Chapter 26

As for the Montenegrin King, he had attempted, before his departure, to put the whole blame on the shoulders of Colonel Pe[vs]i['c]. He sent--in order to make more certain the success of the Austrian army--a telegraphic command[99] to the Voivoda Djuro Petrovi['c], the chief of the Herzegovinian detachment, in which he required him to destroy his cannons and machine guns and then (although the enemy was exerting no pressure upon him) to withdraw towards Nik[vs]i['c]. This order was issued in the name of Colonel Pe[vs]i['c], the signature being forged. In fact Nikita thought his Serbian Chief of Staff was quite a useful personage. But there exists a letter in which the Colonel wrote that, in order to avoid capitulation, a supreme effort would be necessary at certain positions which he indicated and anyhow the army should be withdrawn to Scutari and the defence of the town organized. Scutari, by the way, was the scene of another of Nikita's exploits: he caused the Bank of Montenegro to send money to the Austrian Consul there, the cash being delivered by Martinovi['c], the Montenegrin Consul. It was used to incite the Albanians to take military action against the Serbs between Prizren and Djakovica. When this affair was exposed all the Montenegrins knew by what traitors they were governed. The fall of Montenegro had been brought about more swiftly by the Austrian submarines which in the Gulf of San Giovanni di Medua torpedoed practically every ship that carried food or munitions, while other boats were not molested. An investigation showed that the shipping news had been telegraphed to Prince Peter, and he in his turn handed it on to the Austrians. The Prince's egregious parent wanted to be in a position to say that, owing to the lack of food and munitions, he had been compelled to surrender. One of his final acts was to summon the Skup[vs]tina, as he did not wish to be saddled with the responsibility of making peace. At a secret sitting on December 11, 1915,--when the retreating Serbs were in San Giovanni, Scutari and Podgorica,--the Government declared that they had no resources, that the Entente could not assist them and that they would wage war for so long as they had the means--in other words, that the war would cease. It was continued, however, by those Montenegrin troops between Kola[vs]in and Bielo Polje, who--even after the fall of Lov['c]en on January 10, and the flowing of the Austrian army towards Scutari--were ordered to make a counter-offensive, during which they had over 1500 dead and wounded. The reason for this was that Nikita wished to prevent his army from escaping to Scutari; he was afraid lest, if they escaped with the Serbs, they would dethrone him forthwith. Afterwards he gave an explanation that he had ordered the Chief of Staff, Yanko Vukoti['c], to rescue the army, which order he alleged he had wirelessed from Brindisi. Vukoti['c], together with Prince Mirko and the Ministers who stayed behind, declared in the _Pester Lloyd_ that Nikita was lying. They added that he could have sent no wireless from Brindisi, because there was at that time no receiving station in Montenegro, the French one at Podgorica having been destroyed at the order of the British Minister, Count de Salis, the doyen of the diplomatic corps. The King, by the way, had endeavoured for some time to rid himself of the diplomats, who were inconvenient witnesses of what was in progress. On December 31 a telegram was sent by the Ministers of France, Great Britain, Italy and Russia, in which they said that "Apparently our presence is displeasing to the King and he is trying to disengage himself from us. He has begged us on several occasions to depart and last night he insisted, with the asseveration that in forty-eight hours it would be too late. We suspect that His Majesty is playing a very ambiguous game...." And on January 9 the French Minister telegraphed, among other things, that "My Russian and English colleagues are of opinion that the King is merely performing a comedy with us and that this comedy will end in a tragedy for the belligerents." Nikita, on his arrival in France, proposed to settle down at Lyons, but the French authorities did not care for him to be so close to Switzerland, which was one of his intriguing centres. So they placed at his disposal a château near Bordeaux and it was not until he had made repeated requests that they permitted him to come to Neuilly, a suburb of Paris. He replaced Miu[vs]kevi['c] as Premier by Radovi['c], the former victim of the Bomb Trial, hoping by this move towards the Left to silence his critics. But in August 1916 Radovi['c] presented a memorandum in favour of the formal union between Montenegro and Serbia, under King Peter's son and King Nicholas' grandson, Prince Alexander. The Montenegrin monarch was enraged at this and, after Radovi['c] had resigned, one after another all the Montenegrins of any standing withdrew from Nikita, who was openly working against the Serbs. He and the Princess Xenia conducted all the Government business, though he distributed among his tiny clique of adherents various empty titles. An aged friend of his, Eugene Popovi['c], a native of Triest and a naturalized Italian, was made Premier, to give pleasure to Italy; a more active person was the War Minister, Hajdukovi['c], a former shipping contractor in Constantinople, where a long time ago he had been one of those young Montenegrins who, to the number of twenty, the Sultan used to educate--a process which, in the case of idle boys, was not very irksome. During the Great War Hajdukovi['c] was invited by the Allies to quit Salonica, as they had certain suspicions against him. He had also, on behalf of his King, urged the Montenegrin volunteers who had managed to get to Salonica not to allow themselves to be commanded by Serbian or French officers, but to demand Montenegrin officers, of whom there was no adequate supply. These men had ultimately to be sent to Corsica and kept there till the end of the War. What Hajdukovi['c] performed at Salonica, another royal agent, one Vukovi['c], a bootmaker, attempted at Marseilles, where he continually went on board the vessels that were bringing Montenegrins and, to a smaller extent, other Yugoslavs from the United States and South America to the Salonica front. These travelled men were less easily influenced than those who obeyed Hajdukovi['c]; but 300-400 did refuse to proceed. They were installed in a factory at Orange, where the Montenegrin Government fed them and paid them. Now and then they were encouraged by being told that if they had gone to the Front the Serbian officers would have flogged them.... And so the little Court at Neuilly occupied the years with many a congenial intrigue. Feelers were stretched out to this country, where an English edition of Radovi['c]'s _Montenegrin Bulletin_, the pro-Yugoslav organ, was being published by my friend Vassilje Buri['c] to the furious indignation of the busybodies who supported the King and of the Italian Embassy. From these two sources and from Neuilly the Foreign Office was bombarded with protests, begging it in the name of justice, etc., to put a stop to this dire scandal. One day a charming Foreign Office clerk, an acquaintance of mine, had Buri['c] to lunch at the Royal Automobile Club; in the course of the meal he suggested that, as Buri['c] was not looking well, they two should have a little holiday in France. Buri['c] said he would be very glad to go with him, but he thought it would be nice to stay in England. The charming official held out for the Continent, and with such obstinacy that Buri['c] at last put his hand upon his arm and invited him to promise that they would both of them come back to England. Thereupon the host acknowledged that a perfect flood of letters had been pouring on the Foreign Office with respect to the _Montenegrin Bulletin_, and they were weary of receiving them.... Sometimes the Neuilly Court was plunged in gloom, as when old Tomo Oraovac's little book appeared with seventy-five awkward questions to Nikita. For three days the King shut himself up in his room, trying to decide as to whether he should issue an answer. He decided to do nothing. Now and then a French review or newspaper referred to him. "The official courtesies extended by the French Government to Nicholas I. and his family should not deceive the public," said the eminent publicist Monsieur Gauvain in the _Revue de Paris_ (March 1917). M. Gauvain showed that the Petrovi['c] dynasty constituted the sole obstacle to a union of Montenegro with Serbia and the rest of the Yugoslav lands. As Nikita drove past the office of the _Revue de Paris_ he may have been thinking, rather wistfully, of that brave afternoon at Nik[vs]i['c].[100] ... Sometimes the old man was worried by his sons. Peter, for example, who had been the spoilt child and who had been given posts for which he was unfitted, now discovered in himself, during the autumn of 1918, a great desire to obtain a certain Madame Violette Brunet, the legal wife of Monsieur Brunet, who was in Nikita's service. The ardent lover, regardless of the ancient Montenegrin custom which inflicted stoning on the guilty married woman, while the husband sometimes cut her nose off, wrote to his parents, asking them to arrange the matter, and when the ex-King raised objections, Peter blackmailed him by threatening to divulge to the world at large all the unsavoury details connected with Lov['c]en. "My dear son," wrote Nikita in November 1918,[101] "You write again asking me to send an emissary to represent myself and your mother in suing for the hand of the woman of your choice, failing this, you say you will make a scandal whereby the honour of both of us and of the whole family will suffer; to obviate this unpleasant possibility we may see our way to agree to your wish, but under the following conditions...."

THE BROKEN SERBS AT CORFU

Meanwhile the Serbs had, ever since the early days of 1916 when they began arriving in Corfu, been hard at work upon their army. Thousands landed at Corfu in such a state that only with continual care, with warmth and nourishing food could they be rescued. But on the little island of Vido where they were deposited the tents were few, the beds were fewer, wood was lacking, so that fires could not be made, and thousands died where they sank down, amid the olive groves and orange trees. The doctors nursed as many as they could in that one empty building; but for very long about a hundred corpses were each day piled in a little boat and taken out to sea. Usually they had died of pure exhaustion. Out of the 16,000 boys who had scrambled along with the army as far as Durazzo, about 2000 died on the sea and another 7000 on the Isle of Vido.

At Corfu the Serbs, with the other Yugoslavs, had also to set about securing the foundations of their State that was to be. The Russians, at the time of the negotiations which ended in the Treaty of London, had been looking forward to an Orthodox State, a Greater Serbia, bounded by the river Narenta. This, if it had been carried out, would have jettisoned, and probably for ever, the Croats and Slovenes. That was the incredibly stupid old Russian policy of identifying Slav patriotism with the Orthodox Church, a policy held up to ridicule by Strossmayer. It was the Yugoslav Committee, working chiefly in London, assisted by English friends, working there and at Corfu, which caused the Serbs, the Croats and Slovenes to publish on July 20, 1917, the historic Corfu Declaration, which laid it down that the nation of the three names was resolved to free itself from every foreign yoke and to become a constitutional, democratic and Parliamentary Monarchy under the Karageorgevi['c] dynasty. It is said that those two excellent friends of the Southern Slavs, the brilliant Mr. Wickham Steed and Dr. Seton-Watson, than whom no publicist is more conscientious, had to face a determined opposition on the part of M. Pa[vs]i['c] before it was agreed that the Roman Catholic religion should in the prospective State have equal rights with the Orthodox. One would be disposed to criticize the Serbian Premier on account of a narrow policy dictated by his excessive wish for self-preservation--he saw very well that these clauses of equality might undermine the long reign of the Radicals--but it must be acknowledged that if the Southern Slavs had limited themselves to a Greater Serbia, in which the Radical party had been supreme, they would not have wasted so much of their energy, after the War, in domestic political conflict. They would also, very probably, have gained more favourable terms from the Entente; and the union with the Croats and Slovenes might have been effected later. But against this is the opinion of those who argue that the separation would have become permanent. However, if the union of the Southern Slavs could not be postponed, we may believe that it would have been wise to call the new country, for a couple of years, Greater Serbia. No doubt the logical Italians would have pointed out to the rest of the Entente that their bugbears, the Croats and the Slovenes, were included in this State; but the Allies as a whole would have been more inclined to be indulgent towards a country whose name they honoured than towards the same country whose various new-fangled designations--Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; or Yugoslavia; or S.H.S.--they found so puzzling. The Transylvanians who, one supposes, will play the chief rôle in Greater Roumania have as yet, much to the profit of all the Roumanians, permitted the retention of that name. This course was not adopted by the Southern Slavs, and Pa[vs]i['c] giving way to Messrs. Steed and Seton-Watson, appointed M. Yovanovi['c] to London with the object of working on the lines of the Declaration of Corfu.

THE SOUTHERN SLAVS IN THE UNITED STATES

The building of the new State and its army was also being undertaken with great fervour in America, New Zealand and Australia. North America contained about 100,000 Orthodox Serbs, 200,000 Catholic Slovenes and 400,000 Catholic Croats; South America had some 50,000 Yugoslavs, chiefly Catholic Dalmatians; while the 8000-10,000 in Australasia were mostly of that origin. Two kinds of Southern Slav newspapers were being printed in North America, namely those which the Austrian Ambassador supported, and those which were national. The chief argument of the former species was the Treaty of London, which, as the editors pointed out, gave up a large part of Dalmatia to the Italians. Two of these editors, by the way, were imprisoned for other reasons by the authorities. They had constantly threatened the terrible punishment that Austria would inflict on those who had worked against the Fatherland--many of the Southern Slavs, like the Roumanians, Czechs, Ruthenians and Magyars, were employed in munition factories, and the Austrian Embassy, in concert with the German, hoped to see them on the land. After a time the Yugoslavs took an office in Washington and attacked this propaganda, their example being followed by the Czechs and the Poles. When the United States entered the War these Austrophil papers no longer wrote in favour of Austria, but confined themselves to animadversions against the Serbian leaders, suggesting likewise that Croatia and Slovenia should be independent.... The patriotic Yugoslav papers--three dailies in New York, three in Chicago, and over twenty weekly organs--were not subsidized by the Yugoslav Committee in London or by the Government in Corfu; and some of the editors did not display a very prosperous appearance. But the poor Yugoslav workers contributed 20 million dollars to the first three Liberty loans, and when the National Council at Pittsburg in November 1916 united the different charitable, gymnastic and political associations, a call was made for volunteers. Between 25,000-30,000 men joined the United States army, a good many joined the Canadian contingents, and about 10,000 sailed for Salonica. The Yugoslavs in South America were in different circumstances: the Dalmatian temperament being nearer to the Spanish they found it easier to make their way; besides which, those who went to South America were on the average more advanced than those who preferred the North. In Chili, the Argentine and Bolivia the Yugoslavs are often very prosperous merchants and shipowners. They organized the Yugoslav National Defence and found all the funds for the Yugoslav organization in London. From New Zealand, where there is a Yugoslav paper called _Zora_ (the _Dawn_), about 300 volunteers sailed to the Dardanelles, and others, when the Salonica base was established, joined their compatriots in that port.

CASH AND THE MONTENEGRIN ROYAL FAMILY

While the distant Yugoslavs were, in one way or another, helping the cause, that family of criminals which reigned in Montenegro did not shrink from malversation of the funds of the Red Cross. A young Croat, Mr. Mili[vc]evi['c], who before the War became a naturalized Montenegrin and in Neuilly served as Minister of Justice, has related how the Government continually borrowed (and did not repay) large sums of Red Cross money, and that if new clothes came from England for the refugees they would in Paris be replaced quite often for much older ones. How did the people fare? After the country had been occupied by the Austrians, most of the Allies consented that it should be revictualled on the same lines as Belgium. Even Austria offered no objections. One State only and one man were hostile to the scheme, and that man actually the King of Montenegro. "A poor and starving people," he argued, "is the most subservient. My interests will suffer if commodities are given to the Montenegrins. Let them wait. And when the moment comes for my return, I will go back with large supplies and be most popular." Even when his Ministers had realized that there must be no more delay in asking for the King of Spain's good offices--since the Italians (presumably in concert with Nikita) fought against the plan--and when the letter to the King of Spain was drafted it produced another one from Nikita to his Ministers--written by Nikita, but signed by his aide-de-camp. "The King," he said, "considers that the letter to the King of Spain should stand over, so long as one cannot be sure that Italy will permit the transit of foodstuffs destined for the people." He desired no mediation between himself and the Italians. Perhaps the most audacious act of spoliation was the sale of the State stores at Gallipoli, just when the Allied offensive on the Salonica front was leading to the collapse of the enemy. Instead of forwarding the 25,000 greatcoats, the 20,000 kilos of leather, and great quantities of material, medical and other stores, to Montenegro and rendering first aid to the liberated population, the managers of the Royal Treasury deemed it wiser to transfer the value of all these stores into their own pockets, disposing of more than 2½ million francs worth of goods to trusted figureheads for a few hundred thousand Italian lire. Fortunately the French naval authorities put a stop to this brigandage, and the honest guardians of the people only succeeded in diverting a few hundreds of thousands. You may suppose that there is no excuse for conduct of this kind; but the Royal Family could say, "Behold, the people do not want our gifts." The Montenegrins, for example, who were interned at Karlstein in Austria, where they were not overfed, sent a telegram on November 27, 1916, to ask at whose initiative the Red Cross parcels had been sent to them. This was (in German) the prepaid reply: "Montenegrin Committee, President, Professor Pugnet, supported by the Red Cross. (Signed) THE BAKERY." As Pugnet was Danilo's professor, all the interned, except six or seven, declined the parcels.[102] Among the half-dozen were some relatives of Nikita, and some who explained that "We take the traitor's bread, for otherwise we should die; and after all it is the Entente which sends it. How unfortunate for us that they regard Nikita as our King." After the Armistice Nikita and his adherents complained bitterly that the Podgorica Assembly which deposed him was convened before these internees had come back from Austria!