CHAPTER VI

THE CAPITAL OF CRIME

Plans of Procedure—Meeting of the Regicides—The First Move—The Murder of the King and Queen—The Assassination of Others—The Royal Burial—The Murder of the Brothers Novakovics in 1907.

Swiftly and silently had been fomented the plot of wholesale slaughter, of which the Queen was marked as the first and chief victim. If the King could be induced to sign a form of abdication he was to be given a chance for his life; his refusal meant death. The murderers—and of these there were almost a hundred who cut and slashed at the lifeless bodies of their sovereign—would then descend upon the house of the Queen’s relatives and kill all in cold blood. This was to be followed by the assassination of the King’s adherents, including General Zinzar Markowitz, the Prime Minister; General Pawlowitch, the Minister of War; M. Todorowitch, Minister of the Interior; and many officers of the army who had refused to join, or who had expressed themselves as being opposed to the plot to kill the royal couple.

The red glow of the setting sun had scarcely faded from the sky behind the walls and turrets of the old fortress on Wednesday evening, June 10, 1903, when the regicides gathered at the “Crown Café” to discuss and perfect their plans for the invasion of the palace that night. They sat about smoking and laughing and drinking until many were in a state of intoxication. The scene was one common in Belgrade. You will see just such a company of officers grouped about the tables along the street in front of any restaurant in the Servian capital of a summer evening. Perhaps, if you will notice, some of these men wear upon the breast, amid an array of other medals, a small, white Maltese cross. You may be sure that the proud possessors of these crosses were implicated in the terrible plot of that June evening—mayhap, some whom you will see are the very ones who, frenzied by the sting of liquor, broke open the door to the royal bedchamber and fired mercilessly upon the helpless occupants. The white crosses are decorations pinned on the breasts of those who helped to do away with Alexander and Draga by King Peter himself, in apparent grateful recognition of their services.

During this preliminary meeting of the regicides at the café it was announced that everything had been arranged satisfactorily: the co-operation of the servants and soldiers, within the palace and without, was assured by none other than Colonel Maschine, the brother-in-law of the Queen, who personally had made arrangements to thus afford the least possible difficulty in entering the _konak_; the doors of the palace would even be left unlocked; a regiment of soldiers had been commissioned to cover the rear of the conspirators and repel any attack.

By midnight all details had been completed, and the truculent corps of more or less intoxicated officers moved stealthily toward the palace gates. After overwhelming a suspiciously weak and pitiful resistance on the part of the guards they tramped across the garden and lawn, burst through the unlocked doors of the _konak_ and scrambled pell-mell up the broad stairs in search of the royal apartments. An officer encountered in the hallway was killed instantly, and a private who offered some slight resistance suffered a like fate. General Petrowitch, loaded revolver in hand, was the next victim, although he endeavoured to conceal the exact whereabouts of the royal couple by leading the crowd to another part of the palace.

Needless to say, the King and Queen were awakened by the shots on the stairs and the loud curses of the frantic criminals. How they endeavoured to conceal themselves in their helplessness must have been pathetic indeed. Hurrying from their bed, and still clothed in night attire, they secreted themselves in an adjoining closet which was used as a wardrobe-room by Queen Draga. Here they crouched together, trembling in prayer, while their conspirators raged through room after room, demolishing _bric-à-brac_, overturning tables and chairs, tearing pictures from the walls and looting the palace from top to bottom.

Through a window in this closet the luckless King and Queen saw, by the dim, flickering light of the street lamps, a great crowd collect outside the palace gates. They were unable to comprehend why this crowd stood motionless and silent—why they did not rise up, like the devoted and loyal subjects they were supposed to be, and offer assistance.

At seven minutes past two a stick of dynamite was applied to the door of the bedchamber, the explosion of which burst the barrier to atoms and stopped a clock which stood upon a mantel in the room. One report has it that the Queen, thinking the officers had departed, owing to a sudden lull in the noise in the bedchamber, foolishly raised the window in the closet and cried to the crowd outside in the street, “You will save your King and Queen.”

This action is said to have disclosed to the men the hiding-place of their victims. At all events the latter were discovered cowering in a corner of the closet, praying and pleading for mercy. The Queen was fired upon and killed instantly, and the King, in trying to shield her, fell a victim to the volley of shots hardly a moment later. Not to shrink from fulfilling an oath previously taken by many of the officers, that each would bury the point of his sword in the corpse of the Queen, they mutilated and hacked the bodies beyond recognition. It was found later that the body of Queen Draga bore no less than fifty-seven sword wounds.

And then, as a fitting sequel to their ghastly proceedings, the regicides tossed the bodies from the window of the closet where the King and Queen had stood but a few moments before and looked out upon the crowd. They fell with a thud into the garden below, where they remained until ten o’clock the following day, all the while being viewed apathetically by the passing and repassing throng of people. At that late hour, Russia, whose embassy was directly across the street from the _konak_, to cover as much as possible the part she had played in the tragedy, in the person of her minister demanded that the bodies be removed.

Leaving the palace and the carnage they had wrought there, the regicides, led by Colonel Maschine, sought the home of the Queen’s family and succeeded in killing her two brothers, Nikola and Nikodim. The Minister of War suffered the same fate in his home and the Minister of the Interior was severely wounded.[3]

[3] A certain author claims that the Prime Minister was also killed, but I have the best of authority for contesting that point. He was thrown into prison and has only lately been released. At his home Alexander and Draga indulged in the most of their courtship.

About this time Colonel Nikolics, the commandant of the Danube Division of the army, who, with a regiment of infantry, was in quarters outside the city, heard of what was going on in Belgrade. In a heroic attempt to bring his troops to the palace gates, with the hope of saving his sovereigns, he was met at the edge of the town by a revolutionary regiment under the command of Colonel Gagowitch. Both officers were killed in the hand-to-hand encounter which followed.

The bloody labour of this night was at last terminated by the murder of many officers of the army, who had been branded by the revolutionaries with the hot iron of revenge for being in league with the King.

The morning of June eleventh dawned gray and dismal. The very heavens seemed mortified at the awful butchery of the night before. Rain descended in torrents, while crowds of indifferent Servians paced to and fro in front of the palace. The city was in the hands of the revolutionaries.

There is no need to go into political details of the aftermath: suffice it to say that Peter Karageorgevitch was elected King by the Parliament and notified to leave Geneva for Belgrade at once. The family feud of a hundred years had been brought to an awful termination, since Alexander, having no heir, was the last descendant of Milosh Obrenovitch.

Under cover of the blackness of the night of Friday, June twelfth, two roughly hewn coffins were carried into the _konak_, and in them were placed the mutilated remains of Alexander and Draga. No care whatever was even taken to clothe the bodies properly. While the people of Belgrade still slept and dreamed of the events of to-morrow the hearse was driven, slowly, out through the rear gate of the palace grounds, over the cobbled streets, up to the weather-beaten door of the little chapel of the Obrenovitch family, which stands in the old cemetery of St. Mark, back of the city. Graves had been prepared hurriedly under the board floor of the chapel and, after chanted benedictions had been uttered by two priests—the only mourners—the bodies of the chief victims of the bloodiest national tragedy of modern times were lowered reverently to their final resting-place.

Story has it that the rambler roses, which cover thickly the fence in front of the palace grounds, had bloomed white until the summer of 1903, but that the spilled blood of the royal couple had changed their hue to red. Of course this is a consoling little piece of fiction, circulated by the friends of the Obrenovitch dynasty; but one thing is agreed upon by all, that the roses never bloomed in such profusion or with such gorgeous colouring as they did that year.

While strolling by the palace grounds to-day you would scarcely believe that only a few years ago the _konak_ of Alexander and Draga stood upon the very spot where now a bandstand, festooned with electric bulbs, shelters the musicians as they play for the royal family, while the street in front hums with the chatter of gay promenaders. You will see the same red rambler roses, forming a brilliant screen to the beautiful garden in the background. Perhaps you can, through the eye of your imagination, see the very spot upon which fell the distorted remains of royalty on that memorable tenth of June.

* * * * *

Notwithstanding the fact that the untimely death of the last Obrenovitch put an end to the family contentions, a number of dastardly crimes are perpetrated each year in Belgrade by the constituents of the two rival houses. The latest Servian outrage to be hawked before the world was the murder in prison of the brothers Novakovics on September 28, 1907, because of their too zealous efforts to bring to the bar of Justice the real murderers of King Alexander.

Captain Novakovics, a short time after the murder of the late King and Queen, was the instigator of a wide-spread scheme to bring the regicides to trial. This scheme was betrayed, Novakovics was tried by court martial and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, during which period two unsuccessful attempts to poison him were made. Upon his release, although his health was permanently shaken, he started a daily paper called “Za Otadjbinu,” in the columns of which he attacked the present ruling dynasty and, in more or less open language, accused King Peter, unflinchingly, of being the prime mover of the plot to do away with Alexander. His printing presses were seized and he was arrested the second time, the absurd charge having been brought against him that he had stolen three screws from his own machine which, a few hours before, had been sold at auction by the police. Twenty-five days of incarceration in an under-ground dungeon with many of the worst criminals in the land failed to break his spirit, and he—with his brother, who had also been arrested and sent to prison—was transferred to a cell which overlooked the street. Again bribes and threats failed to insure his future silence.

Finally, the two brothers, unable longer to withstand the assaults made upon them by the prison-keepers, decided to call public attention to their case. Having secured, during a moment of relaxation on the part of the guards, rifles from a near-by room, they barricaded the door to their cell quickly and commenced firing toward the ceiling. The police, failing in courage to burst open the door, resorted to a heinous method of overpowering the prisoners, which was invented on the moment by a reinstated detective agent. A solution of saltpetre was inserted through the window of the cell. Gradually the rifle-firing ceased, the door was broken open and, although the prisoners lay senseless upon the floor, the enraged jailers riddled their bodies with bullets.

People, who had gathered outside attracted by the shots of the prisoners, cried, “Asphyxiates were forbidden at The Hague!” “Down with the police!” “Enough of regicide rule!” But the prison was soon surrounded with cavalry troops and the crowd dispersed.

Captain Novakovics was a scion of one of the best Servian families, and had been married but four months before his assassination. His body was not only forbidden to be placed in the family vault, but his relatives were not even allowed to attend his funeral.