood that the Treaty of London could only be imposed in direct defiance of the wishes of the populations most immediately concerned, so that the Italian Cabinet insisted that the whole transaction should be kept from the knowledge of the Serbian Government. As an illustration of the domineering and extortionate nature of Italy's demands (to which the Entente submitted) one may mention that part of the proposed boundary was traced over the high seas beyond the three-mile limit, which of course was a proposition entirely at variance with international law. We should not forget, says the Spectator,[90] the whole Italian record of idealism and liberal thought. And Mr. G.M. Trevelyan, an Italian exponent,[91] remarks that the terms of the Treaty of London were unknown to the people who paraded the streets of Rome impatient for their country to enter the War, and threatening with death the Minister Giolitti who had hitherto succeeded in keeping them out of it. The grandiose bargain which the Government had made was unknown to them; but surely Mr. Trevelyan is paying meagre tribute to their idealism and liberal thought when he implies they would have been elated by a knowledge of the details of the Treaty. Ought not, rather, a people imbued with the afore-mentioned virtues to have threatened with death a Minister who should attempt to carry through so scandalous an instrument? "The broad reason why the Italians joined our side," says Mr. Trevelyan, "was because they were a Western, a Latin and a Liberal civilization." Mr. Bartlett, who ponders his words with legal precision, thinks that "Italy was not inspired by any very noble principles of right and justice when the War began, nor until long after it had swept over the greater portion of Europe ... nor was she spontaneously moved by any sentiment of human justice. She was cool, calculating and business-like. She weighed carefully in the balance the advantages and disadvantages she might derive from the pending struggle; she saw on which side the profit might lie, and with that commercial prudence for which her people are renowned she set her own price on the value of her aid to the Entente." But if the long hesitation was nothing more than governmental prudence, and if the nation as a whole was out of sympathy with such ideas, how came it that, after the plunge was taken, no less than 300 deputies left their cards on Signor Giolitti? The country was, through various causes, swept into the War; and in considering whether this was in harmony with or in opposition to the desires of the majority I think one should pay at least as much attention to the deputies who acted as to the crowd who shouted.... The country was swept into the War, and a Bologna newspaper (Resto del Carlino, March 21, 1915) has published a telegram from Sonnino to the Italian Ambassadors in Paris, London and Petrograd, which announced that Italy was joining in the World War for the purpose of destroying the strategical advantage enjoyed by Austria in the Adriatic. But at the same time the Southern Slavs must be prevented from gaining a similar position, and so the coast must be neutralized from Kotor to the river VojuŠa. Sonnino expressly gives Rieka to the Croats. It is not only this which lends great interest to the document, but the fact that Italy's entrance into the War was determined five weeks before the signing of the Treaty of London and two months before she actually declared war.

HOW BULGARIA CAME INTO THE WAR

In the course of the year 1915 Ferdinand of Bulgaria, with his henchman Radoslavoff, was arranging to come into the War. Public opinion in that country was smarting under the drastic Treaty of Bucharest, which had been imposed by the victors of the second Balkan War. It was Roumania which had inflicted the shrewdest wound by taking the whole of the Dobrudja as a recompense for a military promenade, during which she lost a few men who deserted, and a few officers who were shot in the back. The Dobrudja is a land whose people cause it to resemble a mosaic—Greeks, Turks, Roumanians, Tartars, Bulgars, Armenians and gipsies are to be found—but the southern parts are undoubtedly Bulgarian. After the great outcry which the Bulgars had raised over the surrender of one town, Silistra, it can be imagined that the loss of the whole land came as an unendurable sentence. Quite apart from Bulgaria's Macedonian aspirations, it was felt in Belgrade that Ferdinand, by pointing to the Dobrudja, would be able to drive his kingdom into an alliance with the Central Powers, an alliance whose aim, as far as he was concerned, was to leave him Tzar of the Balkans. The photograph which he circulated of himself, seated in a splendid chair upon a promontory by the Black Sea, wearing the appropriate archaic robes, and with a look of profound meditation on his otherwise Machiavellian features, was exactly what he thought a Balkan Tzar should be.

The Serbs were in favour of delivering an attack upon the Bulgars before they had mobilized and concentrated their troops. This would not have warded off the Teutonic invasion, but the Serbs would have been able to maintain contact with Salonica, thus facilitating the evacuation of their army. And who knows whether this diversion would not have induced the Greeks and the Roumanians to change their attitude? However, the proposal was vetoed by Serbia's great Allies, who thought that their diplomacy might work upon the Bulgars. Many worthy people said that it would be quite inconceivable for the Bulgarian army to oppose the Russian, seeing that this would be terrible ingratitude. But they forgot that if the Russians had been, not for purely altruistic motives, the kind patrons of the Bulgars, they had recently—when the Tzar Nicholas and the Tzarina came to the Constanza fÊtes—made open cause with Bulgaria's opponents. They were also forgetting, rather inexcusably, that the Bulgars were averse to the idea of the Russians securing Constantinople. On the other hand, the old pro-Russian sentiments of the people still survived: the Russian Legation at Sofia received numerous applications to serve in the army; large contributions were made to the Russian Red Cross, and public prayers were offered for the success of the Russian arms. But the Muscovite Minister at Sofia was a man unfitted for the post, and Ferdinand's task was made easier. The Allied diplomats could argue, later on, that they failed by a narrow margin, since Radoslavoff only succeeded in gaining a majority by means of the help of the Turkish deputies; but if the Sobranje had been hostile to Ferdinand and Radoslavoff they would simply have dissolved it. As a pattern of morals Dr. Radoslavoff is not worth quotation—the offences for which during a previous Premiership he was convicted were rather flagrant—but his views on international politics are quite instructive. On November 14, 1912, he wrote to his friend Mavrodieff, the prefect of Sofia, a letter which was afterwards reproduced in facsimile. "It is clear," he said, "that Russian diplomacy is disloyal. It wants Constantinople.... But it is not only Russia which envies Bulgaria; the same thing is true for Austria-Hungary and Germany. The Balkan Union has surprised them, and they will seek a new basis in their future politics...." But then the second Balkan War and the Treaty of Bucharest enabled Ferdinand to commit his country to an alliance which various of his statesmen and generals vehemently deprecated. "If the Germans should win," telegraphed Tocheff, the Minister at Vienna, in August 1915, "that would be still more dangerous for Bulgaria."

Ferdinand was sure that the Austro-Germans would succeed in conquering the Serbs. On October 6, after a treacherous artillery preparation, the two armies began to cross at various points the Danube, the Save and the Drin. Their losses in the hand-to-hand engagements may have reminded them of a phrase in the official explanation that was issued, after the rout of the previous December, by the Viennese authorities: "The retirement of our forces after their victorious offensive in Serbia has given birth to divers rumours for the most part entirely without foundation.... It was inevitable that we should have important losses in men and material." So it was on this occasion—at Belgrade, for example, thousands were killed as they struggled to the shore—in a broad street leading down to the harbour a brigade of Skoplje recruits plunged through the Austrians with their knives. But in the end, on October 10—and in spite of heroic work on the part of some French and British naval detachments—Belgrade fell. On October 12 the Bulgars attacked. "The European War is drawing to its close," said Ferdinand's proclamation. "The victorious armies of the Central Powers are in Serbia and are rapidly advancing." They advanced less rapidly than they had planned, thanks to the wonderful exploits of the Serbian army, which was heavily encumbered by the growing stream of fugitives. The Austro-Germans failed to encircle the Serbian troops—slowly and keeping in touch with those who were on the Bulgarian frontier, the Serbs retired to the south and west.

ATTEMPT TO BUY OFF THE SERBS

The Government and the diplomatic corps had been for some time at NiŠ, the second largest town, whose Turkish character is disappearing. But the population in the direst Turkish times were less exposed to epidemics than the thousands of unwilling residents who thronged the little, painted houses and the wide, cobbled streets in 1915. It was at NiŠ that the negotiations were conducted with Bulgaria, and in July an aged gentleman from Budapest came with the offer of a separate peace. This gentleman, a stockbroker of Slav origin, was imbued with patriotic motives, for he was assured that Germany would win the War. It was an undertaking in those days for a man in his seventy-sixth year to travel, by way of Roumania and Bulgaria, to NiŠ; but as he had connections in Serbia he was resolved to see them, and he travelled at his own expense, although the German Consul-General at Buda-Pest, acting apparently for the Deutsche Bank, had spoken of 18 million crowns for distribution among the politicians at NiŠ and five millions for the old stockbroker himself. His suggestion was that Serbia should make certain small modifications in the Bucharest Treaty in favour of the Bulgars, that Albania should be hers up to and including Durazzo, that she should be joined to Montenegro, and that her debts to the Entente should be shouldered by Germany, which would likewise give a considerable loan, and requested merely the permission to send German troops down the Danube. "My dear boy," said a Minister, an old friend of his, "go back at once, or they'll lock you up in a mad-house." And when the poor old gentleman got back he found himself compelled to start a lawsuit against the Germans, since they were unwilling to pay his costs. The Consul-General at Pest disowned all knowledge of him, but the broker called in the police as witnesses; for they had summoned him, on more than one occasion, to explain why he was so much in the Consul's company. The German Government said also that he was a perfect stranger to them; but finally they settled with him for a sum which is believed to have been 35,000 crowns.

GREEK TRANSACTIONS

One reason why the Entente had dissuaded the Serbs from attacking Bulgaria was to prevent the casus foederis with Greece being jeopardized. This treaty between Greece and Serbia would become operative by a Bulgarian aggression—and the fox-faced M. Gounaris when he was Prime Minister of Greece in August 1915 assured the Allied Powers that Greece would never tolerate a Bulgarian attack upon Serbia. It was largely on the strength of this assurance that, when, a little later, the attitude of Bulgaria grew menacing and the Serbian General Staff suggested marching upon Sofia and nipping the Bulgarian mobilization in the bud, the then Russian Foreign Minister, M. Sazonov, supported in this by Sir Edward Grey, warned Serbia not to take the initiative. Serbia yielded to the demands of her great Allies, only to see herself abandoned by the Greeks. King Constantine and probably the greater part of his people were anxious to remain outside the war. And to free himself from the embarrassing Treaty with Serbia he declared that it would only have applied if Serbia had been attacked by the Bulgars. [We may say that it was doubtful whether the casus foederis arose when Serbia was attacked by Austria; but it clearly and indubitably did arise when she was attacked by Bulgaria. When Venizelos spoke of the obligations of Greece towards Serbia, a certain Mr. Paxton Hibben, an American admirer of Constantine, said in his book, Constantine I. and the Greek People (New York, 1920), that Venizelos was making an appeal to the sentimentality of his countrymen!] So Constantine proclaimed that Greece was neutral—"Our gallant Serbian allies," he declared some five years later, when he returned from exile, "Our gallant Serbian allies"; and the Athenian mob—

—the Athenian mob cheered itself hoarse. One word from Constantine and they would have wrecked the Serbian Legation and the French and the British for the terrible bad taste of not exposing their flags. But Constantine, clutching his German Field-Marshal's baton (or perhaps it was the native baton given to the royal leader who in the Balkan War wiped out some of the ignominy with which the previous Turkish War had covered him), at any rate Constantine restrained himself. Why the devil couldn't these Serbs understand that they were his gallant allies! Let them wipe out the unhappy past. Had they never heard of that magnificent French actress who, being asked about the paternity of her son, replied that she really did not know? "Alas!" she said, "I am so shortsighted." Well, it was true that in 1915 he had been neutral and unable to tolerate the presence of Serbian soldiers on his territory; if they found themselves obliged to leave their country and retreated by way of Greece he gave orders to have them disarmed. This was the attitude imposed upon a neutral. And thousands and thousands of them had unfortunately died in consequence while passing over the Albanian mountains. "Our alliance with Serbia," quoth the King while opening the Chamber in 1921—"our alliance with Serbia now drawn closer as the result of so many sacrifices and heroic struggles...." The son of the eagle, as his people call him, stopped a moment, but could hear no laughter. As for his policy in 1915, he had been perhaps a neutral lacking in benevolence. If he and his Ministers did not actually refuse to receive the non-combatant young Serbs they very certainly did not go out of their way to offer any shelter to these erstwhile little allies in distress, when the alternative to Greece was wild Albania. Twenty thousand Serbian children lost their lives upon those bleak and trackless mountains.[93] It was most unfortunate. And in the Cathedral of Athens, in the gorgeous presence of the clergy and the more responsible sections of the population, the King chuckled to himself as he was acclaimed with cries of "Christos aneste!" (Christ is risen!). After all, those 20,000 Serbian boys would not have lived for ever. These excellent Athenians were resolved that bygones should be bygones. It was perfectly true that British soldiers and French, entrapped and shot down by his command, were buried away yonder in PirÆus cemetery. He felt like having a good laugh, but if you are a King you must be dignified....

FLIGHT OF THE SERBS

NiŠ fell on November 4, 1915, King Peter's plate, according to the subsequent avowals of one Brust, a non-commissioned officer, being distributed among the 145th Prussian Regiment, the Colonel annexing ten pieces and several privates receiving spoons and knives—and now the Serbs had to leave their country. On the other side of the Albanian mountains they might hope to find a land of exile. It is said that several of the Ministers contemplated suicide—the Minister of War had so far lost his head that, after reaching Salonica by way of Monastir, he refused to join his colleagues at Scutari—but the venerable PaŠic did not lose his jovial humour. He may have laughed in order to encourage those who were despairing. On the other hand, he may have known that Serbia would rise, and rise to greater heights. He made no secret of the satisfaction which he felt when the Bulgars attacked, for this, he said, would settle once for all the Macedonian question. Whether the attitude of the Southern Slavs in Austria-Hungary appealed to him in equal measure is a little doubtful. It was hard for him, at his time of life, to envisage anything more than a Greater Serbia.

THE FAITHFUL CROATS

But the Croats, as is shown by other documents from the Zagreb archives, were faithful to their race. The extracts, by the way, reply to those foolish Italians who persisted for years in shouting that the Croats had been the fiercest foes of the Entente. That they were the foes of Italy is not surprising, for the provisions of the wretched Treaty of London, concluded behind the back of the British Parliament and without even the Cabinet being consulted, were by this time public property, and it was seen that the Italians had succeeded in persuading the Entente to promise them the reversion of a great slice of Yugoslav territory, very large portions of which were as completely Yugoslav as the island of Scedro (Torcola), whose population consists of one Slav woman called YakaŠ, over eighty years of age. Save for their sentiments towards the Italians, it is clear that a large number of Croats were very warmly and very actively on the side of the Entente. I am sure that the unfortunate Italians of the Trentino who, like them, were enrolled in the Imperial and Royal army were as eager to desert, and no doubt if they had been more numerous we should have had an Italian contingent fighting with the Russians, in association with the Czecho-Slovak and the Yugoslav brigades.

(G)

In spite of the ten months' war with Serbia, in spite of the notable executions of native citizens for assisting the enemy at the time of his incursion into Syrmia and Bosnia, there has latterly been an alarming increase in the number of cases of grossest insult to the person of H.M. the Emperor and King; outbreaks of deeply felt, only forcibly controlled hatred against everything friendly to the dynasty and the Monarchy, curses upon the exalted wearer of the Crown, glorification of King Peter and the Serb realm, expressed by men and women alike, are of daily occurrence....

(H)

In this document we return to the subject of desertions:

Royal Hungarian 42nd Infantry of the Line.
Op. No. 1312/6.
To the Imperial and Royal Corps
Command in Sadagora.
Czernawka, August 12, 1915.

In the period from the 8/8 to the 9/8 two men of the 10th company have deserted (of whom one is probably wandering somewhere behind the front, as he is mentally deficient, having even gone away without a cap and being a Roman Catholic); likewise four men of the 12th company and all the men recently enrolled from the village of Dolnji Lapac, of the Greek Orthodox religion, have apparently deserted to the foe.

The impressions which I had of these men—impressions based on a personal intercourse of several hours while they were being marched to the recruiting depot—was unfavourable. And this I immediately made known in writing to the regimental command, with a brief note on this point on the 6/8 to the 11th Corps command. Unhappily my impressions were correct; there are scoundrels in these ranks. I have for the present instituted a most thorough and severe examination, wherein I am already myself participating; for I am inflexibly determined, at the very smallest sign of a recurrence, to apply to these traitors the military judicial procedure and, if necessary, to have the men decimated, as I was unfortunately compelled to do with the Bosnian-Herzegovinian line regiment No. 4 last winter, which method had the most excellent results. That regiment has thenceforward been blameless.... I am so very well informed as to conditions in the south that I cannot be deceived, and I know that, in spite of all—including some misguided—measures, there are still a number of traitors, some of them occupying a high social position, moving about freely in Croatia-Slavonia instead of being strangled.

So that steps may be taken against the families of guilty persons, I enclose a list of the men who have deserted from the middle of June, this year. I beg that I may be supported to the uttermost, without the slightest wavering, and in a short time—so my experience tells me—we shall be in a most satisfactory position.

Liposcak, Lieut.-Field-Marshal.[94]

Imperial and Royal Corps Command,
Sadagora, 12/8, 1915. 9 p.m.
No. 2446, with three enclosures.

(I)

We then get an elaborate and indignant dissertation, dated November 1915 and signed by Lieut.-Colonel Olleschick. It is a study of the way in which the secret police was hampered and its patriotic activities watered down; the Colonel also exposes the manner in which antipatriotic, or shall we say anti-Habsburg, citizens of Croatia-Slavonia are protected:

Imperial and Royal Military Command in Zagreb.
Chief of the General Staff.
K. No. 1681.

The Colonel expresses his unbounded approval of Maravic, the chief of this branch of the police, and of von Klobucaric, a police captain. The former, who is dead, was for many years at the head of the police at Zemlin, opposite Belgrade, and has left behind a reputation for fairness. The whereabouts of von Klobucaric are unknown, and it would be prudent if this ex-Austrian officer, ex-dentist's assistant and ex-policeman were to ensure their remaining so. The Ban is accused of having frustrated various designs of this couple. He is further accused of having placed at the head of the Koprivnica internment camp—where 6000 "politically untrustworthy" Serbs were assembled—the mayor, Kamenar, who himself had been dismissed for his political untrustworthiness; and when the military protested, they received no answer, while the mayor—so the wrathful writer hears—has been removed from his post at the internment camp and restored to his former office and dignity. The colonel asks how it is that in Croatia the crimes of "MajestÄtsbeleidigung" and high treason are seldom punished with more than three or four months' incarceration, while in other parts of the Empire they are visited with death or at least a sentence of several years. (The answer is that in Croatia the Government was obliged, on account of the language, to employ Croatian judges.) He mentions that Professor Arshinov, alleged to have come to Zagreb in order to carry on an anti-Habsburg and pro-Serbian propaganda, is indeed under arrest, but is being far too well treated at the hospital, where he receives his Serbian associates and even has convivial evenings with them. In fact the whole country, so the writer asserts, is saturated with Serbian sympathies and agitators. He says that in some villages every functionary, from the highest to the lowest, is a Serb; the gendarmerie, the tax-gatherers and the foresters are frequently Serbs and he regards it as noteworthy that the hotels, inns and cafÉs are almost exclusively in Serbian hands; "and it is only too well known,"—so he rather strangely says—"that these are the places where suspicious characters are wont to hatch their secret plans under the influence of alcohol." He complains at length of the anti-Austrian activities of the Serbo-Croatian Coalition, and this proves that the party was not, as its critics have said, too subservient to the Habsburgs.

HOW THE SERBS CAME TO THEIR PATRIARCH'S TOWN

At the end of November the Serbian army, with the Government and thousands of refugees, arrived at the ancient towns of Prizren and Pec. It was at the rambling old patriarchal town of Pec that the Serbian soldiers had to do a thing which even their marvellous optimism could not endure—most of the field guns had now to be destroyed, after a few years of crowded and victorious life. An American correspondent, Mr. Fortier Jones, tells us[95] how a gunner asked to be photographed beside his beloved weapon, and how, when he wanted to leave his address, he suddenly realized that with the loss of this gun he would be a mere homeless wanderer. It was not surprising that these steel-built stoics, than whom all French and British witnesses agree there are no better fighters in the world, should have broken down at this ordeal. As for the chauffeurs, they were busy polishing their cars and cleaning their engines—presumably through force of habit—prior to the breaking up of all these touring-cars and lorries. Some were saturated with petrol and set on fire, others were exploded with hand grenades, but the most imaginative method was to drive the car up to that place, two or three miles from Pec, where the road to Andrievica turned into a horse-trail on the side of the precipice. Here the chauffeur would jump out, after having let in the clutch and pushed down the accelerator—and the car would leap into space, three or four hundred feet over a mountain torrent. From this point the via dolorosa stretched away precariously, at first a winding path of ice and then a track across the snowdrifts of the barren uplands. The Serbian Government had offered to construct this very necessary road to Andrievica; the engineer, one Smodlaka, undertook to build it in three months, but Nikita's Minister replied that the Austrian prisoners, whom it was proposed to use, were mostly in the grip of spotted fever. This was not the case, and one of the results of there being no road was that nearly all the supplies from Russia for the Montenegrins were abandoned at Pec. Cold, starvation and exposure took a fearful toll among the straggling wanderers—between 1000 and 1500 were cut off and murdered by savage Albanians (whose considerate treatment of the Serbs is highly praised by their champion, Miss Edith Durham. Reviewing in the Daily Herald a book of Serbian tales that have precious little to do with Albania, she goes out of her way to laud, in those days of the terrible retreat, the kindliness of her protÉgÉs.) As we have mentioned, of the 36,000 boys who accompanied the army in order to escape the Austrians, only some 16,000 reached the Adriatic, where it was said that there was nothing human left of them except their eyes. They had lived on roots and bark of trees, they drank the water into which decomposed corpses had been thrown. Of the 50,000 Austrian prisoners—many of them Yugoslavs—about 44,000 died in the course of their eight weeks' retreat; none of them were heard to complain or seen committing any brutal act. Very many Englishwomen were included in this long procession; old King Peter walked a good deal of the way, the Archbishop of Belgrade brought the relics of Stephen the First-Crowned and was followed by priests with lighted tapers, and Marshal Putnik, whom exposure would have killed, was carried all the way inside a primitive sedan-chair.... "Whence do you come and what are you?" asked a Serbian woman[96] of the wounded and dying. "We are," they replied in prose that reminds one of Mestrovic, "we are the smouldering torches with which our country is kept warm. In the heart of one's native land there is neither truth nor justice—we love our native land; this love is a barrier against human love; the heart of one's native land is great and selfish and it throbs—in this heart is the faith of all our hearts, we love our native land. We watch over it and we defend it and we love, though the lettering upon our tomb be enveloped in ivy. Formidable is its victory, and we will march along, not asking whether anybody will return. We love our native land and even when the blood is thickening inside our throats and we are carrying our entrails in our hands." Though they were Serbs they had forgotten how to sing; it was some time later that the words, now famous, of "Tamo daleko" burst from the inspired lips of a simple soldier and were taken up by his companions: "There, far away, far away by the Morava, there is my village, there is my love...."

"They came exhausted into Scutari, one by one or in small groups," says Monsieur Boppe, the French Minister,[97] "some of them on horseback, some on foot; here and there one saw a trace of military order, but most of them had no weapons. They looked as if they could not march another mile, these moving skeletons, so painfully they crawled along, so haggard, so emaciated, with a colour so cadaverous and eyes so dull. This mournful band of brothers struggled into Scutari for days, beneath the rain and through the mud. No bitterness came from the lips of those who had undergone every privation; as if impelled by destiny, they passed along in silence; from time to time, indeed, one heard them say 'hleba' (bread)—that was the only word they had the strength to pronounce. For several days the majority of them had had nothing to eat, and in the cantonments where they were lodged outside the town their Government could only provide a meagre ration." A hundredweight of maize cost 300 francs in gold.... But what of the women who had remained in Belgrade? Miss Annie Christic, whose unflagging work for her people is so well known in this country, has told us how the Austro-Hungarians started paying out relief money to the families of State officials. They advertised their generosity on a large scale, but the amounts were very small, and many women were too proud to accept this dole from the enemy. They preferred to do any kind of work offered by the municipality of Belgrade. Thus one saw women in furs or smart clothes—the remnants of former days—trundling wheelbarrows of stone for road repairs, or carrying heavy loads. Delicately nurtured girls could be seen working at the slaughterhouse among the entrails and offal for twelve hours on end. The wife of a professor scrubbed office floors for many months before her husband at the front could send her any money. Street-sweeping was a common occupation for women of all classes.

"We rescued the gallant Serbian army," said the Italians, in the course of a long and rhetorical placard which in 1919 they pasted up throughout Rieka and the Adriatic lands they occupied, and which was not more convincing than the caravan of Dalmatian mayors whom, after the War, they very proudly exhibited in Paris, a suave official from the Embassy acting as the showman. (The Italian authorities had taken in hand the election of these mayors—save Signor Ziliotto of Zadar, who was elected by his fellow-townsmen.) ... When the wretched Serbs who found themselves staggering through central Albania—among them large numbers of boys so young that they would not have been called up until 1919—when they hoped to reach the Adriatic at Valona, they were told that this route was barred to them. Having eluded the Austrians, the Germans and the Bulgars, they were left by the Italians to die of starvation and fatigue. It may well have seemed to them, as to Bedros Tourian, the Armenian poet, that "All the world is but God's mockery." When King Peter, worn out by the journey and his ailments, reached Valona by way of Durazzo, he was ordered by the commandant of that place to depart with his suite—which consisted of four persons—within twenty-four hours.... In the middle of December a French relief mission arrived on the Albanian coast, General de MondÉsir reached Scutari and a large British mission under General Taylor landed at Durazzo. These did what was possible to save the remnants of the Serbian army. But, after a short time, a fresh series of obstacles arose. The King of Montenegro, very loyal to the Austrians, facilitated their advance across his country. Thus it was impracticable for the Serbs to concentrate and to embark from those few wooden huts which are called, in Italian, San Giovanni di Medua. Between the bare cliffs and the sea the miserable men and boys and women were compelled to plod towards the south. One hundred and fifty thousand survivors were eventually carried by the Allies to Corfu.

THE SHADOW OVER MONTENEGRO

These had been busy days for Nikita and his sons. A royal order was issued to the Montenegrin military and police authorities, commanding them to prevent the population from giving or selling any provisions to the Serbian army. "Ne bogami, svetoga mi Vassilija ne!" ["Goodness gracious, no! And by St. Basil, no!"] was the phrase which greeted the Serbs;[98] and when they remonstrated with the Montenegrins for demanding eleven Serbian dinars in silver for ten Montenegrin perpers—the exchange was at par, but the people were acting under orders—"If I had ten sons I would give them to King Peter," was the usual reply, "but money is money." Yet the Austrians were not as grateful as they might have been. Nikita was intending, after the annihilation of the Serbs, to conclude a separate peace with Austria and to rule, as an Austrian satrap, over an enlarged territory. But they ignored his aspirations; they did not take into account that he had been so kind to them at Lovcen and elsewhere. They swarmed over his country—this time he was not play-acting when he showed his indignation—and the deceived deceiver was forced to fly. On January 10, Lovcen had fallen. A characteristic telegram:

["My house is burning, I want the Kuci"] was sent by Nikita to his best fighting men, the Kuci, whom he had left in reserve at Danilovgrad. When General Gajnic received this he marched all night with his brigade and reached Cetinje in the morning. Nikita met them and announced that, after all, he did not require them. He would conquer without them. And Lovcen fell.

That Adriatic Gibraltar, which rises gaunt and sheer to some 6000 feet, was entrusted by Nikita to his youngest son, Prince Peter, a young man of marvellous vanity. He used to deny, after the surrender of Lovcen, that he had consorted at Budva with Lieut.-Colonel Hupka, the former military attachÉ at Cetinje, whom the Austrians brought specially from the Italian front for this purpose. The well-known patriot, Dr. Machiedo of Zadar, who happened to be confined during the summer of 1915 by the Austrians in the fortress of Gorada, which lies above Kotor, read in the telephone book certain messages from Prince Peter, asking for an interview with Hupka—these messages were carried by a patrol to the lines and thence telephoned to Gorada. When the Prince at last acknowledged that he had been meeting Hupka—which he naturally had done at his father's command—he stated that it was with the object of preventing the bombardment of open towns by Austrian aeroplanes. Between him and Hupka the arrangements were made; many of the Austrians exchanged their military boots for the Serbian national sandals, so that they could more easily scale the rocks; and Peter sent verbal orders to his two outlying brigadiers that they must not resist. General Pejanovic demanded, however, that this should be put in writing, and the document is extant. Thirteen Austrians lie buried in a little graveyard on the slopes of Lovcen, mostly men who missed their footing; and this was the price that Austria paid for the tremendous mountain that she had coveted for years; she had been willing, more than once, to let the Montenegrins, in exchange for it, have Scutari. The great picture of "The Storming of Lovcen," which Gabriel Jurkic, the Sarajevo artist, was commissioned by the Austrians to paint, was never painted; and when Nikita motored out from Cetinje to meet the men who were retiring from Lovcen he had the hardihood to rebuke them as traitors. "It is not we who are traitors," shouted a colonel, "it is you and your sons!" "Oh! that I must hear such words!" groaned the King, "I want to die!" But he did not die; on the contrary, he went to Paris. His eldest son had announced, early in the campaign, that he was unwell, and he had gone to France by way of Athens. There he was very accurately told by Constantine in which month Mackensen and the Bulgars would descend upon Serbia. When the Prince arrived at Nice he mentioned this to his friend, Jovo Popovic, the former Montenegrin Minister at Constantinople, and to Radovic. They advised him to inform the Entente, in order to rehabilitate himself. But when he telegraphed to his father the reply was "Be quiet." Prince Danilo has never denied the allegations that while he was at Nice, Signor Carminatti, the Montenegrin Consul-General in Milan, conducted negotiations on his behalf at Lugano with a certain Herr Bernsdorf of the Deutsche Bank, with a view to a separate peace by Montenegro. The amount of the financial consideration is not known. And the business-like Prince, realizing that it would be impossible for him to return to his native land, secured himself against the future by selling, through a couple of confidential agents, his real estate to the Austrians. He likewise disposed of a good deal of forest which is alleged to have belonged not to him but to the State, and when his father heard of the resulting sum of a hundred million francs he was exceedingly annoyed that this robbery and trafficking with the enemy during the War had only replenished Danilo's and not his own exchequer. When his political opponents heard of these transactions he denied, over and over again, that they had taken place; but we have his autograph letter on the subject to Danilo. Before the King left Montenegro he found another opportunity for a grandiose attitude. He appeared at Podgorica where he made an eloquent speech, exhorting his people to march on the morrow against the hated Austrian and assuring them that their old King would fire the first shot, whereas he decamped in the night for Scutari, which is in the opposite direction. He and the Queen, Prince Peter and MiuŠkevic, the Premier, fled the country; while Prince Mirko, the remainder of the Cabinet, the National Assembly and—above all—the army had instructions to remain behind. How much easier it would have been for his army than for the Serbs to reach Corfu. But this terrible old man delivered 50,000 of the best Yugoslav soldiers to the enemy. On January 21 he sailed away. I do not know if anybody sang the National Anthem—"Onamo! Onamo!" ["Yonder! Yonder!"]—which in his youth Nikita had himself composed. And a few years later when the gallant Montenegrins could again lift up their voices and sing "Onamo!" how many of them thought of him who was skulking and of course intriguing yonder in France.

We have alluded to the treatment which in their distress the Serbs received from their Italian Allies; but in Albania the Italian army did render a certain amount of assistance—every day at eleven o'clock the Austrian aeroplanes would reach Durazzo, and the Italian soldiers, sentries and all, would rush helter-skelter from the plentiful food to which they were just sitting down. The Serbs, many of them, after their privations, looking like grey ghosts, were always in the neighbourhood of the Italian barracks and very glad they were to see those aeroplanes which permitted them to enter in and enjoy a bounteous meal. When the senior Italian officer complained to his Serbian colleague, "Surely," said the latter, "you have a sentry at the door. He can prevent anyone from going in." At some distance inland a Serbian major, a friend of mine, was resting on the side of the road; he had eaten nothing for four days. A spick-and-span Italian lieutenant of gendarmerie paused in front of him and was clearly interested. The major wondered whether he would have some food about him. But the lieutenant did not even offer him a cigarette. "Pardon me," he said with a friendly smile, "but will you allow me to take a photograph?" Large numbers of mules were brought over by the Italians and apparently it gave them pleasure to cut their throats. The officers purchased many Serbian horses—their owners were too destitute to bargain. But in fairness it must be said that some Italian ships worked with the French and British vessels in conveying the Serbs, soldiers and civilians, from the coast of Albania.

As for the Montenegrin King, he had attempted, before his departure, to put the whole blame on the shoulders of Colonel PeŠic. He sent—in order to make more certain the success of the Austrian army—a telegraphic command[99] to the Voivoda Djuro Petrovic, the chief of the Herzegovinian detachment, in which he required him to destroy his cannons and machine guns and then (although the enemy was exerting no pressure upon him) to withdraw towards NikŠic. This order was issued in the name of Colonel PeŠic, the signature being forged. In fact Nikita thought his Serbian Chief of Staff was quite a useful personage. But there exists a letter in which the Colonel wrote that, in order to avoid capitulation, a supreme effort would be necessary at certain positions which he indicated and anyhow the army should be withdrawn to Scutari and the defence of the town organized. Scutari, by the way, was the scene of another of Nikita's exploits: he caused the Bank of Montenegro to send money to the Austrian Consul there, the cash being delivered by Martinovic, the Montenegrin Consul. It was used to incite the Albanians to take military action against the Serbs between Prizren and Djakovica. When this affair was exposed all the Montenegrins knew by what traitors they were governed. The fall of Montenegro had been brought about more swiftly by the Austrian submarines which in the Gulf of San Giovanni di Medua torpedoed practically every ship that carried food or munitions, while other boats were not molested. An investigation showed that the shipping news had been telegraphed to Prince Peter, and he in his turn handed it on to the Austrians. The Prince's egregious parent wanted to be in a position to say that, owing to the lack of food and munitions, he had been compelled to surrender. One of his final acts was to summon the SkupŠtina, as he did not wish to be saddled with the responsibility of making peace. At a secret sitting on December 11, 1915,—when the retreating Serbs were in San Giovanni, Scutari and Podgorica,—the Government declared that they had no resources, that the Entente could not assist them and that they would wage war for so long as they had the means—in other words, that the war would cease. It was continued, however, by those Montenegrin troops between KolaŠin and Bielo Polje, who—even after the fall of Lovcen on January 10, and the flowing of the Austrian army towards Scutari—were ordered to make a counter-offensive, during which they had over 1500 dead and wounded. The reason for this was that Nikita wished to prevent his army from escaping to Scutari; he was afraid lest, if they escaped with the Serbs, they would dethrone him forthwith. Afterwards he gave an explanation that he had ordered the Chief of Staff, Yanko Vukotic, to rescue the army, which order he alleged he had wirelessed from Brindisi. Vukotic, together with Prince Mirko and the Ministers who stayed behind, declared in the Pester Lloyd that Nikita was lying. They added that he could have sent no wireless from Brindisi, because there was at that time no receiving station in Montenegro, the French one at Podgorica having been destroyed at the order of the British Minister, Count de Salis, the doyen of the diplomatic corps. The King, by the way, had endeavoured for some time to rid himself of the diplomats, who were inconvenient witnesses of what was in progress. On December 31 a telegram was sent by the Ministers of France, Great Britain, Italy and Russia, in which they said that "Apparently our presence is displeasing to the King and he is trying to disengage himself from us. He has begged us on several occasions to depart and last night he insisted, with the asseveration that in forty-eight hours it would be too late. We suspect that His Majesty is playing a very ambiguous game...." And on January 9 the French Minister telegraphed, among other things, that "My Russian and English colleagues are of opinion that the King is merely performing a comedy with us and that this comedy will end in a tragedy for the belligerents." Nikita, on his arrival in France, proposed to settle down at Lyons, but the French authorities did not care for him to be so close to Switzerland, which was one of his intriguing centres. So they placed at his disposal a chÂteau near Bordeaux and it was not until he had made repeated requests that they permitted him to come to Neuilly, a suburb of Paris. He replaced MiuŠkevic as Premier by Radovic, the former victim of the Bomb Trial, hoping by this move towards the Left to silence his critics. But in August 1916 Radovic presented a memorandum in favour of the formal union between Montenegro and Serbia, under King Peter's son and King Nicholas' grandson, Prince Alexander. The Montenegrin monarch was enraged at this and, after Radovic had resigned, one after another all the Montenegrins of any standing withdrew from Nikita, who was openly working against the Serbs. He and the Princess Xenia conducted all the Government business, though he distributed among his tiny clique of adherents various empty titles. An aged friend of his, Eugene Popovic, a native of Triest and a naturalized Italian, was made Premier, to give pleasure to Italy; a more active person was the War Minister, Hajdukovic, a former shipping contractor in Constantinople, where a long time ago he had been one of those young Montenegrins who, to the number of twenty, the Sultan used to educate—a process which, in the case of idle boys, was not very irksome. During the Great War Hajdukovic was invited by the Allies to quit Salonica, as they had certain suspicions against him. He had also, on behalf of his King, urged the Montenegrin volunteers who had managed to get to Salonica not to allow themselves to be commanded by Serbian or French officers, but to demand Montenegrin officers, of whom there was no adequate supply. These men had ultimately to be sent to Corsica and kept there till the end of the War. What Hajdukovic performed at Salonica, another royal agent, one Vukovic, a bootmaker, attempted at Marseilles, where he continually went on board the vessels that were bringing Montenegrins and, to a smaller extent, other Yugoslavs from the United States and South America to the Salonica front. These travelled men were less easily influenced than those who obeyed Hajdukovic; but 300-400 did refuse to proceed. They were installed in a factory at Orange, where the Montenegrin Government fed them and paid them. Now and then they were encouraged by being told that if they had gone to the Front the Serbian officers would have flogged them.... And so the little Court at Neuilly occupied the years with many a congenial intrigue. Feelers were stretched out to this country, where an English edition of Radovic's Montenegrin Bulletin, the pro-Yugoslav organ, was being published by my friend Vassilje Buric to the furious indignation of the busybodies who supported the King and of the Italian Embassy. From these two sources and from Neuilly the Foreign Office was bombarded with protests, begging it in the name of justice, etc., to put a stop to this dire scandal. One day a charming Foreign Office clerk, an acquaintance of mine, had Buric to lunch at the Royal Automobile Club; in the course of the meal he suggested that, as Buric was not looking well, they two should have a little holiday in France. Buric said he would be very glad to go with him, but he thought it would be nice to stay in England. The charming official held out for the Continent, and with such obstinacy that Buric at last put his hand upon his arm and invited him to promise that they would both of them come back to England. Thereupon the host acknowledged that a perfect flood of letters had been pouring on the Foreign Office with respect to the Montenegrin Bulletin, and they were weary of receiving them.... Sometimes the Neuilly Court was plunged in gloom, as when old Tomo Oraovac's little book appeared with seventy-five awkward questions to Nikita. For three days the King shut himself up in his room, trying to decide as to whether he should issue an answer. He decided to do nothing. Now and then a French review or newspaper referred to him. "The official courtesies extended by the French Government to Nicholas i. and his family should not deceive the public," said the eminent publicist Monsieur Gauvain in the Revue de Paris (March 1917). M. Gauvain showed that the Petrovic dynasty constituted the sole obstacle to a union of Montenegro with Serbia and the rest of the Yugoslav lands. As Nikita drove past the office of the Revue de Paris he may have been thinking, rather wistfully, of that brave afternoon at NikŠic.[100] ... Sometimes the old man was worried by his sons. Peter, for example, who had been the spoilt child and who had been given posts for which he was unfitted, now discovered in himself, during the autumn of 1918, a great desire to obtain a certain Madame Violette Brunet, the legal wife of Monsieur Brunet, who was in Nikita's service. The ardent lover, regardless of the ancient Montenegrin custom which inflicted stoning on the guilty married woman, while the husband sometimes cut her nose off, wrote to his parents, asking them to arrange the matter, and when the ex-King raised objections, Peter blackmailed him by threatening to divulge to the world at large all the unsavoury details connected with Lovcen. "My dear son," wrote Nikita in November 1918,[101] "You write again asking me to send an emissary to represent myself and your mother in suing for the hand of the woman of your choice, failing this, you say you will make a scandal whereby the honour of both of us and of the whole family will suffer; to obviate this unpleasant possibility we may see our way to agree to your wish, but under the following conditions...."

THE BROKEN SERBS AT CORFU

Meanwhile the Serbs had, ever since the early days of 1916 when they began arriving in Corfu, been hard at work upon their army. Thousands landed at Corfu in such a state that only with continual care, with warmth and nourishing food could they be rescued. But on the little island of Vido where they were deposited the tents were few, the beds were fewer, wood was lacking, so that fires could not be made, and thousands died where they sank down, amid the olive groves and orange trees. The doctors nursed as many as they could in that one empty building; but for very long about a hundred corpses were each day piled in a little boat and taken out to sea. Usually they had died of pure exhaustion. Out of the 16,000 boys who had scrambled along with the army as far as Durazzo, about 2000 died on the sea and another 7000 on the Isle of Vido.

At Corfu the Serbs, with the other Yugoslavs, had also to set about securing the foundations of their State that was to be. The Russians, at the time of the negotiations which ended in the Treaty of London, had been looking forward to an Orthodox State, a Greater Serbia, bounded by the river Narenta. This, if it had been carried out, would have jettisoned, and probably for ever, the Croats and Slovenes. That was the incredibly stupid old Russian policy of identifying Slav patriotism with the Orthodox Church, a policy held up to ridicule by Strossmayer. It was the Yugoslav Committee, working chiefly in London, assisted by English friends, working there and at Corfu, which caused the Serbs, the Croats and Slovenes to publish on July 20, 1917, the historic Corfu Declaration, which laid it down that the nation of the three names was resolved to free itself from every foreign yoke and to become a constitutional, democratic and Parliamentary Monarchy under the Karageorgevic dynasty. It is said that those two excellent friends of the Southern Slavs, the brilliant Mr. Wickham Steed and Dr. Seton-Watson, than whom no publicist is more conscientious, had to face a determined opposition on the part of M. PaŠic before it was agreed that the Roman Catholic religion should in the prospective State have equal rights with the Orthodox. One would be disposed to criticize the Serbian Premier on account of a narrow policy dictated by his excessive wish for self-preservation—he saw very well that these clauses of equality might undermine the long reign of the Radicals—but it must be acknowledged that if the Southern Slavs had limited themselves to a Greater Serbia, in which the Radical party had been supreme, they would not have wasted so much of their energy, after the War, in domestic political conflict. They would also, very probably, have gained more favourable terms from the Entente; and the union with the Croats and Slovenes might have been effected later. But against this is the opinion of those who argue that the separation would have become permanent. However, if the union of the Southern Slavs could not be postponed, we may believe that it would have been wise to call the new country, for a couple of years, Greater Serbia. No doubt the logical Italians would have pointed out to the rest of the Entente that their bugbears, the Croats and the Slovenes, were included in this State; but the Allies as a whole would have been more inclined to be indulgent towards a country whose name they honoured than towards the same country whose various new-fangled designations—Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; or Yugoslavia; or S.H.S.—they found so puzzling. The Transylvanians who, one supposes, will play the chief rÔle in Greater Roumania have as yet, much to the profit of all the Roumanians, permitted the retention of that name. This course was not adopted by the Southern Slavs, and PaŠic giving way to Messrs. Steed and Seton-Watson, appointed M. Yovanovic to London with the object of working on the lines of the Declaration of Corfu.

THE SOUTHERN SLAVS IN THE UNITED STATES

The building of the new State and its army was also being undertaken with great fervour in America, New Zealand and Australia. North America contained about 100,000 Orthodox Serbs, 200,000 Catholic Slovenes and 400,000 Catholic Croats; South America had some 50,000 Yugoslavs, chiefly Catholic Dalmatians; while the 8000-10,000 in Australasia were mostly of that origin. Two kinds of Southern Slav newspapers were being printed in North America, namely those which the Austrian Ambassador supported, and those which were national. The chief argument of the former species was the Treaty of London, which, as the editors pointed out, gave up a large part of Dalmatia to the Italians. Two of these editors, by the way, were imprisoned for other reasons by the authorities. They had constantly threatened the terrible punishment that Austria would inflict on those who had worked against the Fatherland—many of the Southern Slavs, like the Roumanians, Czechs, Ruthenians and Magyars, were employed in munition factories, and the Austrian Embassy, in concert with the German, hoped to see them on the land. After a time the Yugoslavs took an office in Washington and attacked this propaganda, their example being followed by the Czechs and the Poles. When the United States entered the War these Austrophil papers no longer wrote in favour of Austria, but confined themselves to animadversions against the Serbian leaders, suggesting likewise that Croatia and Slovenia should be independent.... The patriotic Yugoslav papers—three dailies in New York, three in Chicago, and over twenty weekly organs—were not subsidized by the Yugoslav Committee in London or by the Government in Corfu; and some of the editors did not display a very prosperous appearance. But the poor Yugoslav workers contributed 20 million dollars to the first three Liberty loans, and when the National Council at Pittsburg in November 1916 united the different charitable, gymnastic and political associations, a call was made for volunteers. Between 25,000-30,000 men joined the United States army, a good many joined the Canadian contingents, and about 10,000 sailed for Salonica. The Yugoslavs in South America were in different circumstances: the Dalmatian temperament being nearer to the Spanish they found it easier to make their way; besides which, those who went to South America were on the average more advanced than those who preferred the North. In Chili, the Argentine and Bolivia the Yugoslavs are often very prosperous merchants and shipowners. They organized the Yugoslav National Defence and found all the funds for the Yugoslav organization in London. From New Zealand, where there is a Yugoslav paper called Zora (the Dawn), about 300 volunteers sailed to the Dardanelles, and others, when the Salonica base was established, joined their compatriots in that port.

CASH AND THE MONTENEGRIN ROYAL FAMILY

While the distant Yugoslavs were, in one way or another, helping the cause, that family of criminals which reigned in Montenegro did not shrink from malversation of the funds of the Red Cross. A young Croat, Mr. Milicevic, who before the War became a naturalized Montenegrin and in Neuilly served as Minister of Justice, has related how the Government continually borrowed (and did not repay) large sums of Red Cross money, and that if new clothes came from England for the refugees they would in Paris be replaced quite often for much older ones. How did the people fare? After the country had been occupied by the Austrians, most of the Allies consented that it should be revictualled on the same lines as Belgium. Even Austria offered no objections. One State only and one man were hostile to the scheme, and that man actually the King of Montenegro. "A poor and starving people," he argued, "is the most subservient. My interests will suffer if commodities are given to the Montenegrins. Let them wait. And when the moment comes for my return, I will go back with large supplies and be most popular." Even when his Ministers had realized that there must be no more delay in asking for the King of Spain's good offices—since the Italians (presumably in concert with Nikita) fought against the plan—and when the letter to the King of Spain was drafted it produced another one from Nikita to his Ministers—written by Nikita, but signed by his aide-de-camp. "The King," he said, "considers that the letter to the King of Spain should stand over, so long as one cannot be sure that Italy will permit the transit of foodstuffs destined for the people." He desired no mediation between himself and the Italians. Perhaps the most audacious act of spoliation was the sale of the State stores at Gallipoli, just when the Allied offensive on the Salonica front was leading to the collapse of the enemy. Instead of forwarding the 25,000 greatcoats, the 20,000 kilos of leather, and great quantities of material, medical and other stores, to Montenegro and rendering first aid to the liberated population, the managers of the Royal Treasury deemed it wiser to transfer the value of all these stores into their own pockets, disposing of more than 2-1/2 million francs worth of goods to trusted figureheads for a few hundred thousand Italian lire. Fortunately the French naval authorities put a stop to this brigandage, and the honest guardians of the people only succeeded in diverting a few hundreds of thousands. You may suppose that there is no excuse for conduct of this kind; but the Royal Family could say, "Behold, the people do not want our gifts." The Montenegrins, for example, who were interned at Karlstein in Austria, where they were not overfed, sent a telegram on November 27, 1916, to ask at whose initiative the Red Cross parcels had been sent to them. This was (in German) the prepaid reply: "Montenegrin Committee, President, Professor Pugnet, supported by the Red Cross. (Signed) The Bakery." As Pugnet was Danilo's professor, all the interned, except six or seven, declined the parcels.[102] Among the half-dozen were some relatives of Nikita, and some who explained that "We take the traitor's bread, for otherwise we should die; and after all it is the Entente which sends it. How unfortunate for us that they regard Nikita as our King." After the Armistice Nikita and his adherents complained bitterly that the Podgorica Assembly which deposed him was convened before these internees had come back from Austria!

Although the funds of the Montenegrin Red Cross were, as we have seen, not devoted to the needs of many of the Montenegrins, yet the Royal Family were very energetic in collecting cash. They caused a letter to be written to the French Red Cross, which had collected two millions for the Serbs, and in the letter they asked for a part of the two millions. A diplomatic answer was received. "You are only working," it said, "for Montenegro, whereas we are for all the Yugoslavs." This lack of success in financial matters was a new experience for the Royal House. When Russia sent the Montenegrin officers their pay during the War, an arrangement was made for it to come via Serbia in Serbian dinars. The King of Montenegro kept the dinars and paid his officers in paper money. Later on he sold such enormous quantities of dinars on the Paris Bourse that the Serbian Minister, Mr. Vesnic, had to protest. One remembers the haste with which Nikita left his country—both his people and his army he forgot, but not his gold. And for two years in France he struggled to get into his own hands this bullion which belonged to the State. Apparently he did at last receive it when he was at Pau in 1918. He was granted, for the expenses of his Court, a monthly allowance of 100,000 francs by Great Britain, the same by France, and 300,000 by Italy, which latter was not registered in the books. It would be interesting to know how much of this money was used for objects that Great Britain and France would never have countenanced. Virulent anti-Serbian newspapers were published in Switzerland—the Srpski List, the NaŠa Borba and the Nova Srbija. The tone of these papers was so pleasing to the Austrians that they bought up large numbers and distributed them throughout the Southern Slav lands they were occupying. We are, therefore, not astonished that the British subsidy came to an end in the course of 1917; to be resumed, however, in 1918 and finally stopped in June 1919, much to the indignation of Nikita and his partisans, who pointed out that it had been decided in Paris in the beginning of the War that the little nations participating in it should be helped pecuniarily. France stopped her payment four months after England and said, in answer to a Montenegrin Note, that if Great Britain resumed payment they would follow her example. PaŠic asked that the subsidies should be discontinued, thus reducing "this little country to such a state of despair," said Mr. Ronald M'Neill in the House of Commons in November 1919, "and to strip it so naked before the world that it will be compelled, having no other course to take, to accept union with Serbia, as the only way out of hopeless misery and bankruptcy." It is possible that Mr. M'Neill is referring to some subsidy other than that given to Nikita, but I have my doubts. In the same speech he alluded to American Relief work in Montenegro, saying that 70 per cent. of it was consumed by Serbian troops and the rest sold to profiteers. He confused the American Red Cross, which maintained four hospitals and distributed vast quantities of clothing and food among the inhabitants of Montenegro, and those American supplies which the Yugoslav Government purchased, mainly for the troops. But Mr. M'Neill, M.P., is very angry with the Serbs for spreading, as he says, reports discreditable to the King of Montenegro—if he knew a little more I think that he would say a good deal less—and Nikita must have deprecated the remark that no facilities at all had been given by the Great Powers to enable him and his Ministers to return to Montenegro. If every Serbian soldier were to be withdrawn the country would, with a tremendous majority, have been adverse to the ex-King and his family. This was recognized by Danilo when his father suggested that he should go out in the autumn of 1918. On December 5 he replied from Cap Martin saying that the appendicitis from which he had suffered since the War prevented him even from going into the garden. Mr. M'Neill and a few similar enthusiasts are not weary of repeating that the Serbs and the Montenegrins are quite distinct peoples. This, no doubt, is Mr. M'Neill's opinion, and if he wishes to retain it he is welcome to do so. But I should like to refer his audiences in the House of Commons and elsewhere to the Patriarch Brkic of Pec, who wrote in the eighteenth century concerning some of the Turkish provinces. No one would pretend that Brkic was profoundly versed in philology or in ethnography, and I believe he studied the Slav languages not any more than does Mr. M'Neill. He was a Montenegrin whose education had been that of an ordinary pupil in a monastery. He spoke the Southern dialect, and in his eyes all those who had another accent were not veritable Serbs. Even in our time there are many Montenegrins whom it is quite difficult to convince that they are not the only true Serbs.

THE BURDEN OF AUSTRIA'S SOUTHERN SLAV TROOPS

Meanwhile Austria's Yugoslav soldiers and sailors had been continuing their patriotic work. On February 2, 1918, a telegram was sent to the Army High Command at Baden (near Vienna). [This message is No. 974. It concerns itself with the Austrian navy, in whose ranks Sarkotic perceives agitation. The rest of the message consists chiefly of the drastic remedies which the writer would apply.]

There follows a document, numbered 106,116, and dated May 5, 1918, in which the disaffection of Slovene troops is described. Not only have anti-dynastic ones been raised, but a N.C.O. has torn off his two Austrian decorations and has stamped on them, while troops have worn their national colours in their caps, though this is only authorized when they are marching to a battlefield.

In a notice on the subject of Southern Slav and Italian propaganda in Dalmatia, the military command at Mostar denounces the Southern Slavs, officers and men:

Imperial and Royal Army: Higher Command.
Chief of the General Staff.
Op. No. 109,942.
Baden, August 5, 1918.

[After discussing various manifestations of disloyalty, the writer says that he has observed how there is a kind of link between the Slav officers, educated at the Academy, and their men. He finds that Spalato is particularly given to these Southern Slav ideas, which he believes is to be accounted for from the fact that Dr. Trumbic, "the celebrated agitator," is mayor and deputy of that town.]

So much for the complaints with regard to Austria-Hungary's Southern Slav soldiers. Two military courts of justice sat at Zagreb through the War, the Imperial and Royal Court, and that of the Royal Hungarian No. 6 (Croatian-Slavonian) Honved Division. No statistics are to hand with reference to the various courts in Syrmia, and that one which earned such an evil reputation in the fortress of Peterwardein. The judgments of the two Zagreb courts, where Croat officers were able to make their influence felt, did not appear to the authorities of Vienna and Buda-Pest to be sufficiently drastic. No death sentences were pronounced, although these had been demanded; and on June 24, 1918, it was decided that any further trials for high treason or for offences against the military authorities should be held in Pressburg (Bratislava) and not in Zagreb. The following statistics, relating to the two Zagreb courts, were compiled from the official books which the Austrians did not remove. The figures shown opposite, which are certified by Captain Stoir, Provost-Marshal, show the increasing determination to risk everything rather than to fight for Austria.

It may be of interest to give some details of one of the regiments whose composition was chiefly Slav. My informant, Dr. Ivo Yelavic, served as telephone officer on the staff of the 37th Dalmatian Regiment. At different times—at the fall of Gorica, in December 1916 at Sanmarco, and in June 1917 at Tolmein, three battalions went over to the enemy; 170 officers (of whom 169 were reserve officers) gave themselves up during the War. Some of them were Serbs, most were Croats. With respect to the fall of Gorica, this was not—despite the clamour that they made about it—due to the Italians, but to two officers, Tolja and Salvi, who took over with them all the plans of the underground forts and maps made to the scale of one step to a millimetre. Among the accomplishments which the officers of this regiment taught their men was how to surrender to the foe. Efforts were made to bring about a different state of things: German and Magyar regiments were placed behind it, with machine guns; the regiment itself was filled up with Magyars. On some occasions the 37th desisted from going over in order not to bring persecution upon their homes. In 1914, opposite the Montenegrins at Gorada, all the plans were worked out, but at the last moment Dr. Count Gozze (of Dubrovnik) said he had just thought of what would happen to their families, and they refrained. After the battalion had gone over in 1916 General Seidler told them he would do his best to have the regiment dissolved and the men divided among other regiments, but that not all the officers would go. This was an ominous hint that he intended to decimate them, after the fashion of Field-Marshal Liposcak. A fortnight later, in the presence of Field-Marshal Boroevic, General Wurm and General Seidler, they were highly praised; and when they, in company with a Magyar regiment, took Hill No. 166, it was announced that this had been achieved by the "fame-covered regiment," which was done to throw dust in the eyes of the Italians and the Entente. Various other methods were used to escape service at the front. A Slav doctor, whose hospital at Konjica could hold 400 patients, used to have 4000-5000 on the books; those whom he was unable to keep he gave convalescent leave. In this way he saved a great many of the Dalmatian intelligentsia. He and another Dalmatian doctor would send the men backwards and forwards, now to one hospital, now to another. One ordinary method for avoiding the front was to bribe the company commander and the N.C.O. who made out the lists. Yet sometimes there was no help for it. When, for instance, in September 1914 they were at Banjaluka, the enemy advanced to PalÉ, very near Sarajevo. My informant has a vivid recollection of the way in which a Viennese captain, the leader of the contingent, trembled. In a Bosnian valley they met a woman with five small children, one of whom was at her breast. The captain told my acquaintance (who was then a N.C.O.) to stay behind with some men and shoot her, but not to let him hear anything. He said that the General at Sarajevo had commanded that everything Serb that goes on two legs must be cut down. Yelavic refused to carry out this order, whereupon the captain told Dr. Gozze, whom he greatly disliked, that he must do it. Gozze stayed behind, fired a few shots in the air and informed the captain that everything was over.

What the Austrian command really thought of the 37th Regiment, and of others, may be seen from a report dated December 2, 1916, and signed by the Archduke Frederick:

"... Certain events that have occurred can be explained only as the consequences of the weak attitude of the authorities towards the traitorous propaganda. On July 21, five soldiers of the 23rd Regiment deserted near Pogger, and gave the Italian Command important information regarding movements of troops and the course of the fighting near Gorica. Quite recently a lieutenant, two reserve officers, two N.C.O.'s and two soldiers deserted from the 37th Regiment, as did three soldiers from the 23rd Regiment. Since April, 244 desertions have taken place from the two regiments. Inquiry shows that these desertions occur regularly and immediately after the return of the soldiers from leave. Unless effective counter-measures are adopted it will be impossible to utilize these Dalmatian regiments."

It was not always an easy operation to surrender, even after one had reached the Italian lines. A friend of mine went over with another officer and eight men. In the first-line trenches they could see no one and felt uncertain what to do. However, they proceeded, and from the second-line trench their whispered calls were answered. They were made to pass in single file, holding up their hands, and with all the available weapons held in readiness against them. My friend, at his request, was conducted to the colonel, and the first thing that he did was to make a formal complaint against the way in which this army, of which he considered himself an ally, manned its front-line trenches.

The Yugoslavs who managed to escape to Russia volunteered for service and, after being organized by General Zivkovic at Odessa, formed the two Divisions which, as is well known, did remarkable work in the Dobrudja. One only has to hear what the Bulgars say about them. In the battles round Constanza, during the campaign of 1916, one of these Divisions was so frequently engaged in the most arduous positions and had such enormous losses that it was regarded as having been wiped out. When the Roumanian troops retreated these Yugoslavs found themselves encircled by the Bulgarian and German armies; they hacked a way out with their bayonets. The higher officers had come from Serbia, the rest of them had previously been enrolled in Austria's army. Thirty-two officers out of 500 were killed, while 300 were wounded; and of the 42,000 men 1939 were killed and more than 8000 were wounded. Nevertheless the morale remained excellent and there was no lack of new volunteers. "Verily," as the Serbian proverb says, "it does not snow to kill the beasts, but in order that they may leave their traces."

THE FAITHFUL ITALIANS

Now let us see what Austria's Italian subjects achieved in the War, basing ourselves less upon the post-war declarations of some Istrian, Trentino and Dalmatian Italians than upon the official Austrian reports that were sent about these gentlemen to the Government during the War. For example:

Imperial and Royal Army: Supreme Command.
Pr. z. 3903.
Dalmatia: Treatment of the Croatian
and Italian Factors.
To the Imperial and Royal Minister of
the Interior, Vienna.
Knin, June 25, 1915.

I permit myself to notify:

[Herein the Statthalter, Graf Attems, praises his Government for not having favoured one party more than another at Zadar. He proceeds to testify to the admirable conduct of Dr. Ziliotto, the well-known mayor (who subsequently toiled with such zeal for Italy). He says that under this gentleman Zadar was a very model of a place, never allowing an occasion to pass by when it was possible to show that, in grief and in gladness, the sentiments of the glorious House of Habsburg were its own. Thus on the "all-highest" birthday of the Emperor did the doctor and his townsfolk revel in loyalty, while at the outbreak of the Great War they accompanied the departing troops to the quay and provided patriotic music and refreshments. This worthy conduct was not in the least modified, says the Statthalter, when Italy entered the War.]

Further on in this book there are similar good-conduct testimonials from Split, where the chief Italian used to wander down with an Austrian official to the harbour and there witness the embarkation, in chains, of the Yugoslav intelligentsia who were being taken as hostages. Hundreds and hundreds of Yugoslavs were shot, hanged, imprisoned; we know the numbers (not difficult to count) of the Italians in Dalmatia who suffered in any way. We know the equally minute numbers who escaped to Italy and enrolled themselves in the Italian army. As for the population of the Italian irredentist provinces, one may read in the Secolo of August 11, 1916 how it became generally known that "with the exception of Cervignano and Monfalcone, our soldiers have been received, on the other side of the old frontier, with demonstrations quite the reverse of enthusiastic on the part of the agrarian population. The surprise and disillusion of our troops were very great, for they expected from our unredeemed brothers, who all speak our language, a joyous reception." This frigidity may, however, have been due to the influence of Austrian priests and gendarmes. What are we to say, though, when we come to the more enlightened classes? The Italians in Austria were represented by twelve deputies who were devoted to the Austrian Government and hostile to Italy, and by six national-liberals and one socialist who were animated with pro-Italian sentiments. In electing such deputies, however, the peasants may not have simply allowed the priests and the gendarmes to command them; it is also possible that they were moved by the fear that the Trentino would economically be ruined if it were to become Italian and had to compete with the agricultural products of the Kingdom. As a matter of fact it was the Trentino intelligentsia which looked forward to annexation, and not, as a class, the peasants. And, during the War, Italian deputies of various parties overflowed with loyal Austrian sentiments; unlike the Yugoslav deputies, who refused in a body to vote the budget and the war credits, the Italian deputies never even ventured on a national pronouncement. Pittoni, chief of the Italian socialists at Triest, Faidutti (who was born in Italy) and Bugatto, the chiefs of the Italian Catholic party of GradiŠca, uttered not a few words of hate against the Madre Patria. The Italians praise always, and with excellent reason, their three heroes: Battisti, Rismondo and Sauro. But the Yugoslavs, in the course of the late War, lost in the unredeemed provinces so many hundreds of thousands who were hanged in Bosnia, who were dragged away—centenarians and infants—to the prison camps, were spat upon and stoned and treated in the most barbaric fashion, that they look upon those Yugoslavs who, like Battisti, fled from Austria and afterwards were slain by Austrians, as rather to be envied, since at any rate they struck a blow. But anyhow the names of all these volunteers could not be celebrated, on account of their great number. "There is nothing in fact," wired Mr. Beaumont on December 31, 1919, from Milan for the blameless readers of the Daily Telegraph, "there is nothing that creates such terrible exasperation in Italy as the persistent repetition of this patent falsehood that the Yugoslavs—meaning thereby the Croats—fought for the common cause."

Poor Battisti—when his regiment was captured he feigned to be dead. His men, however, told the Austrians that it was he, and this they did because they said that he and his Irredentist party were to blame for the War. These facts are now fairly well known, thanks to the Czech doctor who was on the spot and tried to save him by assuring the Austrians that it was not Battisti. The soldiers insisted, and in the end the Austrians executed him.

SOUTHERN SLAVS IN THE AUSTRIAN NAVY

The several transactions or attempted transactions which took place at various periods of the War between the Yugoslav members of the Austro-Hungarian navy, associated with other Yugoslavs, on the one hand and the Italian authorities on the other, were frustrated time and again by the astounding conduct of the Italians. Had they made anything like a proper use of the invaluable information that was showered upon them or if they had requested the other Allied navies in the Mediterranean to act on their behalf many Allied ships in the Mediterranean would not have been torpedoed—since the submarine activity centred at Kotor, one of the stations which could have been seized—the Austrian front in Albania must have collapsed and the entire war would have ended sooner.

In October 1917 the Austrian torpedo boat No. 11 was seized by the Slav members of her crew and brought into Ancona, but their offers of service were refused. The ringleaders showed, by refusing to accept large sums of money, that their purpose was purely patriotic. The Italians, however, simply interned them.

A much more serious affair was that of February 1, 1918, on which day it had been arranged that the Slav sailors at Pola and Kotor should mutiny. At the former place it did not succeed, at Kotor it was so far successful that the mutineers, after imprisoning Admiral Njegovan and many other officers whom they suspected of not being in sympathy with them, took command of the ships and left unanswered an ultimatum addressed to them by the High Naval Command. There was a prospect of the whole fleet shaking off the Austro-Hungarian authority. The chief revolutionary leader was Ante Sesan, a Croat ensign, twenty-six years of age, from near Dubrovnik and the son of a well-known sea captain on the coast. "We drew up," he says, "a proclamation representing our case to the Yugoslavs, Czechs and Poles from the national point of view, and to the Germans and Magyars from the socialist point of view. The Germans threw in their lot with us, but the Magyars went against us. From our ship we continually sent wireless messages asking for help from the Entente fleet, and at first from Italy which was nearest and could help most quickly. The messages were continually jammed by sailors at the Ercegnovo station loyal to Austria-Hungary, but nevertheless it was known in Italy that something was happening at Kotor. We told the High Command at Bok Kotor (Bocche di Cattaro) that we no longer recognized their authority and asked that we might get into touch with our deputies, whom alone we recognized. The High Command consented. We wired for the following deputies to come to us: TreŠic (Yugoslav), Stanjek (Czech), Karolyi (Magyar), Adler (German) and one Polish deputy, but our wires did not, for the most part, get through. Our object was to get help, but meanwhile our situation became more and more desperate. We knew that the Third Division was coming from Pola against us, and also the army in Herzegovina. We were prepared to take the battery of the Punta d'Ostro, the most important battery and the key to Bok Kotor, which was in the hands of sailors inimical to us. The news came from Gaa that the Magyars there had got the upper hand. We tried to bring them over to us, but in vain. They said, 'If you don't stop this, we shall join the Third Division and take action against you.' The Magyars from other boats sent the same message. The Council of Sailors then debated what was to be done, and it was suggested that Rasha (who was shot later) should go in a hydroplane to Italy to give information on the situation and ask for help, and that we in the meantime should lie low, and in the event of help coming, again raise a revolt. Rasha objected that he did not know Italian, and proposed that I should go. The Third Division meanwhile was already in the port Bok Kotor.

"At half-past eight in the morning we flew away in the hydroplane to Italy, I and two Poles. At ten we reached Mattinato, and I explained at the Carabineers' station why I had come and asked to be brought as soon as possible before the Commander of the District. Later I saw Captain Odo (of the Territorials) and told him all, and asked him to put me into communication with Brindisi, Taranto or Rome. He had us put under arrest. I was interviewed by two flying officers two days later, but they went off to Brindisi in my hydroplane without me.

"On February 17 I was taken under armed escort to Brindisi, where I was imprisoned in a cabin of the man-of-war Varese.... I told the commander of the ship that I was at his disposal with all my knowledge of the Austrian fleet. I asked him to put questions, because I did not know how much he knew. It was all to no purpose. On February 21 the Admiral in command at Brindisi saw me. From what he said I understood that nothing had been done about Bok Kotor and, what was more, that not one hydroplane had been sent to investigate the situation there. I learned that I was to go to Rome. They clapped me into barracks.... I again asked the Italians to allow me to speak to the Serbian Minister, whom I considered the representative of the Yugoslav people, but the request was refused on the plea that it was a question of high politics. Meanwhile the Polish representative Zamorski was allowed to visit the Poles, but from February 3 to May 25 I was unable to get into communication with any of our people."

In May there was another outbreak at Kotor, but it was overpowered, and many Yugoslav sailors were shot or imprisoned. Sesan was also kept in his Italian prison, though occasionally he was brought out, questioned and then taken back again. Thus at Ferrara he informed Captain Ciano about the whole organization of the Austrian offensive and defensive forces, and especially about Pola and Split. Sesan begged to be allowed to take part in the action against the Austrian fleet, and, at Rome, where he came before Captain Soldati, of the Bureau of Information, he made the same request. With two motor launches he undertook to organize communication between Italy and the Slavs of Dalmatia, in this way to follow events in Austria and help the revolutionary movement. It would be possible to procure the secret wireless codes which the Austrian and German submarines used—but the Italians would do nothing, because they were not willing to recognize that the Yugoslavs were fighting against Austria.... Seeing that he would never move the Italians to take serious action against the Austrian fleet, Sesan asked to be sent to the Serbian army in Macedonia, so that at Salonica he could get into touch with the French and British fleet. In this also he failed, for he was interned from June till December with Yugoslav officers at Nocera Umbra. While there he was visited by Bissolati, from whom he learned that the Chief of the Admiralty was hostile to the Yugoslavs. And at Nocera Umbra he remained until December 6, when he was liberated, owing to the efforts of Trumbic and other members of the Yugoslav Committee.

In the month of September a memorandum was drawn up by Trumbic, in which he proposed to English and American political and military circles the landing at Šibenik of a force of 50,000 men. This would have been assisted by the mutinous crews of the Austro-Hungarian Fleet, whose preparations had been completed in July (at this port 90 per cent. of the sailors of the fleet were Yugoslavs, and among them there was a strong national feeling; in fact, if their political leaders had not held them back, they would have endeavoured in July to blow up the naval fortifications and sail with the ships to Corfu). The expeditionary army, once at Šibenik, could have penetrated inland and, acting in consort with the many Yugoslav deserters and the insurgent population of Dalmatia and Bosnia, have accelerated the Austrian dÉbÂcle. In this memorandum Trumbic asked that the combined Anglo-American-French fleet should support the action, but that the Italians, whom the Yugoslavs distrusted, should take no part. He sneered at the cowardice of the Italians who, with a huge army, did not dare to start an offensive on a grand scale.

[In well-informed circles in Italy this memorandum was already known, but when it was read in the Italian Chamber in the spring of 1919 it made a considerable sensation.]

On October 3, Messrs. Frederick Štepanek, Rudolph Giunio, Valentine Zic (of Šibenik) and other authorized Czecho-Slovak and Yugoslav emissaries went in a sailing-boat from Vis to Italy, with a view to getting into connection with Dr. BeneŠ (afterwards the Czecho-Slovak Foreign Minister) and Dr. Trumbic, to inform them as to the situation in the Monarchy and to obtain instructions regarding the moment of the revolution in which their soldiers and sailors were to participate. On arrival in Rome on October 7, the delegates were interrogated by Major Trojani of the Bureau of Information and on the same day for three hours by the Inspector-General of Public Safety. From then till October 20, they were interned in the Macoa barracks at the Castro Pretoris, and although they made repeated attempts to see a member of the Yugoslav Committee or Dr. BeneŠ, who was in Rome, they were told that this "delicate" question could only be solved by the Premier himself; and when brought before him Dr. BeneŠ had departed. The delegates had entreated that he and Trumbic should be informed of their arrival, but in spite of various assurances nothing whatever was done. It is suggested that the fleet would have been in Slav hands two or three weeks earlier, which would very probably have precipitated events on the Western front, if the Italians had not acted in this inexcusable fashion.

ADVANCE OF THE ALLIES IN MACEDONIA

The collapse of Austria-Hungary was being hastened by the fine work of the Allies' Macedonian army. France and Great Britain had provided for the re-equipment of the Serbs. And of the variegated forces that were based on Salonica none did more magnificently than this resurrected army. A weather-beaten sergeant of the French Infanterie Coloniale told me that he had never seen an exploit such as that of Kaimatcalan, where the Serbs set themselves the task of climbing to the summit, which towers 8000 feet high, and from there dislodging the Bulgarian artillery. Over and over again the Serbs were thrown back, and with terrific losses, for the mountain-side was strewn with rocks not large enough to shelter more than a man or two. But as the Infanterie Coloniale is habitually chosen for the roughest work, so the Serbs asked for nothing better than to climb the wall that shut them out from their own country. The labyrinth of trenches on the mountain-top was taken and retaken many times, until the Bulgars—inadequately supported by their Allies—had to retreat; and this, after further ferocious fighting, enabled the Serbs and the French to liberate Monastir. The complicated story of Greek manoeuvres need not detain us, nor need we ask whether Mr. Leland Buxton[103] is justified in saying that the majority of that people were pro-German, "but were subsequently compelled by the Allied blockade ... to declare themselves supporters of Venizelos, on whose behalf, indeed, the British Admiralty and War Office had to carry on a sort of election campaign (by Eastern European methods) until the numerous waverers wisely decided that it was better to be a well-fed Venizelist than a hungry Royalist." Sufficient that after months of delaying, in the course of which the Russian troops had to be turned into labour battalions, Marshal MiŠic—whose plan of campaign had fortunately been adopted—had the satisfaction of seeing his own countrymen and their Allies racing up at last through Macedonia and Serbia to the Danube and beyond it.... What did they find? Bridges hastily blown up, tunnels rendered impassable by two locomotives laden with dynamite being made to collide in the middle of them—but the Serbs went rushing on. The supply columns could not keep pace with the troops—during the first eight days of the offensive the men of the 2nd Army received but two days' rations—they continued their advance across the Vardar, though but little bread and practically no other food was obtainable. In three days they had covered sixty miles. There was only time for them to greet the women and old men—and even if they had then been told of the 130,000 horses, the 6,000,000 sheep and goats, the 2,000,000 pigs, 1,300,000 cattle and over 8,000,000 poultry which the enemy had taken; if they had learned that the losses sustained by Serbia—exclusive of her own expenses and of the war loans from her Allies—amounted to some 10,000,000,000 frs. on a pre-war valuation, what did all this matter in that joyous time?

HOW THE MAGYARS TREATED THEIR SERBIAN SUBJECTS

At the beginning of the War the dominant Magyars of the Banat had as little uncertainty about the result as Count Julius AndrÁssy professed to have at a later period. "Victory must come to our troops," he said, "because they are better organized and more efficient, and because they are, above all, filled with unexampled enthusiasm, which makes heroes of them all." The enthusiasm which, for instance, caused the mob at Velika Kikinda to shout "Eljen a haboru!" ["Long live the War!"] while they fired revolvers in at the windows of an unilluminated house because it was the house of a Serb, a son-in-law of the well-known banker, Marko Bogdan, without stopping to ascertain that he was at the front fighting against Serbia, might be dismissed as a folly on the part of the crowd if it were not so characteristic of the whole Magyar administration. The "subject nationalities" were to be enrolled in the Magyar host and treated, at the same time, with contumely. At VerŠac Dr. Slavko Miletic,[104] son of the famous patriot, was suspected not only of cherishing Serbian sympathies, which was natural, but of committing a felony. The authorities believed that in his medical capacity he was exempting people from their military service, and not for the advantage of the Serbian cause so much as for that of his own pocket. Several detectives were therefore put to bed in one or two of the wards of the military hospital; and the upshot of it was that three other doctors—all of them Magyars—who had given way to these practices, committed suicide; the chief of the hospital poisoned himself, one of the staff shot himself, and the third culprit hanged himself in prison. Dr. Miletic had previously been kept for three and a half months under the shadow of a conviction for high treason: one Bonchocat, a Roumanian who did not understand the Serbian language, asserted that the doctor, at a meeting held two weeks before the Archduke's assassination, must have known that war was brewing, since—so said Bonchocat—he had not confined himself to Serbian ecclesiastical affairs, which was the object of the meeting, but had uttered the remark that if the Austrians had bayonets the Serbs had axes. Although Bonchocat was a man condemned to nine years' penal servitude for murder, and although the doctor only called on his own behalf two witnesses who were not Serbs, but the head of the frontier police and the head of the town police, he was nevertheless kept in suspense for three and a half months. Afterwards, owing to the lack of Magyar doctors, he was begged to be the State doctor for the town. Similarly the Orthodox priest, Radulovic, of Pancevo, was transported to Arad and interned there for no other reason than his nationality, whereas his son, a first lieutenant of the Hungarian Honved, was expected to be very loyal. When certain rumours came to the son's ears—he was then serving on the Russian front—he inquired, and was told that his father had merely been warned. Presently he learned the truth, and in consequence deserted to the Russians and became a member of the Yugoslav brigade. Thus it will be seen that the Magyar unwisdom was on a par with that which they had shown in days of peace. Unfortunately for their State the Magyar politicians were less honest than the Magyar peasants, so that the de-nationalizing process met with pretty firm resistance. What can be said for the honesty of a legal decision which laid it down that as two Serbian philanthropists, Barajevac and Sandulovic, at Pancevo had not specially mentioned that the funds they had bequeathed for a school were to be for a Serbian school—(this the benefactors had assumed as a matter of course)—they must be used for a Magyar establishment? Save for the officials there were practically no Magyars in Pancevo. And when the War began the remainder of the fund was invested by the Magyars in their War Loan! It is curious, by the way, to see what methods were employed to make the Loan successful. Fathers were frequently told that if their subscription was adequate their sons at the front would duly be granted leave. The Slovak village of Kovacica in the Banat was compelled to put three million crowns into War Loan, the Magyar notary making a list of the amounts which every person had to pay under penalty of being sent to the front; if he was too old for this he was threatened with internment. Kovacica, a few years before the War, had shown the Magyar fitness for governing an alien people. The population consisted of 5200 Lutheran Slovaks and 200 miscellaneous persons—Jews, Magyars and Germans. Nevertheless it was ordered that the church services must be in the Magyar and not in the Slovak language. When the parishioners objected, the police, with sticks and guns, expelled them from the large, lofty church, and 83 of them were sentenced to various periods of imprisonment. Serbian barristers defended them gratuitously, but the judge had himself taken an active part in turning the people out of the church; and presently the barristers were told that they had themselves been convicted—Dr. DuŠan BoŠcovic for one year, on the ground that he had had the napkins at a banquet decorated with the Serbian colours; Dr. Branislav Stanojevic for three years, because his visits to Belgrade, where his parents and his brother were living, stamped him, said the Magyar judge, as a traitor. The total number of Magyars at Kovacica was ten, and for a time they came to hear their language, which had thus been compulsorily introduced. Handbills were sent round to summon the Magyars from neighbouring villages, but gradually this congregation grew smaller and smaller. When two Magyars attended, then the pastor gave them a sermon; if only one was present he confined himself to prayers. The Magyars had seen to it, by the way, that there should not be much sympathy between the pastor and his bishop: of this diocese about three-quarters were Slovaks and one-quarter Germans and Magyars; but the Government vetoed the choice of Dr. Czalva, who was disqualified for being friendly to the Slovaks—his father and grandfather had both been bishops of that same diocese—and a certain Dr. Raffay was appointed, who spoke nothing but Magyar and some words of German.... However, by taking in this way a few examples of Magyar methods, one may be accused of having chosen merely those which illustrate one's theme. It would be hazardous to draw conclusions as to Magyar officers in general because a certain Lieutenant Chaby, who, during the War, found himself quartered on a Serbian family of the name of Stejvovic at Priboj in the Sandjak, behaved differently from his predecessor, an Austrian colonel. This Austrian had been well satisfied, but the lieutenant's first night was so disturbed that he fined his hosts sixty crowns for giving him a bug-ridden bed. Nevertheless, if large numbers of Austrian colonels and Magyar lieutenants had acted in a similar fashion we should be justified in deducing that several characteristics, be they good or bad, are possessed by the average Magyar subaltern. And the catalogue of Magyar limitations in the Banat, both prior to and during the War, is so voluminous that one would have thought them to be not worth discussing; if one restricts oneself to a few it is in order to avoid being tedious, and if they are ineffective among the resolute pro-Magyars of this country, then one must resign oneself to leaving these gentlemen unconvinced. They will argue that stupidity is universal, and that the Magyar authorities should not be called in question for their treatment of the priest of Crvna Crkva, a village with 1108 inhabitants—1048 Serbs, 34 Slovaks, 17 Germans and 9 Magyars. This intelligent man—he is a noted player of a complicated card game—was indicted for high treason, because on hearing that the Emperor William was alleged to have undertaken to slaughter every Serb, the priest remarked that the Emperor should have added, "if God wills it." But near the village of Zlatica there was, at the beginning of the War, one Adam Rada, who was charged with making signals to the Serbs across the Danube by means of lights, and this although the situation of Rada's mill made such a thing impossible. Before being executed he was led ceremoniously through the village, his coffin being carried in the procession. This coffin was so small that Rada's feet had to be cut off. The grave was guarded by a soldier, who kept the family away from it; Rada's servant was in the hands of the police—after having been thrashed in order to compel him to give hostile evidence, he was convicted to six years' imprisonment. But the lack of evidence does not appear to have weighed very strongly with the Magyar judges. "It is quite true," said one of them in 1915 in the town of Bela Crkva, during the trial of a young priest, Voyn Voynovic, "that there are witnesses who say he did not utter certain words in 1913, and no witnesses who say that he did; but I am convinced that he uttered them." The ferocity of the punishments may be seen from the example of Alexa Petkovic of Pancevo, the father of nine, who was condemned to hard labour for nine years because his twelve-year-old son, during the War, is alleged to have said to him: "Father, don't accept German money; it won't have any value." At the same place, in 1914, the Serbian peasants were brought in from the village of BortŠa; there was no proof that they were traitors, but they had been denounced and they were sentenced to be shot. With a military escort they were promenaded through the town, each one of them having to hold a Hungarian flag. At the scene of execution the Hungarian Élite, together with their wives and daughters, were assembled. And after the bodies had been thrown on to a cart they were flogged, for some unknown reason, by one Blajek, a detective, while the audience cried "Eljen!" ["Hurrah!"]. But the War brought to an end the bad old days of a tyrannous minority. It will be shown, in a year or two, when a proper census is taken, that the Magyars were always much more in a minority than they ever admitted. Instead of nine millions out of the eighteen millions—which was the pre-war population of Hungary—it will be found that the Magyars themselves numbered barely six millions, though in their efforts to obtain recruits they charged only one crown and afterwards nothing at all for a naturalization paper. The day has gone by when a father could be interned for being a Serb, while his son, an assistant notary, was reckoned a Magyar—only Magyars being eligible for that office. The day has gone when the Buda-Pest Government could order its officials while taking a census to swell the Magyars' numbers as much as possible: the officials at Subotica confessed on oath, after the War, that they had received orders to this effect. One of their practices was to put down as "uncertain" those Serbian children who were too young to speak. Even those who were most willing to be absorbed into magyardom were often indigested: one finds in the statistics cases of converted Jews who, being asked to state their religion and nationality, replied to the former question "Catholic" and to the latter "Jew."

THE SOUTHERN SLAVS PAY PART OF THEIR DEBT TO THE HABSBURG MONARCHY

If the practices of Buda-Pest had been less flagrant one would write of Hungary's decomposition with a certain sympathy. It is conceivable that in the British Empire there are anti-British elements whose aims would commonly be classed by the authorities as "mad ambitions," which is what Count Apponyi called the separatist tendencies of the Southern Slavs in Austria-Hungary. But—may the platitude be pardoned!—there is all the difference between the spirit in which the alien rule of the one government was, and of the other is, administered. No doubt there are portions of the British Empire in which a plebiscite would have the same disintegrating result as it would have had in most of the regions that have been lopped from Hungary. We, with our Allies, declined to permit a plebiscite in Hungary's late territories, since we believed that the population had overwhelmingly displayed its wishes at the end of the War; and an Englishman may hope to escape the charge of hypocrisy if he does not permit the withholding of a plebiscite from certain of his fellow-subjects to prevent him from alluding with satisfaction to those who have been liberated from the sway of Buda-Pest.

(a) IN SYRMIA

Everywhere the dawn was breaking for the Habsburg's Southern Slavs. At Vukovar in Syrmia—to take an example—there was formed, as elsewhere, a National Council. Under Baron Joseph Rajacsich, a grandson of the Patriarch and—to all appearances—a brother of Falstaff, the Council maintained order until the coming of the Serbian army. An Austrian naval captain with a floating arsenal, four steamers and twenty-two drifters, was held up, as he proposed to sail towards Buda-Pest, by being told of a battery at Dalja, higher up the Danube. However, the Vukovar townsfolk, in view of a possible explosion, begged that the prisoner, who had wept at being stopped, should be sent on his way. The German harbour-master, a lieutenant, assured the Baron that he would assist him if he were allowed to keep his liberty. But he was tempted, in the middle of a night, to assist two German captains who were trying to get through, each with a string of drifters. Rajacsich, whose armed force consisted of forty Serbian ex-prisoners and fifty of his own workmen—he armed them with what he found on the drifters—had no means of stopping the German boats. But after telephoning in vain to the ex-harbour-master, he fired a shot into one of the boats, which fortunately found the kitchen, and made such a terrible noise among the pots and pans that the Germans considered it more prudent to remain. The Baron succeeded in sending back to Belgrade altogether 39 steamers and 217 loaded drifters, which contained booty, even from the Ukraine, that was valued at about a milliard crowns; ... but the Austro-Hungarians managed to get away with a considerable amount of plunder. The people of Buda-Pest were surprised, on the morning of November 5, to find the Sophie, one of the most luxurious passenger steamers on the Danube, lying at their quay, with her decks groaning under such a pile of packing-cases and parcels and furniture and all kinds of objects heaped upon each other as almost to make the boat unrecognizable. A lieutenant with a dozen soldiers was sent to investigate, and the captain showed him an order from the Minister of War, commanding that the Sophie should take on board the Military Government in Serbia and transport it to Vienna. But the Buda-Pest authorities insisted on removing all the articles whose ownership the passengers were unable to prove; and it took a whole day to unload the enormous quantities of flour, leather, clothing, poultry, sugar, fats, etc. General Rhemen, the former military governor of Serbia, related that on October 5 he received the order to begin the military evacuation of Serbia. This was carried on day by day, and on October 28 it was completed. "We sent by the railway and by boats," said Colonel Kerchnaive to the Hungarian journalists, "4000 carloads of wheat, 10,000 fat oxen, 10,000 transport oxen, 10,000 pigs, 4000 sheep, 15 carloads of wine, 400 carloads of jam, enormous quantities of wood, of telephone material, of arms, munitions and 16 million crowns in silver." Such was the "military evacuation" of Serbia.... And at the beginning of the same month, when the whole Austro-Hungarian monarchy was in a state of collapse, Baron Hussarek stood up in the Reichsrath and said that "the task will arise for the Government carefully to prepare and inaugurate the difficult but hopeful work of reconstructing the monarchy on the basis of national autonomy." The imperturbable Prime Minister announced that "we shall have to go to work and set our house in order." But you will say that the Baron was a futile Mrs. Partington, an isolated antagonist of the inevitable, and only mentioned here for the sake of dramatic effect. Not at all! So far from being laughed at everywhere as an absurd reactionary he was held in the highest Buda-Pest circles to be a perilous innovator. He actually spoke about conciliating the Austro-Hungarian Slavs: not so Count Tisza. "What is happening in Austria," exclaimed the grim Calvinist a few months before, "are strange, grotesque displays of the ridiculous symptoms of the presumptuous mentality of people of no importance."

(b) IN SLOVENIA

One further example of Southern Slav activity may be given, as it will show us what was happening among the pious and industrious Slovenes. It would have been unnatural if the Clerical party had longed for Austria's downfall, and a large number of priests would still have been Austrophil[105] if Dr. Jeglic, the eminent Prince-Bishop of Ljubljana, had not summoned all the political parties and caused them to adopt a patriotic Yugoslav attitude. (His retirement was in consequence demanded; but the Pope, who asked him for an explanation of the whole movement, was quite satisfied. Nor would Vienna have been able to take any serious steps against the Bishop, seeing that most of the Slovenes were behind him.) But the small Slovene people could, until November 1, 1918, offer nothing more than a passive resistance to their masters. They did not dare to speak Slovene in public. "What is the easiest language in the world?" was being asked in Maribor on the 1st of November. It was the language which so many people had apparently learned in a single night. The people were Slovenes, the officials were Austrian—though one or two of the officials were Slovenes and a minority of the people claimed to be Austrians, this being more marked in the town of Maribor (where the German-Austrians were as many as 35 per cent.) than in the surrounding district (where 95 per cent. are Yugoslav). Dr. Jeglic had prepared the forces that were going to break their bonds on that fateful day. At 7 a.m. Dr. Srecko LajnŠic—one of the rare Slovene officials—he had been denounced by two of his colleagues and imprisoned at the beginning of the War, for having, as they said, "laughed maliciously" at Great Britain resolving to fight—Dr. LajnŠic and his friend General Maister took over the administration in the name of the Yugoslav State. General Maister had been till then a Major, employed—as he was a political suspect—on dÉpÔt work. And when the eight or nine Austrian colonels appeared on November 1 before LajnŠic, the genial official, and Maister, they were informed by the latter that he was a General—he looks like a swarthy Viking—and they were asked to surrender their swords. As they did not know how many men the General had behind him—as a matter of fact he had nine—they acted on his suggestion; one of them wept as he did so. At 11 a.m. LajnŠic deposed all the chief civil officials in that part of Styria, and the General persuaded the 47th Regiment to leave by train. They were influenced by a notice in the papers which said that 100,000 Frenchmen (invented by the General and LajnŠic) had just arrived at Ljubljana. After this the two companions carried on at Maribor; very little was known of them for a month at Ljubljana, Zagreb or Belgrade. But then they were confirmed in the posts they had assumed and Maister became a regular General. They were not intolerant; they expelled less than ten people, although so many of the German-Austrians had come, under the auspices of the SÜdmark Verein (a colonization society) or the Deutsche Schulverein (an educational body), to propagate Germanism. One of these colonists, a doctor, who had lived a dozen years in Maribor, could only say "Good morning" in Slovene; and German women in the market-place (themselves unable to speak proper German) used to insist on the Slovene peasants speaking a language of which they knew scarcely a word. LajnŠic and Maister took no steps against the Bishop of Maribor who, three months after the Austrian collapse, celebrated a Mass in honour of the ex-Emperor. This Bishop, the son of Slovene peasants, had been educated near Vienna, had been a confessor of the House of Habsburg, and he found it difficult to regard himself as a Slovene. Gradually the voice of his own people spoke in him and then, after very long and honourable mental conflict, he developed into an excellent Yugoslav. He and Maister are, both of them, poets. Most of the General's pieces—which are all in Slovene—treat of love and nature. But he wrote at least one set of other verses, which the Austrians suppressed during the War. This is the nearest translation I can make of them:

[80] Cf. "Le ProgrÈs politique et Économique sous le RÉgne de Pierre i.," by A. Mousset, in Yugoslavia, December 15, 1921.