The Birth Of Yugoslavia Volume I Part 15

Ni 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 Paic 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 att.i.tude 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 doc.u.ments 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 Yaka, 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 a.s.sociation with the Czecho-Slovak and the Yugoslav brigades.

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IMPERIAL AND ROYAL MILITARY COMMAND IN _Sealed._ ZAGREB. CHIEF OF STAFF.

INT. DEP. ARMY G.H.Q. 1 To be dispatched in COMMANDER ON THE S.E. FRONT. two envelopes, K.N.

F.P.O. 11. 2 to be written on the 5 op. by H.Q.F. P.O. 305. 3 one inside and N.

5 A.E.C. F.P.O. 81. 4 alone without K. on Evid. O. Vienna. 5 the outer; seal!

ZAGREB, _July_ 10, 1915.

In spite of the ten months' war with Serbia, in spite of the notable executions of native citizens for a.s.sisting 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....

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In this doc.u.ment 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 inst.i.tuted a most thorough and severe examination, wherein I am already myself partic.i.p.ating; 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.

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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 a.s.sistant 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 a.s.sembled--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 "Majestatsbeleidigung" 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 a.s.sociates and even has convivial evenings with them. In fact the whole country, so the writer a.s.serts, 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 cafes 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 proteges.) 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 pa.s.sed along in silence; from time to time, indeed, one heard them say 'hleba' (bread)--that was the only word they had the strength to p.r.o.nounce. 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 munic.i.p.ality 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 cla.s.ses.

"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 Emba.s.sy 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 G.o.d'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 Mondesir 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 Va.s.silija 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:

Kuca mi gori, Kuci mi trebaju--

["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 attache 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 doc.u.ment 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 att.i.tude. He appeared at Podgorica where he made an eloquent speech, exhorting his people to march on the morrow against the hated Austrian and a.s.suring 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 Miukevic, the Premier, fled the country; while Prince Mirko, the remainder of the Cabinet, the National a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sistance--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 dest.i.tute 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 Peic. 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 Nikic. This order was issued in the name of Colonel Peic, 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 Skuptina, 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 a.s.sist 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 Kolain 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 a.s.severation 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 chateau 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 Miukevic 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 t.i.tles. 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 Ma.r.s.eilles, 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 Va.s.silje Buric to the furious indignation of the busybodies who supported the King and of the Italian Emba.s.sy. 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 const.i.tuted 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 Nikic.[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, a.s.sisted 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 const.i.tutional, 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.