The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean Part 3

"He does not," was the answer.

"Then you must have picked up some Serb or Italian," I hazarded.

"Niver a wurrd of thim vulgar tongues do I know," said he.

"Then how do you and the bishop get along?"

"Shure," said Father Mullane, in the rich brogue which is, I imagine, something of an affectation, "an' what is the use of bein' educated for the church if we were not able to converse with ease an' fluency in iligant an' refined Latin?"

When we were leaving Spalato, Father Mullane presented us with a _Bon Voyage_ package which contained cigarettes, a box of milk chocolate, and a five-pound tin of gum-drops. The cigarettes we smoked, the chocolate we ate, but the gum-drops we used for tips right across the Balkans. In lands whose people have not known the taste of sugar for five years we found that a handful of gum-drops would accomplish more than money. A few men with Father Mullane's resource, tact, and sense of humor would do more than all the diplomats under the roof of the Hotel Crillon to settle international differences and make the nations understand each other.

I had been warned by archaeological friends, before I went to Dalmatia, that the ruins of Salona, which once was the capital of Roman Dalmatia and the site of the summer palace of Diocletian, would probably disappoint me. They date from the period of Roman decadence, so my learned friends explained, and, though following Roman traditions, frequently show traces of negligence, a fact which is accounted for by the haste with which the ailing and hypochondriac Emperor sought to build himself a retreat from the world. Still, the little excursion--for Salona is only five miles from Spalato--provided much that was worth the seeing: a partially excavated amphitheater, a long row of stone sarcophagi lying in a trench, one or two fine gates, and some beautifully preserved mosaics. I must confess, however, that I was more interested in the modern aspects of this region than in its glorious past, for, standing upon the ma.s.sive walls of the Roman city, I looked down upon a panorama of power such as Diocletian had never pictured in his wildest dreams, for, moored in a long and impressive row, their stern-lines made fast to the _Molo_, was a line of war-ships flying the flags of England, France, Italy, and the United States. On the right of the line, as befitted the fact that its commander was the senior naval officer and in charge of all this portion of the coast, was Admiral Andrews's flag-ship, the _Olympia_, but little changed, at least to the casual glance, since that day, more than twoscore years ago, when she blazed her way into Manila Bay and won for us a colonial empire. On her bridge, outlined in bra.s.s tacks, I was shown Admiral Dewey's footprints, just as he stood at the beginning of the battle when he gave the order "You may fire when you are ready, Gridley."

Of the 18,000 inhabitants of Spalato, less than a tenth are Italian, the general character of the town and the sympathies of its inhabitants being strongly pro-Slav. In fact, its streets were filled with Jugoslav soldiers, many of them still wearing the uniforms of the Austrian regiments in which they had served but with Serbian _kepis_, while others looked strangely familiar in khaki uniforms furnished them by the United States. It being warm weather, most of the men wore their coats unb.u.t.toned, thereby displaying a considerable expanse of hairy chest or violently colored underwear and producing a somewhat negligee effect.

Because of the presence in the town of the Jugoslav soldiery, the crews of the Italian war-ships were not permitted to go ash.o.r.e with the sailors of the other nations, as Admiral Andrews feared that their presence might provoke unpleasant incidents. Hence their "sh.o.r.e leave"

had, for nearly six months, been confined to the narrow concrete _Molo_, where they were permitted to stroll in the evenings and where the Italian girls of the town came to see them. For a Jugoslav girl to have been seen in company with an Italian sailor would have meant her social ostracism, if nothing worse.

Though Italy will unquestionably insist on the cession of certain of the Dalmatian islands, in order, as I have already pointed out, to a.s.sure herself a defensible eastern frontier, and though she will ask for Zara and possibly for Sebenico on the ground of their preponderantly Italian character, I believe that she is prepared to abandon her original claims to Dalmatia, which is, when all is said and done, almost purely Slavonian, Jugoslavia thus obtaining nearly 550 miles of coast. Now I will be quite frank and say that when I went to Dalmatia I was strongly opposed to the extension of Italian rule over that region. And I still believe that it would be a political mistake. But, after seeing the country from end to end and talking with the Italian officials who have been temporarily charged with its administration, I have become convinced that they have the best interests of the people genuinely at heart and that the Dalmatians might do worse, so far as justice and progress are concerned, than to intrust their future to the guidance of such men.

It had been our original intention to steam straight south from Spalato to the Bocche di Cattaro and Montenegro, but, being foot-loose and free and having plenty of coal in the _Sirio's_ bunkers, we decided to make a detour in order to visit the Curzolane Islands. In case you cannot recall its precise situation, I might remind you that the Curzolane Archipelago, consisting of several good-sized islands--Brazza, Lesina, Lissa, Melida, and Curzola--and a great number of smaller ones, lies off the Dalmatian coast, almost opposite Ragusa. From Spalato we laid our course due south, past Solta, famed for its honey produced from rosemary and the cistus-rose; skirted the wooded sh.o.r.es of Brazza, the largest island of the group, rounded Capo Pellegrino and entered the lovely harbor of Lesina. We did not anchor but, slowing to half-speed, made the circuit of the little port, running close enough to the sh.o.r.e to obtain pictures of the famous Loggia built by Sanmicheli, the Fondazo, the ancient Venetian a.r.s.enal, and the crumbling Spanish fort, perched high on a crag above the town. Then south by west again, past Lissa, the western-most island of the group, where an Italian fleet under Persano was defeated and destroyed by an Austrian squadron under Tegetthof in 1866. A marble lion in the local cemetery commemorated the victory and marked the resting-places of the Austrian dead, but when the Italians took possession of the island after the Armistice they changed the inscription on the monument so that it now commemorates their final victory over Austria. It was not, I think, a very sportsmanlike proceeding.

Leaving Lissa to starboard, we steamed through the Ca.n.a.le di Sabbioncello, with exquisite panoramas unrolling on either hand, and dropped anchor off the quay of Curzola, where the governor of the islands, Admiral Piazza, awaited us with his staff. In spite of the bleakness of the surrounding mountains, Curzola is one of the most exquisitely beautiful little towns that I have ever seen. The next time you are in the Adriatic you should not fail to go there. Time and the hand of man--for the people are a color-loving race--have given many tints, soft and bright, to its roofs, towers, and ramparts. It is a town of dim, narrow, winding streets, of steep flights of worn stone steps, of moss-covered archways, and of some of the most splendid specimens of the domestic architecture of the Middle Ages that exist outside of the Street of the Crusaders in Rhodes. The sole modern touches are the costumes of the islanders, and they are sufficiently picturesque not to spoil the picture. How the place has escaped the motion-picture people I fail to understand. (As a matter of fact, it hasn't, for I took with me an operator and a camera--the first the islanders had ever seen.) Besides the Cathedral of San Marco, with its splendid doors, its exquisitely carved choir-stalls black with age and use, its choir bal.u.s.trade and pulpit of translucent alabaster, and its dim old altar-piece by Tintoretto, the town boasts the Loggia or council chambers, the palace of the Venetian governors, the n.o.ble mansion of the Arnieri, and, brooding over all, a towering campanile, five centuries old. The Lion of St. Mark, which appears on several of the public buildings, holds beneath its paw a closed instead of an open book--symbolizing, so I was told, the islanders' dissatisfaction with certain laws of the Venetians.

But the phase of my visit which I enjoyed the most was when Admiral Piazza took us across the bay, on a Detroit-built submarine-chaser, to a Franciscan monastery dating from the fifteenth century. We were met by the abbot at the water-stairs, and, after being shown the beautiful Venetian Gothic cloisters, with alabaster columns whose carving was almost lacelike in its delicate tracery, we were led along a wooded path beside the sea, over a carpet of pine-needles, to a cloistered rose-garden, in which stood, amid a bower of blossoms, a blue and white statue of the Virgin. The fragrance of the flowers in the little enclosure was like the incense in a church, above our heads the great pines formed a canopy of green, and the music was furnished by the birds and the murmuring sea. Here we seemed a world away from the waiting armies and the great gray battleships, from the quarrels of Latin and Slav. It was the first real peace that I had known after five years of war, and I should have liked to remain there longer. But Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, all the unhappy, war-torn lands of the Near East lay before me, and I turned reluctantly away. But my thoughts keep harking back to the little town beside the turquoise bay, to the restfulness of its old, old buildings, to the perfume of its flowers, and the whispering voice of its turquoise sea. So some day, when the world is really at peace and there are no more wars to write about, I think that I shall go back to where

"Far, far from here, The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay Among the green Illyrian hills."

CHAPTER III

THE CEMETERY OF FOUR EMPIRES

We stood on the forward deck of the _Sirio_ as she slipped southward, through the placid waters of the Adriatic, at twenty knots an hour. Less than a league away the Balkan mountains, savage, mysterious, forbidding, rose in a rocky rampart against the eastern sky.

"Did it ever occur to you," remarked the Italian officer who stood beside me, a noted historian in his own land, "that four great empires have died as a result of their l.u.s.t for domination over the wretched lands which lie beyond those mountains? Austria coveted Serbia--and the empire of the Hapsburgs is in fragments now. Russia, seeing her influence in the peninsula imperiled, hastened to the support of her fellow Slavs--but Russia has gone down in red ruin, and the Romanoffs are dead. Germany, seeking a gateway to the warm water, and a highway to the East, seized on the excuse thus offered to launch her waiting armies--and the empire reared by the Hohenzollerns is bankrupt and broken. Turkey fought to retain her hold on such European territory as still remained under the crescent banner. To-day a postmortem is about to be held on the Turkish Empire and the House of Osman. Think of it!

Four great empires, four ancient dynasties, lie buried over there in the Balkans. It is something more than a range of mountains at which we are looking; it is the wall of a cemetery."

Rada di Antivari is a U-shaped bay, the color of a turquoise, from whose sh.o.r.es the Montenegrin mountains rise in tiers, like the seats of an arena. We put in there unexpectedly because a _bora_, sweeping suddenly down from the northwest, had lashed the Adriatic into an ugly mood and our destroyer, whose decks were almost as near the water as those of a submarine running awash, was not a craft that one would choose for comfort in such weather. Nor was our feeling of security increased by the knowledge that we were skirting the edges of one of the largest mine-fields in the Adriatic. But the _Sirio_ had scarcely poked her sharp nose around the end of the breakwater which provides the excuse for dignifying the exposed roadstead of Antivari (with the accent on the second syllable, so that it rhymes with "discovery") by the name of harbor before I saw what we had stumbled upon some form of trouble.

There were three other Italian destroyers in the harbor but, instead of being moored snugly alongside the quay, they were strung out in a semblance of battle formation, so that their deck-guns, from which the canvas muzzle-covers had been removed, could sweep the rocky heights above and around them. A string of signal-flags broke out from our masthead and was answered in like fashion by the flag-ship of the flotilla, after which formal exchange of greetings our wireless began to crackle and splutter in an animated explanation of our unexpected appearance. Our hawsers had scarcely been made fast before a launch left the flag-ship and came plowing toward us, a knot of white-uniformed officers in the stern. From the blue rug with the Italian arms, which, as I could see through my gla.s.ses, was draped over the stern-sheets, I deduced that the commander of the flotilla was paying us a visit.

"You have come at rather an unfortunate moment," he said after the introductions were over. "Last night we were fired on by Jugoslavs on the mountainside over there," indicating the heights across the harbor.

"In fact, the firing has just ceased. There must have been a thousand of them or more, judging from the flashes. But I hope that madame will not be alarmed, for she is really quite safe. They are firing at long range, and the only danger is from a stray bullet. Still, it is most embarra.s.sing. On madame's account I am sorry."

His manner was that of a host apologizing to a guest because the children of the family have measles and at the same time attempting to convince the guest that measles are hardly ever contagious. I relieved his quite obvious embarra.s.sment by a.s.suring him that Mrs. Powell much preferred taking chances with snipers' bullets to the discomfort of a destroyer in an ugly sea; and that, having journeyed six thousand miles for the express purpose of seeing what was happening in the Balkans, we would be disappointed if nothing happened at all.

When I left Paris for the Adriatic I carried with me the impression, as the result of conversations with members of the various peace delegations, that the people of Montenegro were almost unanimously in favor of annexation to Serbia, thereby becoming a part of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. But before I had spent twenty-four hours in Montenegro itself I discovered that on the subject of the political future of their little country the Montenegrins are very far from being of the same mind. And, being a simple, primitive folk, and strong believers in the superiority of the bullet to the ballot, instead of sitting down and arguing the matter, they take cover behind a convenient rock and, when their political opponents pa.s.s by, take pot-shots at them.

My preconceived opinions about political conditions in Montenegro were largely based on the knowledge that shortly after the signing of the Armistice a Montenegrin National a.s.sembly, so called, had met at Podgoritza, and, after declaring itself in favor of the deposition of King Nicholas and the Petrovitch dynasty, which has ruled in Montenegro since William of Orange sat on the throne of England, voted for the union of Montenegro with the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

Just how representative of the real sentiments of the nation was this a.s.sembly I do not know, but that the sentiment in favor of such a surrender of Montenegrin independence is far from being overwhelming would seem to be proved by the fact that the Serbs, in order to hold the territory thus given to them, have found it necessary to install a Serbian military governor in Cetinje, to replace by Serbs all the Montenegrin prefects, to raise a special gendarmerie recruited from men who are known to be friendly to Serbia and officered by Serbs, and to occupy this sister-state, which, it is alleged, requested union with Serbia of its own free will, with two battalions of Serbian infantry. If Montenegrin sentiment for the union is as overwhelming as Belgrade claims, then it seems to me that the Serbs are acting in a rather high-handed fashion.

I talked with a good many people while I was in Montenegro, and I was especially careful not to meet them through the medium of either Serbs or Italians. From these conversations I learned that the Montenegrins are divided into three factions. The first of these, and the smallest, desires the return of the King. It represents the old conservative element and is composed of the men who have fought under him in many wars. The second faction, which is the noisiest and at present holds the reins of power, advocates the annexation of Montenegro to Serbia and the deposition of King Nicholas in favor of the Serbian Prince-Regent Alexander. The third party, which, though it has no means of making its desires known, is, I am inclined to believe, the largest, and which numbers among its supporters the most level-headed and far-seeing men in the country, while frankly distrustful of Serbian ambitions and unwilling to submit to Serbian dictatorship, possesses sufficient vision to recognize the political and commercial advantages which would accrue to Montenegro were she to become an equal partner in a confederation of those Jugoslav countries which claim the same racial origin. Most thoughtful Montenegrins have always been in favor of a union of all the southern Slavs, along the general lines, perhaps, of the Germanic Confederation, but this must not be interpreted as implying that they are in favor of a union merely of Montenegro with Serbia, which would mean the absorption of the smaller country by the larger one. They are determined that, if such a confederation is brought about, Serbia shall not occupy the dictatorial position which Prussia did in Germany, and that the Karageorgevitches shall not play a role a.n.a.logous to that of the Hohenzollerns. Montenegro, remember, threw off the Turkish yoke a century and three-quarters before Serbia was able to achieve her liberty, and the patriotic among her people feel that this hard-won, long-held independence should not lightly be thrown away.

It is not generally known, perhaps, that, when Austria declared war on Serbia in August, 1914, an offensive and defensive alliance already existed between Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro. We know how highly Greece valued her signature to that treaty. Montenegro, with an area two-thirds that of New Jersey, and a population less than that of Milwaukee, could easily have used her weakness as an excuse for standing aside, like Greece. Very likely Austria would not have molested her and the little country would have been spared the horrors of a third war within two years. But King Nicholas's conception of what const.i.tuted loyalty and honor was different from Constantine's. Instead of accepting the extensive territorial compensations offered by the Austrian envoy if Montenegro would remain neutral, King Nicholas wired to the Serbian Premier, M. Pachitch: "_Serbia may rely on the brotherly and unconditional support of Montenegro in this moment, on which depends the fate of the Serbian nation, as well as on any other occasion_," and took the field at the head of 40,000 troops--all the men able to bear arms in the little kingdom.

It has been repeatedly a.s.serted by his enemies that King Nicholas sold out to the Austrians and that, therefore, he deserves neither sympathy nor consideration. As to this I have no _direct_ knowledge. How could I?

But, after talking with nearly all of the leading actors in the Montenegrin drama, it is my personal belief that the King, though guilty of many indiscretions and errors of policy, did not betray his people.

I am not ignorant of the King's shortcomings in other respects. But in this case I believe that he has been grossly maligned. If he did sell out he drove an extremely poor bargain, for he is living in exile, in extremely straitened circ.u.mstances, his only luxury a car which the French Government loans him. It is difficult to believe that, had he been a traitor to the Allied cause, the British, French, and Italian governments would continue to recognize him, to pay him subventions, and to treat him as a ruling sovereign. Certain American diplomats have told me that they were convinced that the King had a secret understanding with Austria, though they admitted quite frankly that their convictions were based on suspicions which they could not prove. To offset this, a very exalted personage, whose name for obvious reasons I cannot mention, but whose integrity and whose sources of information are beyond question, has given me his word that, to his personal knowledge, Nicholas had neither a treaty nor a secret understanding with the enemy.

"The propaganda against him had been so insidious and successful, however," my informant concluded, "that even his own soldiers were convinced that he had sold out to Austria and when the King attempted to rally them as they were falling back from the positions on Mount Lovtchen they jeered in his face, shouting that he had betrayed them.

Yet I, who was on the spot and who am familiar with all the facts, give you my personal a.s.surance that he had not."

Nor did the King give up his sword to the Austrian commander at Grahovo, as was reported in the European press. When, with three-quarters of his country overrun by the Austrians, his chief of staff, Colonel Pierre Pechitch of the Serbian Army, reported "_Henceforth all resistance and all fighting against the enemy is impossible. There is no chance of the situation improving_," King Nicholas, in the words of Baron Sonnino, then Italian Foreign Minister, "preferred to withdraw into exile rather than sign a separate peace."

I may be wrong in my conclusions, of course; the cabinet ministers and the amba.s.sadors and the generals in whose honor and truthfulness I believe may have deliberately deceived me, but, after a most painstaking and conscientious investigation, I am convinced that we have been misinformed and blinded by a propaganda against King Nicholas and his people which has rarely been equaled in audacity of untruth and dexterity of misrepresentation. To employ the methods used by certain Balkan politicians in their attempted elimination of Montenegro as an independent nation even Tammany Hall would be ashamed.

When, upon the occupation of Montenegro by the Austrians, the King fled to France and established his government at Neuilly, near Paris--just as the fugitive Serbian Government was established at Corfu and the Belgian at Le Havre--England, France, and Italy entered into an agreement to pay him a subvention, for the maintenance of himself and his government, until such time as the status of Montenegro was definitely settled by the Peace Conference. England ceased paying her share of this subvention early in the spring of 1919. When, a few weeks later, it was announced that King Nicholas was preparing to go to Italy to visit his daughter, Queen Elena, the French Minister to the court of Montenegro bluntly informed him that the French Government regarded his proposed visit to Italy as the first step toward his return to Montenegro, and that, should he cross the French frontier, France would immediately break off diplomatic relations with Montenegro and cease paying her share of the subvention. This would seem to bear out the a.s.sertion, which I heard everywhere in the Balkans, that France is bending every effort toward building up a strong Jugoslavia in order to offset Italy's territorial and commercial ambitions in the peninsula. The French indignantly repudiate the suggestion that they are coercing the Montenegrin King.

"How absurd!" exclaimed the officials with whom I talked. "We holding King Nicholas a prisoner? The idea is preposterous. So far as France is concerned, he can return to Montenegro whenever he chooses."

Still, their protestations were not entirely convincing. Their att.i.tude reminded me of the millionaire whose daughter, it was rumored, had eloped with the family chauffeur.

"Sure, she can marry him if she wants to," he told the reporters. "I have no objection. She is free, white, and twenty-one. But if she does marry him I'll stop her allowance, cut her out of my will, and never speak to her again."

Because it has been my privilege to know many sovereigns and because I have been honored with the confidence of several of them, I have become to a certain extent immune from the spell which seems to be exercised upon the commoner by personal contact with the Lord's anointed. Save when I have had some definite mission to accomplish, I have never had any overwhelming desire "to grasp the hand that shook the hand of John L. Sullivan." To me it seems an impertinence to take the time of busy men merely for the sake of being able to boast about it afterward to your friends. But because, during my travels in Jugoslavia, I heard King Nicholas repeatedly denounced by Serbian officials with far more bitterness than they employed toward their late enemies and oppressors, the Hapsburgs, I was frankly eager for an opportunity to form my own opinions about Montenegro's aged ruler. The opportunity came when, upon my return to Paris, I was informed that the King wished to meet me, he being desirous, I suppose, of talking with one who had come so recently from his own country.

At that time the King, with the Queen, Prince Peter, and his two unmarried daughters, was occupying a modest suite in the Hotel Meurice, in the rue de Rivoli. He received me in a large, sun-flooded room overlooking the Tuileries Gardens. The bald, broad-shouldered, rather bent old man in the blue serge suit, with a tin ear-trumpet in his hand, who rose from behind a great flat-topped desk to greet me, was a startling contrast to the tall and vigorous figure, in the picturesque dress of a Montenegrin chieftain, whom I had seen in Cetinje before the war. I looked at him with interest, for he has been on the throne longer than any living sovereign, he is the father-in-law of two Kings, and is connected by marriage with half the royal houses of Europe, and he is the last of that long line of patriarch-rulers who, leading their armies in person, have for more than two centuries maintained the independence of the Black Mountain and its people.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HIS MAJESTY NICHOLAS I. KING OF MONTENEGRO

He has been on the throne longer than any living sovereign, he is the father-in-law of two kings, and is connected by marriage with half the royal houses of Europe]

King Nicholas, as is generally known, has been remarkably successful in marrying off his daughters, two of them having married Kings, two others grand dukes, while a fifth became the wife of a Battenberg prince. Remembering this, I was sorely tempted to ask the King as to the truth of a story which I had heard in Cetinje years before. An English visitor to the Montenegrin capital had been invited to lunch at the palace. During the meal the King asked his guest his impressions of Montenegro.

"Its scenery is magnificent," was the answer. "Its women are as beautiful and its men as handsome as any I have ever seen. Their costumes are marvelously picturesque. But the country appears to have no exports, your Majesty."

"Ah, my friend," replied the King, his eyes twinkling, "you forget my daughters."

Another story, which ill.u.s.trates the King's quick wit, was told me by his Majesty himself. When, some years before the Great War, Emperor Francis Joseph, on a yachting cruise down the Adriatic, dropped anchor in the Bocche di Cattaro, the Montenegrin mountaineers celebrated the imperial visit by lighting bonfires on their mountain peaks, a mile above the harbor.

"I see that you dwell in the clouds," remarked Francis Joseph to Nicholas, as they stood on the deck of the yacht after dinner watching the pin-points of flame twinkling high above them.

"Where else can I live?" responded the Montenegrin ruler. "Austria holds the sea; Turkey holds the land; the sky is all that is left for Montenegro."

One of the things which the King told me during our conversation will, I think, interest Americans. He said that when President Wilson arrived in Paris he sent him an autograph letter, congratulating him on the great part he had played in bringing peace to the world and requesting a personal interview.

"But he never granted me the interview," said the King sadly. "In fact, he never acknowledged my letter."