Chapter 3

Whether rightly or wrongly, the Yugoslavs had formed their opinion of the Italian sailors, an opinion which dated from the time of Tegetthoff and had not undergone much modification by the incidents of this War. They remembered what had happened when they cruised outside Italian ports; they knew very probably that the British had on more than one occasion to break through the boom outside Taranto harbour, and they may have read[8] of the experience of some French ladies who came to the Albanian coast on the _Città di Bari_ towards the end of 1915 with 2000 kilos of milk, clothing and medical supplies for the Serbian children who had struggled across the mountains. These ladies write that after the torpedoing of the _Brindisi_ their own crew ran up and down without appearing to see them; the crew had life-belts, those of the ladies were taken away. Ultimately they succeeded in having themselves put ashore, and the _Città di Bari_ fled in the night without landing the stores. And in Albania, the ladies say, one witnessed the "stoic endurance of the noble Serbian race, of which every day brought us more examples. In that procession of ghosts and of the dying there was no imploring look, there was no hand stretched out to beg." ... The Yugoslavs may have known what happened to Lieutenant (now Captain) Binnos de Pombara of the French navy. This officer, in command of the _Fourche_, had been escorting the _Città di Messina_ and, observing that she was torpedoed, had sent to her, perhaps a little imprudently, all his life-boats and belts. A few minutes later, when he was himself torpedoed, the Italians did not see him; anyhow they made for the shore. De Pombara encouraged his men by causing them to sing the Marseillaise and so forth; they were in the water, clinging to the wreckage, for several hours, until another boat came past. The next day at Brindisi, when he met the captain of the _Città di Messina_, this gentleman once more did not see him; but the French Government, although de Pombara was a very young man, created him an officer of the Legion of Honour.

AN ELECTRICAL ATMOSPHERE AND NO PRECAUTIONS

There was thus a certain amount of tension existing between the military and naval services of the Yugoslavs and those of Italy. Other Yugoslavs were apprehensive as to whether the Italians would not demand the enforcement of the Treaty of London. But the United States was not bound by that agreement, which was so completely at variance with Wilson's principle of self-determination. One presumed that, pending an examination of these matters, the disputed territories would be occupied by troops of all the Allies. But unfortunately this did not turn out to be the case. France, Britain and America stood by, while the Italians and the Yugoslavs took whatsoever they could lay their hands on. As the Yugoslav military forces had to come overland, while the Italians had command of the sea, it was natural that in most places the Italians got the better of the scramble; and where they found the Yugoslavs in possession, as at Rieka, they usually ousted them by diplomatic methods. And in one way or another they managed to make their holdings tally, as far as possible, with the Treaty of London, and even to go beyond it. Baron Sonnino declined to make a comprehensive statement as to the Italian programme. Of course he desired in the end to exchange Dalmatia--the seizure of which would entail a war with Yugoslavia--against Rieka. But as Italian public opinion had scarcely thought of Rieka during the War, he made it his business to cause them to yearn for that town. His compatriots were asking why Mr. Wilson's Fourteen Points should be waived for France in the Sarre Basin, for Britain in Ireland and Egypt, but not for them. And some of his would-be ingenious compatriots pointed out--their contentions were embodied in the Italian Memorandum to the Supreme Council on January 10, 1920--that as the Treaty of London was based on the presumption that Montenegro, Serbia and Croatia would remain separate States, this instrument had been altogether upset by the merging of those Southern Slavs into one country, Yugoslavia; it followed, therefore, that the Treaty which attributed Rieka to the Croats could no longer be invoked. But the other parts of the Treaty which gave the Slav mainland and islands to Italy were absolutely unassailable. The reader will resent being troubled by this kind of balderdash, but Messrs. Clemenceau, Lloyd-George and Wilson may have resented it even more.

ITALIAN MILDNESS ON THE ISLE OF VIS

On November 3 the Italians arrived outside Vis (Lissa), the most westerly of the large islands, where the entire population of 11,000 is Slav, except for the family of an honoured inhabitant, Dr. Doimi, and three other families related to his. Dr. Doimi's people have lived for many years on this island--his father was mayor of the capital, which is also called Vis, for half a century--and now they have become so acclimatized that, as he told me, three of his four nephews prefer to call themselves Yugoslavs. This phenomenon can be seen all down the Adriatic coast. It has often, for example, been pointed out to Dr. Vio, the very Italian ex-mayor of Rieka, that he has a Croat father and several Croat brothers. Thus also the Duimi['c] family of the same town has one brother married to a Magyar lady and very fond of the Magyars, a second brother who is a Professor at Milan, and a third who lives above Rieka and is a Yugoslav. The terms "Yugoslav" and "Italian" have now come to signify not what a man is, but what he wants to be, applying thus the admirable principle of self-determination. Well, in the old days on the isle of Vis between two and three hundred people belonged to the Autonomist party, owing to their great regard for Dr. Doimi; but these say now that they are Yugoslavs, and the Italians--at all events Captain Sportiello, their chief officer at Vis--acknowledged that they must base their demand on strategic reasons. A day or two before the Italians arrived the population had arrested several Austrian functionaries, including the mayor and three gendarmes, who had maltreated them during the War. None of these persons were Italian; and when the Italian boats were sighted a committee went to meet them joyfully and brought the officers ashore upon their backs. The officers explained that they had come as representatives of the Entente and the United States, and for the object--which appeared superfluous--of protecting Vis from German submarines. If the Italians had been everywhere as inoffensive as at Vis, it would be more agreeable to write about their doings. Captain Sportiello, a naval officer, showed himself throughout the months of his administration to be sensible; he frequented Yugoslav houses. The greatest divergence occurred on June 1, 1919, when the Italians planned to have a demonstration for their national holiday, and asked the inhabitants to come to the bioscope, where they would be regaled with cakes and sweets; the inhabitants replied that they preferred to have Yugoslavia.... But there is a monument in the cemetery at Vis to which I must refer. It is a very fine monument of white marble, erected by the Austrians to commemorate their victory in these waters over the Italian navy in 1866.[9] On the top there is a lion clutching the Italian flag, while on two of the sides there are inscriptions in the German language. One of them, some feet in length, relates that this memorial is placed there for the officers and men who on July 20, 1866, gave their lives in the service of their Emperor and country. The Italians screwed two marble slabs across the upper and the lower parts of this inscription, so that the German lettering of the central part remained visible; on the lower slab one read: "Novembre 1918" and on the upper one "Italia Vincitrice" (Victorious Italy). We were taken by several Italian officers to look at this. They were so proud of it that they presented us with photographs of the monument in its altered state. I fear that the Italian mentality escapes me. I should not have written anything about them.

THEIR TRUCULENCE AT KOR[vC]ULA

They landed on the same day, November 3, on the beautiful and prosperous island of Kor[vc]ula (Curzola), putting ashore at Velaluka, the western harbour. With the exception of five families, all the people are Yugoslavs; and the Italians, who sailed in under a white flag, announced that they had come as friends of the Yugoslavs and of the Entente, to preserve order and to protect them against submarines. On the 5th, they went to the town of Kor[vc]ula, where one of the two officers, Lieutenant Poggi, of the navy, put his assurances in writing, as he had done at Velaluka. He protested against the word "Occupation." On the 7th they returned to Velaluka and on the 12th went back, with about a hundred men, to Kor[vc]ula. Once more he wrote that he had not come to occupy the island; he added, though, that the district officials should act on the opposite peninsula of Sabioncello in the name of the Yugoslavs, but over Kor[vc]ula and the island of Lastovo (Lagosta) in the name of Italy--not of the Entente. He wanted to remove the Yugoslav flags from public buildings and substitute Italian flags. When he was reminded of what he had said with regard to the Entente, he exclaimed: "No, no! This is Italy!" The chief district official protested, and refused to carry out Lieut. Poggi's injunctions, nor were the Italians able to do so. This officer remained at Kor[vc]ula, requisitioning houses and hoisting as many Italian flags as he could. He issued an order that after 6.30 p.m. not more than three persons were allowed to come together in the streets. His men used to offer food to the women of the place, who declined it; after which the food was given to the children, who were previously photographed in an imploring attitude. There was some trouble on December 15 when the _Leonidas_, an American ship, came in with a number of mine-sweepers. Apparently the Yugoslavs contravened the Italian regulations by omitting to ask whether their band might play in the harbour, but, on the supposition that this would not be accorded to them, went down to the harbour just as if they were not living under regulations. They waved American, Serbian and Croatian flags, all of which the Italians attempted to seize; the most gorgeous one, a Yugoslav flag of silk with gilt fringes, they tore up and divided among themselves as a trophy. When the _Leonidas_ made fast, a lieutenant leaped ashore and placed himself, holding a revolver, in front of an American flag. The captain, according to some reports, had his men standing to their guns, while others of the crew are said to have been given hand-grenades; but whether by this method or another, the turbulence on shore was calmed and the Italians seem to have invited the captain to step off his boat. He preferred, however, to go to another port; the populace came overland. One need not say that there was jollification.... When the other American boats departed, a small one remained at Kor[vc]ula. One day a steamer came from Metkovi['c], having on board a few men of the Yugoslav Legion. The people of Kor[vc]ula, not being allowed to take the men to their houses, came down quietly to the harbour with coffee and bread, but the carabinieri drove them away. These legionaries were emigrants to Australia and Canada, who had come back to fight for the Entente, including Italy. The Italians wanted to arrest them all on account of a small Croatian flag which one of them was holding, but at the request of the American ship they refrained. A certain Marko [vS]imunovi['c], who had gone to Australia from the Kor[vc]ula village of Ra[vc]i[vs]ca, went over to speak to the sailors on the American boat. Because of this the carabinieri took him to the military headquarters. He was interned for several months in Italy.

The long island of Hvar (Lesina) was not occupied until November 13. It is interesting, by the by, to note how this island came to have its names. In the time of the Greek colonists it was known as [Greek: ho pharos], which subsequently became Farra or Quarra, leading to the name Hvar, by which it is known to the Slavs. They also, in the thirteenth century, gave it an alternative name: Lesna, from the Slav word signifying "wooded," for the Venetians had not yet despoiled the island of many of its forests. Lesna was the popular and Hvar the literary name; and the Italians, taking the former of these, coined the word Lesina, the sound of which makes many of them and of other people think that this is an Italian island.[10] The question of Slav and Italian geographical names in Dalmatia has been carefully investigated by a student at Split. Taking the zone which was made over to the Italians by the Treaty of London, he found that with the exception of a reef called Maon, alongside the island of Pago, every island, village, mountain and river has a Slav name, whereas out of the total of 114 names there were 64 which have no names in Italian; and this is giving the Italians credit for such words as Sebenico, Zemonico and so forth, which in the opinion of philologists are merely modifications of the original [vS]ibenik, Zemunik, etc.

AND ON HVAR

At Starigrad on Hvar the Italians also said that they were representatives of the Entente, but soon they prohibited the national colours. Being perhaps aware that in the whole island, with its population of about 20,000, there were before the War only four or five Italians who were engaged in selling fruit, their countrymen in November 1918 did their best, by the distribution of other commodities--rice, flour and macaroni--to make some more Italians. They succeeded at Starigrad in obtaining fifteen or twenty recruits. And they made it obvious that it would be more comfortable to be an Italian than a Yugoslav. The local Reading-Rooms, whose committee had received no previous warning, fell so greatly under the displeasure of the Italians that one night after ten o'clock--at which time curfew sounded for the Yugoslavs; the Italians and their friends could stay out until any hour--the premises were sacked: knives were used against the pictures, furniture was taken by assault, and mirrors did not long resist the fine élan of the attacking party. Old vases, other ornaments and books were thrown into the harbour near the _Sirio_, the Italian destroyer which was anchored ten yards from the Reading-Rooms. Of course there was an inquiry; the result of it was that several Yugoslavs (and no others) were imprisoned. The _Sirio's_ commander was a gentleman of some activity; he sent a telegram to Rome and another one to Admiral Millo, the Italian Governor of the occupied parts of Dalmatia, saying that the people of the island longed for annexation. These telegrams he read aloud before the islanders, with all his carabinieri in attendance.... The old-world capital of the island, which is a smaller place than Starigrad, was occupied on the same day. The first serious encounter took place on December 4, when the Italians, who were quartered on the upper floor of the Sokol or gymnastic club, observed that furniture was being taken from the rooms below them and was being carried out into the street. If they had asked the people what they were about they would have heard that these things had been stored in the gymnasium during the War and that the place was now to be devoted to its original purpose. What they did was to believe at once the yarn of a renegade, who told them that the people were preparing to blow up the house. The Italians opened fire, wounded several persons and killed one of their own carabinieri.

HOW THEY WERE RECEIVED AT ZADAR

On the mainland the Italians were received at [vS]ibenik with some suspicion. They announced, however, that they came as representatives of the Allies, and begged for a pilot who would take them into [vS]ibenik's land-locked harbour, through the mine-field. The Yugoslavs consented, and after the Italians had installed themselves they requisitioned sixty Austrian merchant vessels which were lying in that harbour. (They left, as a matter of fact, to the Yugoslavs out of all the ex-Austrian mercantile fleet exactly four old boats--_Sebenico_, _Lussin_, _Mossor_ and _Dinara_--with a total displacement of 390 tons.) On the other hand, at Zadar, they were received in a very friendly fashion. In this town, as it had been the seat of government, with numerous officials and their families, the Autonomist anti-Croat party had been, under Austria, more powerful than in any other town in Dalmatia. With converts coming in from the country, which is entirely Slav, the Autonomists in Zadar had become well over half the population,[11] which is about 14,000, that of the surrounding district being about 23,000. Zadar was thus a place apart from the rest of Dalmatia, and although the Dalmatian Autonomists were unable to claim any of the eleven deputies who went to Vienna, they managed to be represented in the provincial Chamber--the Landtag--by six out of the forty-one members. The Landtag was not elected on the basis of universal suffrage; four out of these six members were chosen by large landowners, one (Dr. Ziliotto, the mayor) by the town of Zadar and one by the Zadar chamber of commerce. Out of the eighty-six communes of Dalmatia, Zadar was the solitary one that was Autonomist. Some very few Autonomists were wont to say that they aspired to union with Italy, but it was generally thought that most of them agreed with Dr. Ziliotto when he said in the Landtag in 1906: "We, separated from Italy by the whole Adriatic--we a few thousand men, scattered, with no territorial links, among a population not of hundreds of thousands but of millions of Slavs, how could we think of union with Italy?" And Dr. Ziliotto was one of those who always regarded himself as an Italian. But whether the Zadar Autonomists were sincere or not when Austria ruled over them, the large majority of them hung out Italian colours after the War, and in this they were undoubtedly sincere, although the motives varied; in some it was the love of Italy, in some it was ambition and in some a thirst for vengeance.

[Although both Yugoslavs and Italians criticize the Austrian figures, it is probable that they are pretty accurate. The census of 1910 gave for Dalmatia: 610,669 Serbo-Croats, 18,028 Italians, 3081 Germans and 1410 Czecho-Slovaks. The Autonomist party claimed that they were not 18,028 but 30,000; and that 150,000 persons in Dalmatia speak Italian. But the Orlando-Sonnino Government really did try its utmost to improve these figures. At the end of November 1918 the Italians, who had charge of the police at Constantinople, put up notices asking all Austrian subjects from Dalmatia to inscribe themselves with the authorities and thus receive protection. In addition to the ordinary large Yugoslav population, the Austrian army was still there, and two of its officers, in uniform, inscribed themselves. The Italians had to endure not a few rebuffs, for they applied to people at their houses--they had found the nationality lists at the police offices. The Dutch were looking after Yugoslav interests, but received no instructions.]

WHAT THEY DID THERE