THE true story of what happened in Montenegro, when the Austrians reported that the country had submitted to superior force and accepted the domination of the Central Powers, and that it was abandoning the hopeless task of resisting their united strength, will perhaps be revealed in the future. At present it is unknown. Probably it will turn out to have been a great personal disappointment to the Kaiser and another instance where his diplomacy failed. It would have been a triumph to induce Montenegro to submit peaceably, and to have King Nicholas accept the position of a client king at Berlin. But the resistance of Montenegro was not wholly overcome. The king and the people who had fought for freedom with success against all the forces of Turkey and afterward of Austria during so many years could not submit to being deluded by the blandishments of Hadji Wilhelm.

Here the artist shows Nicholas with his bag packed for the journey to France, and labelled “Lyon,” turning away from the Kaiser, who looks toward him with seductive entreaty, and presses his hands in a gesture of petition. He is making a last attempt to induce the king to submit to fate and to himself; to come to Berlin, and to be received with royal honors and enrolled alongside the many princely families of Germany.

The Kaiser set great store by success in this negotiation. It would have been the beginning, as he hoped, of the breaking up of the alliance among his foes. Even though it was only the small and poor Montenegro that abandoned the Allied cause, still it was to be the first stage of a general break-up, which would have been hailed with triumph as the beginning of the end. The Kaiser wanted Nicholas badly, but Nicholas was not going alone to Berlin, and his last word is that “we will all come later.” Raemaekers, with his unfailing confidence in a final victory, looked forward then, when the cause of the Allies seemed to be at its lowest ebb, to the victory of the future, and to the victorious entrance of the united Allies into Berlin. The artist judged by faith, and not by sight. He was not a mere calculator of chances, and an estimator of military power; for those neutrals who judged on such principles were apparently all so profoundly impressed with the overwhelming military strength of Germany, that their moral judgment was warped. Raemaekers had lived too close to Germany to be ignorant of her enormous strength; but he judges as a prophet, who bears witness to the moral quality of the world, despite of the apparent balance of probabilities.

WILLIAM MITCHELL RAMSAY.