Chapter XII: Introduction: The Tragedy of a Frontier (10)

As one might have expected, the withdrawal from Bosnia was followed by a repetition of the reign of terror in that beautiful land of woods and villages, where the Imperial and Royal authorities had been engaged for years in showing foreign journalists exactly what they wanted them to see. There had been some doubt as to whether Bosnia-Herzegovina came under the crown of Austria or that of Hungary. The Magyars had been gradually getting the upper hand in the administration, and now, in the autumn of 1914, it was they who undertook to deal with those subjected Bosniaks. Again we are furnished with evidence galore, not this time by picture postcards but by the cemeteries at Arad, the Hungarian (now it is a Roumanian) town on the Maro[vs]. It was in the casemates of the Arad fortress, many of which had not been opened from the days of Maria Theresa, that thousands of poor Bosniak civilians were interned. In one of the cemeteries I counted 2103 black wooden crosses, in another between 600 and 700, in another about a thousand. These dead witnesses are more eloquent than the living. "On October 31, 1915," says an inscription on a cross in the largest cemetery, "there died, aged 95, Milija Arzi['c]." She may have been a fearful danger to the Magyar State. Cross No. 716 says merely "Deaf and Dumb," so does No. 774. Jovan Kruni['c], No. 706, was 11/2 year old. There are children even younger. The Magyars seem to have applied to Bosnia that label which the monkish mediaeval map-makers applied to the remoter peoples: "Here dwell very evil men." If, however, the commandant, Lieut.-Colonel Hegedues--a magyarized version of the German _held_, which means "hero"--and his subordinates, Sergeants Rosner and Herzfeld, would claim that they did their best, they have some excuse in the fact that although the 10,000 interned people began to arrive in July, the first two doctors--who were also captives--did not appear until January 1915. In the absence of medical advice the sergeants may have thought it was an excellent plan, in November, to drive the prisoners into the Maro[vs] for a bath and then to walk them up and down the bank until their clothes were dry; Hegedues may have thought it was most sanitary to have dogs to eat the corpses' entrails and sometimes the whole corpse. Dr. Stephen Pop, a Roumanian lawyer in Arad (afterwards a Minister at Bucharest), displayed his humanity by drawing up a terrible indictment of the conditions. "You should be glad," said Tisza, the reactionary Premier, to him, "very glad that you can breathe the free air of Hungary." The casemates were provided with less than three centimetres of straw, which was not removed for months. Spotted fever, pneumonia and enteritis were the chief epidemics: those who were guilty of some offence, such as receiving a newspaper, would be put among the spotted fever cases. Sometimes the dead were left for two or three days with the living. Such was the state of the bastions and their underground passages that the Magyar soldiers came as rarely as they could manage. It was, said Hegedues, a provisional arrangement to have about a thousand people in one of these passages or lunettes, with no lavatory. But it was not only the nonagenarians--several of whom were at Arad--that found their life was a very provisional affair. You could be killed in different ways: the dying were occasionally wrapped in a sheet and rocked against a wall. When they groaned the soldiers laughed, and said that this was "Cheering King Peter." In fact the Magyars behaved with rare generosity to their prisoners, we are told in the _Oxford Hungarian Review_ (June 1922), by Mr. Aubrey Herbert, M.P., a gentleman who persists in writing of that which he does not know. A woman called Lenka (or Helen) Mihailovi['c], who had kept the canteen in the fortress during fifteen years, was expelled in January 1916 for having helped to clothe some naked children. People used to give Rosner, the sergeant, a tip in order to be allowed to visit the canteen. Their ordinary food was the reverse of appetizing. Constantine, the son of Ilja Jovanovi['c], a boy who used to be employed at the fortress (and who had not been permitted by the Magyars to learn his own language), saw the children being fed, very often, on salt fish--no matter whether they were ill or not--and sometimes on the intestines of horses. The Serbian grave-diggers used to cook themselves a dish of grass, salt and water. They were too weak to work, and they had work enough: on February 1, 1915, for instance, twenty-nine people were buried. A certain captain (afterwards Major) Lachmann, an Austrian officer, arrived in Arad and heard the apprehensions that an epidemic might spread from the fortress. This had, in fact, been debated by the town council; and Lachmann was eventually responsible for a commission of inquiry. But Hegedues, although he was degraded and condemned to prison, made a successful appeal, for his father-in-law was a field-marshal, one Pacor.

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

THE SOUTHERN SLAVS IN AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

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

(A)

[_In Serbo-Croat:_] TELEGRAM FROM THE COMMANDER OF THE BALKAN ARMY, RECEIVED IN ZAGREB, 3/10/1914

[_In German:_] HIS EXCELLENCY THE BAN BARON SKERLECZ, ZGB. [ZAGREB].

sss. TUZLA, 387, 146, 2/10/05.

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

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

POTIOREK, Field-Marshal.

(B)

IMPERIAL AND ROYAL ARMY--DIRECTOR OF SUPPLIES AND TRANSPORT. K. No. 114.

TO THE ROYAL GOVERNMENT COMMISSARY BRCKO, on the 12th September 1914.

VUKOVAR.

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

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

* * * * *

IMPERIAL AND ROYAL 5TH ARMY--DIRECTOR OF SUPPLIES AND TRANSPORT. K. No. 114.

(C)

IMPERIAL AND ROYAL MILITARY COMMAND IN ZAGREB.

PRESS BUREAU, No. 2590. TO THE HIGHER COMMAND OF THE ARMY. HIGHER COMMAND OF THE BALKAN FRONT. ROYAL MILITARY PRESS BUREAU.

ZAGREB, _November_ 2, 1914.

_/Ceteris exmissis./_

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

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

SCHEURE, Lieut.-Field-Marshal.

(D)

IMPERIAL AND ROYAL MILITARY COMMAND IN ZAGREB.

PRESS BUREAU, No. 3050.

_The Spreading of Disquieting News among the Population._

TO HIS EXCELLENCY THE IMPERIAL AND ROYAL SECRET COUNCILLOR DR. IVAN BARON SKERLECZ, Ban of the Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia.

ZAGREB, _November_ 26, 1914.

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

(E)

IMPERIAL AND ROYAL MILITARY COMMAND IN ZAGREB.

PRESS BUREAU, No. 3297.

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

(F)

IMPERIAL AND ROYAL MILITARY COMMAND IN ZAGREB.

PRESS BUREAU, No. 841.

ZAGREB, _February_ 1915.

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

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

HOW THE WAR RAGED IN THE WINTER OF 1914-1915

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

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

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

THE TREATY OF LONDON, APRIL 1915

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

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

HOW BULGARIA CAME INTO THE WAR

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

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

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

ATTEMPT TO BUY OFF THE SERBS

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

GREEK TRANSACTIONS

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

August Athena! where,
Where are thy men of might, thy grand in soul?
Gone.[92] ...

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

FLIGHT OF THE SERBS

Ni[vs] 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 Pa[vs]i['c] did not lose his jovial humour. He may have laughed in order to encourage those who were despairing. On the other hand, he may have known that Serbia would rise, and rise to greater heights. He made no secret of the satisfaction which he felt when the Bulgars attacked, for this, he said, would settle once for all the Macedonian question. Whether the attitude of the Southern Slavs in Austria-Hungary appealed to him in equal measure is a little doubtful. It was hard for him, at his time of life, to envisage anything more than a Greater Serbia.

THE FAITHFUL CROATS

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

(G)

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

(H)

In this document we return to the subject of desertions:

ROYAL HUNGARIAN 42ND INFANTRY OF THE LINE. Op. No. 1312/6.

TO THE IMPERIAL AND ROYAL CORPS COMMAND IN SADAGORA.

CZERNAWKA, _August_ 12, 1915.

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

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

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

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

IMPERIAL AND ROYAL CORPS COMMAND, SADAGORA, 12/8, 1915. 9 p.m.

No. 2446, with three enclosures.

(I)

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

IMPERIAL AND ROYAL MILITARY COMMAND IN ZAGREB. _Chief of the General Staff._

K. No. 1681.

The Colonel expresses his unbounded approval of Maravi['c], the chief of this branch of the police, and of von Klobu[vc]ari['c], 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 Klobu[vc]ari['c] are unknown, and it would be prudent if this ex-Austrian officer, ex-dentist's assistant and ex-policeman were to ensure their remaining so. The Ban is accused of having frustrated various designs of this couple. He is further accused of having placed at the head of the Koprivnica internment camp--where 6000 "politically untrustworthy" Serbs were assembled--the mayor, Kamenar, who himself had been dismissed for his political untrustworthiness; and when the military protested, they received no answer, while the mayor--so the wrathful writer hears--has been removed from his post at the internment camp and restored to his former office and dignity. The colonel asks how it is that in Croatia the crimes of "Majestaetsbeleidigung" and high treason are seldom punished with more than three or four months' incarceration, while in other parts of the Empire they are visited with death or at least a sentence of several years. (The answer is that in Croatia the Government was obliged, on account of the language, to employ Croatian judges.) He mentions that Professor Arshinov, alleged to have come to Zagreb in order to carry on an anti-Habsburg and pro-Serbian propaganda, is indeed under arrest, but is being far too well treated at the hospital, where he receives his Serbian associates and even has convivial evenings with them. In fact the whole country, so the writer asserts, is saturated with Serbian sympathies and agitators. He says that in some villages every functionary, from the highest to the lowest, is a Serb; the _gendarmerie_, the tax-gatherers and the foresters are frequently Serbs and he regards it as noteworthy that the hotels, inns and 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 Pe['c]. It was at the rambling old patriarchal town of Pe['c] 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 Pe['c], where the road to Andrievica turned into a horse-trail on the side of the precipice. Here the chauffeur would jump out, after having let in the clutch and pushed down the accelerator--and the car would leap into space, three or four hundred feet over a mountain torrent. From this point the _via dolorosa_ stretched away precariously, at first a winding path of ice and then a track across the snowdrifts of the barren uplands. The Serbian Government had offered to construct this very necessary road to Andrievica; the engineer, one Smodlaka, undertook to build it in three months, but Nikita's Minister replied that the Austrian prisoners, whom it was proposed to use, were mostly in the grip of spotted fever. This was not the case, and one of the results of there being no road was that nearly all the supplies from Russia for the Montenegrins were abandoned at Pe['c]. 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 Mestrovi['c], "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...."