Chapter XI: Introduction: The Tragedy of a Frontier (9)

In the course of July 1914 the Austro-Hungarian Government (wherein far more influence was exerted by Count Tisza, the wealthy and incorruptible, the vastly ambitious Magyar Prime Minister, than by the Foreign Minister, Count Berchtold, the courteous, somewhat frivolous man of the world who was doomed to execute reluctantly the orders of Berlin and be swept away by the resulting storm, while the brave and brutal Tisza, fighting for the glory of the Habsburgs and the greater glory of the Magyars, rode upon the storm for years)--the Austro-Hungarian Government in July 1914 dispatched to Sarajevo a commissioner for the purpose of investigating whether the Serbian authorities had anything to do with the Archduke's assassination. This official, Baron von Weisner, a very distinguished Professor of Political Economy who was a German Bohemian[73] with staunch German sympathies, reported in the same month that he was convinced that no accusation whatever could be levelled against Belgrade. (As a matter of fact the Serbian police, who had information that a plot was being hatched in Bosnia, gave warning to the Austrian authorities; but no notice was taken of this, not even when a similar warning was uttered on June 21 by the Serbian Minister at Vienna, nor were any special precautions laid down for the Archduke's safety. It was all rather mysterious.) "Byzantium, the everlasting and unconquerable Byzantium," says an Austrian publicist,[74] "had won another victory.... The Habsburg Empire," says he, "only wished to defend herself against those invisible and irrepressible intrigues." And after denouncing the Serbs for throwing a spark into the powder barrel on June 28, 1914, he accounts for their conduct by writing that "it is the tradition of nomad blood to tear down ancient, noble palaces, replacing them by nomad huts." What we know is that General Potiorek, the Governor of Bosnia, who had urged Francis Ferdinand and his wife to continue their programme after the failure of the first attempt at assassination before lunch, was never invited to explain anything--unfortunately for Austria he was placed in command of the "punitive expedition" into Serbia. Other incidents on which a light may some day be thrown were the very unceremonious funeral arrangements for the murdered couple (though this may very likely have been due to the High Chamberlain's personal hatred of the Archduke), and the fact that an Imperial Commission was sent to Konopi[vs]t[ve], the Archduke's Bohemian estate, to seize his papers. It was there that he had lately been confabulating with the German Emperor; and Count Berchtold had visited the place on the day after the Kaiser's departure to try to ascertain what had occurred.... It was also at Konopi[vs]t[ve] that Francis Ferdinand, who was threatened with hereditary madness, had shot a gamekeeper dead. Knowing that the Archduke was as good a shot as he was insignificant in horsemanship, this had excited great attention in the highest circles, coming as it did after other scenes of violence.... In contrast with all these semi-mysteries it is clear that Serbia had nothing whatever to gain by the Archduke's disappearance, and although Austria had time and again endeavoured to pick a quarrel with her she had managed to avoid a situation which, after the two recent wars, would be perilous in the extreme. The Serbian Press, which enjoyed a complete freedom, was naturally violent in tone when it observed that the Austro-Hungarian Government was doing little to control the demonstrations hostile to Serbia. Houses of prominent Serbs were looted and gutted at Sarajevo, while similar scenes took place--with the connivance of the authorities--in other large towns of the Monarchy. But the Belgrade populace, uninflamed by their Press, conducted themselves with great moderation. The stories circulated in Austria-Hungary of several Magyar journalists having been murdered were absolutely false. Just as false were the rumours of a demonstration against the Austrian Minister at the funeral of M. Hartwig, his Russian colleague, although Serbian public opinion ascribed the sudden death of this powerful friend of theirs to a cup of poisoned coffee at the Austrian Legation. Hartwig has been criticized for his encouragement of Serbia's idea of expansion and for having fostered anti-Austrian propaganda--of course it was a very wicked thing, from the Austrian point of view, to think of the day when the Serbs might be joined to their unredeemed brethren; and as for the blessed word "propaganda," which covers everything from the mildest expression of opinion to assassination, there has been no responsible Austrian so reckless as to accuse the Serbs or M. Hartwig of having had recourse to methods that approached in wrong-doing their own notorious (and unsuccessful) forgeries.

Let us address three questions to those who carried on a calumnious campaign against Serbia:

(a) Why was the Sarajevo trial conducted behind a closed
door? If the crime was instigated and perpetrated by Serbia,
the Habsburg Monarchy, which at the time of the trial had
already declared war on Serbia, had every interest in
establishing with all publicity the guilt and the complicity
of Serbian circles.

(b) Why were the evidence of the witnesses and the
declarations of the authors of the assassination not
published? It was only in 1918 that the Austrian Government,
with the help of a professor of Berlin University, published
a few facts taken from the proceedings of the trial.
Although in this book[75] a great deal of material
importance has been omitted--for example, the declarations
of the witnesses as well as the last declarations of the
accused, nevertheless that which we have before us
constitutes one of the most terrible accusations against the
Habsburg Monarchy. The young accused persons were not afraid
to state, even behind closed doors in a barrack-room, some
bitter truths concerning Austria-Hungary. One can have some
idea of what they would have said in a public trial from the
results of the famous trials of Zagreb and of Friedjung. All
the accused persons, as well as their accomplices, declared
that the decision to kill the Archduke was an act of their
own personal will and that nobody incited or ordered them
to make the attempt, least of all any authority of the
Kingdom of Serbia. The crime was the personal act of Bosnian
patriots who believed that they were serving their oppressed
people. "In Bosnia," said the Minister Burian--"in Bosnia,
there is no policy, there is only administration."

(c) Why did the Sarajevo police and Austro-Hungarian
official circles conduct themselves so strangely with
respect to the bomb-thrower [vC]abrinovi['c], a notorious
anarchist and son of a Sarajevo police spy, who had on a
former occasion been expelled by the police from Sarajevo?
Later on, after the Belgrade police had been obliged, owing
to the intervention of the Austrian Consulate, to allow him
to stay in Belgrade, he returned to Sarajevo and was quite
unmolested by the police, whose precautions a few years
previously, at the time of the visit of Francis Joseph, had
gone so far as to expel, as suspected persons, two members
of the Bosnian Parliament.

The sole charge that could be laid, not against Serbia but against a Serbian subject, concerned the relations of the subordinate officer Tankosi['c] with the authors of the crime. It was asserted that he knew of the plan and that he helped the assassins to procure money and weapons. The accused definitely said that he exercised no influence on their decision, which had been taken before conversation with him. But even supposing that he was an accomplice, it is evident that the whole Serbian nation and especially the Serbian Government is not identical with an officer who, on account of other troubles with the Ministry of War, had already been removed from the active service list.[76] When the Austrian ultimatum was transmitted to the Serbian Government, Tankosi['c] was immediately arrested, so that his guilt and complicity might be enquired into and established. Serbia could not do more than that. But the whole Serbian people, in Serbia and out of Serbia, was declared guilty of the crime, and immediate steps were taken to carry out the sentence. The unprecedented atrocities committed by the Austro-Hungarian army in Serbia were to be the expiation of an imaginary crime, and such proceedings, which recall the times of Attila, are shielded by the illustrious name of the aforementioned Professor Kohler, whose reputation it was to be the most democratic of German jurists. All his previous theories on crime, causality and responsibility became void; we see him adopt the monstrous theory according to which every act of private persons is the responsibility of the whole nation.

It remained for Nikita, a man of Serbian blood, a man whose verses had been laden with love for the Serbian nation, it remained for this shameless Prince to charge his brothers with the crime. So implacable was the old man's hatred of Serbia that when President Wilson arrived in Europe he immediately wrote[77] to him, in his indifferent French, for fear, he said, lest the intrigues conducted by the Serbs or their accomplices should precede him in capturing the President's sympathies. "In spite of their perfidy," said he, "I was the first to lend them a hand by being the first to declare war against Austria, although I was certain that the provocation originated on their side by the Sarajevo murders and their Black Hand.... Horrible thought that this country refuses to realize the crime it has committed, for which it is responsible to mankind no less than William!"

At last, on January 5, 1917, the _Neue Freie Presse_ acknowledged that Austria provoked the war with the intention of crushing Serbia. It is a formal and categorical confession. And it obliges us to consider seriously the thesis put forward by Jules Chopin in _Le Complot de Sarajevo_ (Paris, 1918), according to which the plot was hatched at Konopi[vs]t[ve] between the German Kaiser and the man to whom the plot proved fatal. Monsieur Chopin, after a minute examination of the facts and of grave presumptions, believes that Serbia was to be held up to the world as having provoked the war that was to consolidate the Monarchy and satisfy the Archduke's paternal ambitions. The army manoeuvres were to be in Bosnia, the Archduke was to make his ceremonial entry into Sarajevo on Vidov dan, the day when the Serbs solemnly celebrate the battle of Kossovo, and [vC]abrinovi['c], son of the Sarajevo police-spy, was to be assisted through the Chinese Wall which then encircled Bosnia. But what did not enter into the royal calculations was the possibility that other Southern Slavs, acting on their own initiative, might strike a real blow.

THE MISERABLE MACEDONIANS

This period of Yugoslav history (from 1876 until the European War) was at the beginning much concerned with Macedonia. And so it was towards the end. Very wretched was the lot of the Macedonian Slavs--occasionally the Exarchists and occasionally the Patriarchists were in the ascendant, but while in religious matters the Greeks clung by all possible means to their ancient, privileged position, so the Turks maintained in secular affairs the sorry plight of their Slav raia. The Macedonian Slavs, when the rest of Europe began to listen to their cries, were not the most sympathetic of mortals--the more enterprising of them had abandoned the country, while the moral sense of those who stayed was grievously affected by the course of conduct which the presence of the Turk compelled. Europe was touched by the anguish of these Christians and did not inquire too closely as to the proportion of the virtues, often called the Christian virtues, which they cultivated. And it was undoubtedly a fact that their treatment left a great deal to be desired. The peasant was obliged to pay direct imposts in cash. There were taxes on landed property, on cattle, on sheep and on fruit-trees, tithes on every species of harvest and a poll-tax to which only Christians were liable, amounting to ten shillings per annum for every male. To complete the exactions with a touch of irony, there was also an education-tax and a heavy road-tax for the upkeep of the indescribable highways. These taxes were not collected by Government officials, but were farmed out to the highest bidder, and so flagrant were the abuses of this system that it was not unusual for the villagers to cut down their fruit-trees in order to avoid the tax upon them, for the tax-farmer, against whom an appeal would be worse than useless, was wont to appear with gendarmes and estimate, according to his fancy, the amount of any crop.[78] Another tax very frequently imposed upon the helpless peasant was the tribute to some Albanian chief, who in return undertook to protect the village. And if the village was outside the Albanian sphere of influence it was usually obliged to have its own resident brigands, who might or might not be Albanians. Generally speaking, those villages were the least to be envied which were on the borders of Albanian territory: cattle were lifted, crops of corn or hay were carried off before they could be garnered, young men and old men were kidnapped and held to ransom; sometimes, says Mr. Brailsford, they were fettered and driven to the fields at sunrise with the cattle and were forced to work there until evening. Most of the villages in Macedonia were owned by a Turkish bey to whom the peasant was obliged to give a clear half of the harvest, besides a certain amount of labour on the bey's private farm and in his mill, as well as hewing wood for him and transporting his produce to the market without payment. It is not surprising that the Macedonian Slavs, whose labour brought them such inadequate reward, sank into very slothful habits. Thus at Monastir in 1914-1915, when the population had the choice of taking flour from the Serbian Government or else the British Consul's bread, which came from India, most of them--to save themselves trouble--preferred the bread, though with the Serbian flour they could have baked themselves just twice as much.... When Europe took up the Macedonian problem towards the close of 1902 there had been a considerable revolt, followed by an outburst of official ferocity and the flight of some thousands of peasants. The Sultan, in the hope of forestalling any Russian interference, promised various reforms. But Russia and Austria proceeded to discuss what each of them would do in Macedonia, and one resolve was that they also, being the two "interested" Powers, would institute a scheme of reform. The Western Powers for a time abdicated their responsibilities and left the miserable Macedonians to the supervision of the two countries which, as they themselves said, were the least disinterested. Now and then the other Powers made a suggestion, as when Lord Lansdowne, who was in favour of autonomy, made in January 1905 a number of proposals which would have assisted the solution of the problem. But Austria and Russia would only accept a part of his programme. Their own programme, drawn up at Muerzsteg in September 1903, was plainly of a transitional nature. It announced to the different Balkan peoples that the end of their serfdom was approaching, and thus it accentuated their latent rivalries and hostilities. Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian bands ravaged the country.

"The Serbo-Bulgarian conflict," said Dr. Milovanovi['c], a Serbian Minister of Justice, "has its origin exclusively in the chauvinistic circles of both countries. Macedonia is the battlefield." He said, very rightly, that the population of Macedonia was equally near to Serb and to Bulgar; but unhappily, in his efforts to establish a _modus vivendi_, he proposed that Macedonia should be divided between the two countries. Surely it is far better that it should become the common possession of Serb and Bulgar, the link joining them to one another. After Dr. Milovanovi['c] came the Balkan wars, of which the second utterly destroyed for many a long day his hopes of an understanding, since the experiences of the invaded Bulgars were generally very different from those recorded by the careful schoolmaster, Stavri Popoff, in his monograph, _The Self-Defence of the Village of Ciprovci against the Serbo-Roumanian Invasion of 1913_ (Berkovica, 1915). This isolated village in the mountains was defended by thirty old reservists, who possessed 100 guns and 15,000 cartridges. So pleased is their historian with the manner in which they held their own--the rocks which surround Ciprovci are so many natural fortresses--that he tells us not only the names of the thirty warriors but those of the other inhabitants who carried milk and bread to the outposts. On July 14, a Sunday, there was an exciting battle, in the course of which the Bulgars suffered no human casualties, but lost to the Serbs 900 sheep and a score of cattle, and this, says Popoff, "made the women weep very much." As soon as possible a telegram was sent to the War Office at Sofia, asking for reinforcements, after which "their spirits rose to such a height that they felt they could resist anything." On July 26 the Serbs were again repulsed, but once more a number of sheep and cattle were carried off. In conclusion the author thanks "all those who morally and materially have helped and will help the cause," including the mayors of the neighbourhood.

If the second Balkan War had not left memories more bitter than at Ciprovci then the reconciling labours of those who follow Dr. Milovanovi['c] would be less difficult. In our own day Mr. Leland Buxton, working also for this union which eventually must come, suggests in his _Black Sheep of the Balkans_[79] that Macedonia should be made autonomous. But this would do no more than perpetuate the wearisome and fierce intrigues of which exponents can be always found in Balkan countries. Macedonia must become the common possession; and what could be more desirable than that one of these countries should administer the province in such a way as to attract the other country? Marshal Mi[vs]i['c] was of opinion that the officials whom the Serbs, after the Balkan War, placed in Macedonia were too often not the kind of men whom wisdom would have chosen; but there was as yet a general eagerness to avoid being sent to those unalluring parts. The officials left behind them such unhappy recollections that the Serbian army, advancing through Macedonia in 1918, was received, as a rule, with something less than delight. Fortunately the Yugoslav Government was able, after these events, to induce a far superior class of officials to serve in Macedonia, though I believe the scale of remuneration is no higher than in the old kingdom. Men are selected who, in addition to other qualities, speak the Turkish or Albanian of the district. "You can count on our moral and material support, on all that we now give to Turkey," said Mr. Balfour in 1903 to M. Svetislav Simi['c], the Serbian Minister of Foreign Affairs, who came as special envoy to London "if," said Mr. Balfour, "you can come to an understanding with the Bulgars on the one side and the Croats on the other." In many Macedonian places one finds that priests and schoolmasters--I have said this before but it will bear repetition--who officiated under the Bulgars have been confirmed in their posts. How very different is this from the policy of a few years ago when, for example, at Kriva (or Egri) Palanka there was considerable propaganda with respect to the school. While Macedonia was part of the Sultan's dominions there was, on the whole, more willingness of Serbs and Bulgars to provide a school than of the local population to frequent it.

FEROCITIES OF EDUCATION

A report of February 1901 says that in Rankovci three pupils came to the teacher's house; in April of the same year the attendance has been reduced to one pupil, who after coming regularly for a month decided to keep away. In 1906 the peasants of that locality prevented a school from being opened. At Kriva Palanka until the Balkan War the teachers came from Kustendil--but how far they were patronized I do not know. The three teachers from Serbia who appeared in 1909 seem to have spent their time in promenading the village. Not until after the Balkan War did pupils resort to them. In 1916 the same school taught Bulgarian. In 1918 the Serbian language was resumed. These changes were unfortunate for the child and still more so for the teachers, who were continually being chased away or hanged. And now at last one finds the Serbs so much in advance of what they and the Bulgars used to practise. Their ex-Bulgarian schoolmasters are mostly of Macedonian origin, so that it is not difficult for these gentlemen to give their instruction in the kindred Serbian language, using, of course, the local dialect. And we can look back with a smile to the not very distant days when a zealous Serbian schoolmaster in Macedonia was wont, instead of prayers, to make the children repeat after him three times, every morning and every afternoon, "Ja sam pravo Serbin" ("I am a true Serb"). Likewise the Bulgar was so certain of the superiority of his religion that he deprived the Pomaks of their Moslem names, giving them for Abdulla such a name as Anastasius. The Pomak, unable to remember his new name, was handed a sheet of paper with a record of the matter; but very few of these people can read.

THE STORM IS PAST

Gone for ever are the days of the Turkish censor when Danov, who sold at Veles and Salonica the schoolbooks which at first he wrote himself, was obliged to leave the name of Pushkin out of an anthology because of its resemblance to pushka, a gun. And, with their more civilized methods towards each other, we may be sure that the days have gone when a Serb at Kumanovo could compel Moslem children, before uttering the above-mentioned slogan, to cross themselves; while no Serbian bishop will find himself confronted with such a problem as that which in 1913 nonplussed the Bishop of Skoplje--certain Moslems had been, against their will, converted by the Bulgars to Christianity and they now requested the Bishop to undo what had been done. These days of religious intolerance are as distant as those mediaeval ones in Bohemia when Roman Catholic nobles, many of them foreigners, succeeded after the Battle of the White Mountain to the estates of the decapitated Protestants and conducted themselves after the fashion of one Huerta, an ennobled tailor of Spanish origin, who drove the peasants of his district to Mass with the help of savage dogs.... In view of the strides which have been made in so short a time we shall have in Macedonia an example for the other Yugoslav lands. No longer then will anyone complain like that old couple at Ni[vs] who, on the arrival of the Bulgarian army in the winter of 1915-1916, announced that they were Bulgars. "But what can you do with our daughter?" they asked, "for she says resolutely that she is a Serb, since she has been to the Serbian school." Both the Serbian and the Bulgarian people have, in the last twenty or thirty years, been through the severest school. Now, after an appropriate interval--some authorities say five and some say a hundred years--they will be fellow-citizens in Yugoslavia. The last serious conflict between them, which we will consider in the next chapter, has been waged.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 53: Of the three millions, which is estimated to
have been the population of Macedonia at the time of the
Great War, almost two millions were Slav, and it is to these
only that we refer in using the term "Macedonians" in this
chapter. Among the other inhabitants of the variegated
province are Greeks and Turks and Circassians, Albanians
(Tosks and Ghegs), Jews whose ancestors came from Spain,
gipsies and Kutzo-Vlachs. A French observer said some years
ago that Macedonia was a school of brigandage and ethnology.
He said it was the prey of the Albanians and the
professors--that is, of unconscionable savages and of
laborious agents of all kinds of foreign propaganda. Even the
Kutzo-Vlachs, which in Greek signifies "Limping Roumanians,"
made their propaganda, or had it made for them. Gustav
Weigand, a German professor who devoted himself very
thoroughly to this people, used to wish us to believe that
the Aromunes, as the Roumanians of the kingdom call their
Macedonian relatives--another name to which they answer is
Tsintsares--are free from all Greek blood. But this is not
the case; they have become very hellenized, although it is
true that there are some who call themselves Greek and who,
besides having no such mixture in their veins, cannot speak a
word of the Greek language. According to circumstances--and
very much like the Serbo-Bulgarian Macedonians--this people,
who number less than 100,000, have been accustomed to
proclaim themselves now Greek and now Roumanian. They are a
good example of the bad effects of propaganda, and this,
added to the Turkish domination and the perpetual exodus of
those who could manage to escape, has left in Macedonia a
population that is generally more unsympathetic than any
other in the Balkans. One may wonder, by the way, why the
Roumanians should have put themselves to so much trouble with
respect to these more or less hellenized kinsmen of theirs,
not merely giving them direct support, but subsidizing
Weigand's institution at Leipzig. A great reason was that
King Charles, the friend of the German and Austro-Hungarian
Empires, aimed at diverting the eyes of his statesmen from
the unredeemed Roumanians in Transylvania.]

[Footnote 54: But Macedonia is not the only part of
Yugoslavia where a man's nationality varies. One Rejuka, for
example, came to Ver[vs]ac in the Banat. He was a Czech, but
as at that period (1850-1860) everything German predominated,
he preferred to be a German and sent his son to German
schools. Then the boy learned Magyar at college and, long
before he was appointed mayor, had become a Magyar. Thus we
have three nationalities in two generations.]

[Footnote 55: _Remarks on the Ethnography of the Macedonian
Slavs._ London, 1906.]

[Footnote 56: Quoted in Miss Waring's excellent little book
_Serbia_. London, 1917.]

[Footnote 57: This famous archaeologist and publicist has been
a leading authority on the eastern side of the Adriatic for
more than forty years. We refer on p. 184, Vol. II., to what
befell him in 1918-1919.]

[Footnote 58: _Russkoje Bogatstvo_, 1899.]

[Footnote 59: Cf. p. 79.]

[Footnote 60: _Detruisez l'Autriche-Hongrie_, by Dr. Edvard
Bene[vs]. Paris, 1916.]

[Footnote 61: Cf. "Secret Treaties," in the _Times_, March
17, 1920.]

[Footnote 62: Cf. _Die politischen Geheimvertrage
Osterreich-Ungarns, 1879-1914_, by Dr. Alfred Pribram. Vienna
and Leipzig, 1920.]

[Footnote 63: Cf. _Diplomatic Reminiscences_, by M.
Nekludoff. London, 1920.]

[Footnote 64: Cf. _The Guardians of the Gate_. Oxford, 1918.]

[Footnote 65: Cf. _Dalmatinische Reise_. Berlin, 1909.]

[Footnote 66: Cf. _Montenegro in History, Politics and War_,
by A. Devine. London, 1918.]

[Footnote 67: Cf. _Diplomatic Reminiscences_. London, 1920.]

[Footnote 68: A very detailed and interesting account is
contained in Dr. Seton-Watson's _The Southern Slav Question_.
London, 1911.]

[Footnote 69: "That Austria, as some have stated, should have
planned the _coup_," says Miss Durham (in her _Twenty Years
of Balkan Tangle_) "is very improbable." This lady tells us
that the plot was a very genuine one, "as I learnt beyond all
doubt from my own observations," etc. And, needless to say,
she denounces the Serbs, who in her eyes are a very criminal
people. It is a pity that Miss Durham did not confine herself
to the excellent relief work she was doing the Balkans. Her
description of the travels this involved is interesting. But
even her account of relief work is biased by a prejudice in
favour of the Albanians and against the Slavs, for when she
has occasion to speak of the famous Miss Irby, whose thirty
years of untiring benevolence were spent among the Serbs of
Bosnia and not among the Albanians, it is without a word of
commendation.]

[Footnote 70: Cf. _History of Serbia_, by H. W. V. Temperley.
London, 1917.]

[Footnote 71: Cf. _Le Montenegro Inconnu_, by Louis Bresse.
Paris, 1920.]

[Footnote 72: An illuminating document was found, after the
Great War, in the Austrian archives. It is a lengthy report
sent from Cetinje on November 1, 1911, by Baron Giesl, the
Austrian Minister, to Count Aerenthal, the minister of
Foreign Affairs. Giesl puts down very vividly a conversation
he has had with Nikita, who suggested that the Minister
should go forthwith to Vienna with the purpose of preparing
for a secret treaty. "I will do all that Austria desires,"
the King is reported to have said; "for instance, I will
place under her protection the kingdom of Montenegro.... For
years I have aimed at this and, in spite of all that has
happened [the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina], I was
preparing my people for this and putting Austria in a
sympathetic light." The King promised that his army (whose
numbers, says Giesl, he multiplied by two in this
conversation) should act in perfect harmony with Austria's
troops--they would, if need arose, assist each other. Baron
Giesl appears to have irritated Nikita by his lack of
enthusiasm for the scheme. "With Austria-Hungary, the King
had said, "I must be frank and honest." But the Minister
characterized his efforts as the throwing of dust in
Austria's eyes.]

[Footnote 73: The average German-Bohemian was, in July 1914,
anxious that Austria should go to war. These people
calculated that if Austria proved successful it would be
advantageous to themselves, while if she were defeated they
would merge themselves in the German Empire.]

[Footnote 74: L. von Suedland's _Die Suedslavische Frage und
der Weltkrieg_. Vienna, 1918.]

[Footnote 75: _The Trial of the Authors of the Sarajevo
Crime._ Presented according to the documents by Professor
Pharos, with an Introduction by Professor Dr. Joseph Kohler.
Berlin, 1918.]

[Footnote 76: Cf. the admirably clear account in Dr. Lazar
Markovi['c]'s _Serbia and Europe, 1914-1920_. London, 1921.]

[Footnote 77: Cf. _Ex-King Nicholas of Montenegro and his
Court_ (Collection of eighteen original documents in
facsimile). Sarajevo, 1919. "This collection of documents,"
says the _Times_ (April 15, 1920), "goes far to dethrone the
last of the Petrovich dynasty from his once picturesque
position in the sympathies of Western admirers. Criticism
directed against him during the Balkan wars fell on deaf
ears; and the censorship to a great extent prevented the man
in the street from realizing during the late War that an
Allied Monarch was suspected of 'not playing the game.'" Mr.
Ronald M'Neill, M.P., who loved to dance in front of
Nicholas, informs us (in the _Nineteenth Century and After_,
for January 1921) that "so far as the present writer has been
able, after diligent endeavour, to discover, there never was
any evidence whatever for the Serbian legend that King
Nicholas was at any time during the War untrue to the Allied
cause."]

[Footnote 78: Cf. _Macedonia_, by H. N. Brailsford. London,
1906.]

[Footnote 79: London, 1920.]

V

THE EUROPEAN WAR

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 Vi[vs]egrad 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 Pavlovi['c], 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 Pavlovi['c], 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. Pavlovi['c] 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 Teodosijevi['c]: "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 Stani[vs]i['c] 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 Lije[vs]evi['c]. 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 Pale, 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 ['C]uk 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 Fo[vc]a in Herzegovina joined the Montenegrin army when it penetrated to the neighbourhood of Sarajevo. When it was thrown back the Fo[vc]a 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 Fo[vc]a 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 [vS]abac 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 Skup[vs]tina, 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 Fo[vc]a, 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 Jankovi['c] and Colonel (now General) Pe[vs]i['c], 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. Jankovi['c], finding that orders were given without his knowledge, returned to Ni[vs]; and later on, after the fall of Lov[vc]en, Nikita tried to foist upon Pe[vs]i['c] the odium of a surrender which his own machinations had brought about.

THE MAGYARS AND THEIR PRISONERS