Volume I Part 13 (1/2)

HOW THE AUSTRIANS WAGED WAR--THE SERBIAN PRINCES--THE TACTICS OF THE MONTENEGRIN KING--THE MAGYARS AND THEIR PRISONERS--THE SOUTHERN SLAVS IN AUSTRIA-HUNGARY--HOW THE WAR RAGED IN THE WINTER OF 1914-1915--THE TREATY OF LONDON, APRIL 1915--HOW BULGARIA CAME INTO THE WAR--ATTEMPT TO BUY OFF THE SERBS--GREEK TRANSACTIONS--FLIGHT OF THE SERBS--THE FAITHFUL CROATS--HOW THE SERBS CAME TO THEIR PATRIARCH'S TOWN--THE SHADOW OVER MONTENEGRO--THE BROKEN SERBS AT CORFU--THE SOUTHERN SLAVS IN THE UNITED STATES--CASH AND THE MONTENEGRIN ROYAL FAMILY---THE BURDEN OF AUSTRIA'S SOUTHERN SLAV TROOPS--THE FAITHFUL ITALIANS--SOUTHERN SLAVS IN THE AUSTRIAN NAVY--ADVANCE OF THE ALLIES IN MACEDONIA--HOW THE MAGYARS TREATED THEIR SERBIAN SUBJECTS--THE SOUTHERN SLAVS PAY PART OF THEIR DEBT TO THE HABSBURG MONARCHY: (_a_) IN SYRMIA; (_b_) IN SLOVENIA.

HOW THE AUSTRIANS WAGED WAR

”Machen Sie Ordnung!” [”Put matters in order”] was the phrase used by Austrian officers in Serbia when they wished a non-commissioned officer to see that such and such Serbian civilians should be hanged or shot. Occasionally an accident occurred, as when a priest near Viegrad came to an officer with the request that his plum trees should be spared, since he had nothing else. This officer intended to be kind and, not knowing or forgetting the sense in which those three words were being used, he said to a sergeant, ”Machen Sie Ordnung!”

and the next morning a prominent citizen of Split, Count Pavlovic, whose post in the Austro-Hungarian army was that of a provost-marshal, saw the priest, his wife and his three little boys hanging from the plum trees. It was and is the fas.h.i.+on to a.s.sert that the Austrian army was incomparably less brutal than the Prussian, so that some readers will be disinclined to believe a conversation which Count Pavlovic, particularly as he is a Yugoslav, once had at Donja Tusla in Bosnia with a certain Captain Waldstein, who between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. had sentenced nineteen people to be hanged. These people, by the way, were all over twenty years of age, so that each case had to be tried; persons under that age could, as we have seen, also be hanged, but not as the result of a trial. Pavlovic approached the captain--his rank, to be accurate, was captain-auditor--and asked him how he had lunched after such a morning's work. ”I felt,” was the reply, ”as if I had drunk nineteen gla.s.ses of beer.” An Austrian army surgeon, Dr. Wallisch, who during the occupation travelled professionally in Serbia and wrote a good deal about it in Viennese papers and Austrian papers in Belgrade, said that ”everywhere in this Balkan and patriarchal environment you see educational mansions and s.p.a.cious barracks.[80] Does not this, better than anything else, show the criminal, premeditated hostility of the Serbs against our Monarchy? They have the longing to learn, which devours the ambitious, and likewise the wish to realise by force of arms this fantastic ideal of an over-excited national sentiment.” Yes indeed, this was the ideal of King Peter, in accordance with the device of the poet, Aksentie Teodosijevic: ”Towards liberty, in the first place through learning and culture, then with arms.” Very few people would be inclined to believe that the invading Austrians could be so petty as to burn all the schoolbooks they came across, and still fewer would credit the fact that Yugoslav patients with gold-filled teeth ran any special risk in Austrian army hospitals. Ivo Staniic of the Bocche di Cattaro had fought with the Montenegrins and, in consequence of Nikita's capitulation, had fallen into the Austrians' hands. He was warned by his friends not to go into hospital, where his twelve gold teeth, which he had acquired in the United States, might prove his undoing. He did, as a matter of fact, die there, and the overdose of morphia--witnessed by the well-known architect, Matejorski of Prague--may have been accidental, and the Austrians who took his teeth out may have thought it foolish to leave so much gold in a corpse.

Another Bocchesi who underwent the same treatment was one Risto Lijeevic. Perhaps the Austrians do not deny these incidents, and considering the trouble which they gave themselves to have a long series of open-air brutalities officially photographed and made the subject of picture postcards, one presumes that the dental operations were omitted on account of the bother of indoor photography. The postcards, of which I have a large collection, place on record the procedure used in the wholesale hanging and shooting of Bosnian and Serbian civilians, young and old, men and women. More trouble was taken over the photographs, which are sometimes minute and sometimes artistic in depicting a row of gallows on an eminence with gloomy clouds behind them, than was taken with the manufacture of these gallows, for in many cases they were no more than a seven-foot stake, to the top of which the victim's throat was firmly fastened, holding his or her feet a short distance from the ground. We have in the London Press and in the House of Lords a number of reactionary persons who do not cease regretting the disappearance of Austria-Hungary. The new States, such as Yugoslavia and Czecho-Slovakia, they argue, are very unsatisfactory, if only for the reason that they subst.i.tute a lower civilization for a higher. Austrian culture, in their opinion, is so different from that of the new States that you cannot compare them. And when they talk of the Habsburg dynasty it is after the fas.h.i.+on of old Francis Joseph who, in 1891, when the four hundredth anniversary of the great Czech teacher Comenius was being officially celebrated in all the schools of Prussia, commanded that nothing of the sort was to be done in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, because his attention had been drawn by Archbishop Schwarzenberg of Prague to a Latin letter in which the great man uttered some sharp words concerning the dynasty. One is prepared to overlook a great many things which happened in the stress of war, but the postcards which portray fas.h.i.+onably dressed women and girls strolling between the gallows as if at a garden party and merely using their parasols against the sun, do not appear to leave any attributes for a civilization lower than that which they exhibit. The Bosniaks and Serbs who were thus done away with were frequently even less to blame than those ignorant peasants who, being told by their priests that Peter was their King, shouted ”Long live King Peter!” as the Austrian troops marched through their villages, and were forthwith hanged for high treason. ”Whenever,” says Euripides, ”I see the wicked fall into adversity I declare that the G.o.ds do exist.” At Trnovo twenty-eight were executed, including two women and at Pale, near Sarajevo, twenty-six, the Austrians killing all the old folk and the children who remained when the Montenegrin and Serbian armies retreated. Those who were not murdered on the spot had a period of imprisonment during which they were fed on white bread; but all that they were asked, prior to their execution, was their name, their father's name and their domicile. Thousands were interned--at Doboj between twenty and thirty died every day of illness or of famine. The fate of the abandoned children in Bosnia was such that when Dr. Bilinski, the Governor (afterwards Minister of Finance in Poland) was told of it he had the decency to weep. His informant was Madame Cuk of Zagreb, so well known to British travellers; this lady was at the head of an organization which removed as many children as possible from Bosnia to other parts of the Dual Monarchy. The diet of gra.s.s, cow's dung and a kind of bread, chiefly composed of clay and wood-shavings and the bark of trees, gave to nearly all the children a protruding stomach; they were so weak that they would fall out of the luggage-racks of the railway carriages, and with 500-600 children in three waggons it was necessary to deposit some of them in the racks. At a place called Sunia it was the ladies' custom to have cauldrons of maize and water, as well as bacon, waiting for the travellers, but very often this food brought on a colic, so unaccustomed were the children to fats.[81] If the Austrians intended to put their Bosnian house in order by finis.h.i.+ng off the population--”Machen Sie Ordnung”--they made considerable progress. They had hoped, before the War began, to send a punitive expedition into Serbia that would finish off that insolent, small country. Delirious was the enthusiasm of the Viennese at the declaration of War. Fate was giving them the whitest of bread before their execution.

The Austrian statesmen did not embark on the War without taking certain precautions. Count Berchtold, on July 28, submitted for the old Emperor's signature the war declaration, which explicitly stated that the Government was forced to protect its rights and interests by recourse to arms, the more so as the Serbian troops had already attacked the Imperial and Royal soldiers at Temes-Kubin on the Danube.

After the Emperor had signed the declaration of war in this form, Count Berchtold struck out the reference to a fight at Temes-Kubin, and sent a letter to Francis Joseph explaining that he had taken it on himself to eliminate this sentence as the reports had not been confirmed. ”It is clear,” said the _Arbeiter-Zeitung_,[82] commenting on the Austrian Red-book which revealed this affair, ”it is clear that the fight at Temes-Kubin never occurred, but was simply invented by Count Berchtold. That arch-scoundrel not only deceived the people, but also the Emperor. The destiny of the world depended upon whether an eighty-four-year-old man permitted himself to be deceived. For such a crime Berchtold must certainly be sent to prison, or, more justly, to the gallows.”

If the punitive expedition into Serbia had been less disastrous, it would perhaps have been accompanied with less barbarity--though the Austrian army was handicapped, owing to the large number of aristocratic, and presumably more gentle, officers who found themselves unable to leave the War Office and similar inst.i.tutions in Vienna. Yet the Austrians seem to have determined how to act before they came. A special branch of the army occupied itself with the stealing, packing and dispatching of cameras, engravings, ladies'

garments, etc. etc.--numerous lists were accidentally left behind in Belgrade, and every sheet at the top left-hand corner was stamped with the words ”Sammlungs-Offizier” (_i.e._ Collection-officer). I do not know what knowledge and what skill are necessary before this rubber stamp is conferred upon a man. Did the Imperial and Royal authorities regard him as a non-combatant? The ”Sammlungs-Offizier”

might resent such a cla.s.sification if in private life he had been a courageous burglar. And the Imperial and Royal army, according to certain ”Instructions for the conduct of troops” which were found on a wounded officer of the 9th Army Corps, had resolved--irrespective of success or failure in the War--to ma.s.sacre the Serbs without compunction: ”Any person encountered in the open, and especially in a forest, must be regarded as a member of a 'band' that has concealed its weapons somewhere, which weapons we have not the time to look for.

These people are to be executed if they appear even slightly suspicious”; and another paragraph says that ”I will not allow persons armed, but wearing no uniform, whether encountered singly or in groups, to be taken prisoners. They must be executed without exception.” The Austrians knew very well that the Serbs had not received their new uniforms, and that at least one-third of their army was obliged to take the field in ordinary peasant's dress.[83] The fact that the Austrian invasion of north-western Serbia came to such an ignominious end before September is no reason why so large a number of women, children and old men were, as is very well authenticated, cut to pieces, burned alive, despoiled of their eyes, their noses, disembowelled, and so forth. One expects a certain amount of licence from the baser elements of an invading army; but in Serbia--perhaps because this was a punitive expedition--it seems to have been the Imperial and Royal officers who egged on their men.... I have tried, from the Austrian records, to ascertain whether any comparable outrages can be laid at the door of the Serbs. And there is one incident which utterly disgraces some of their Montenegrin brothers: the men of Foca in Herzegovina joined the Montenegrin army when it penetrated to the neighbourhood of Sarajevo. When it was thrown back the Foca comrades--Yugoslavs, of course, and guilty of high treason against Austria--accompanied them to Montenegro; and later on some Montenegrin officers denounced the people of Foca to the Austrians, with the result that fourteen of them were hanged.

On August 24, 1914, after twelve terrible days, the Austrians were dislodged from abac and flung across to the northern bank of the Save. More useful to the Serbs than their 6000 prisoners were the 50 cannons and over 30,000 rifles, for the Serbian troops had entered the War with such scanty equipment that many of the regiments with an effective strength of over 4000 men possessed only 2500 rifles. The armed soldiers went into action, while the unarmed waited in reserve, springing forward as their comrades fell, and taking up the weapons of the fallen to continue the fight. Here occurred an incident of which the hero was a boy. He had run away to the army and, to his vast delight, been made a standard-bearer. When an officer perceived that he was continuously exposing himself he told him to hide. ”No one will see you,” said the officer. ”But,” answered the boy, ”the flag will see.” And he was killed. Many of the dead or wounded Austrians were Southern Slavs who had not been able to surrender to their brothers; they were often found with all their cartridges intact, and with their rifles made incapable of shooting.

THE SERBIAN PRINCES

One of the first results of this victory was the invasion, by Serb and Montenegrin troops, of Bosnia. They succeeded in penetrating to within a few miles of Sarajevo, and there they were held up not only by the encircling forts but by the scarcity of their ammunition, for the Russian supplies had not yet come through. ”Your Royal Highness,” said a corporal one day to Prince George, the impetuous young man who had resigned his position as heir to the throne and was at this moment far more congenially occupied as the chief of an irregular band in the mountains, ”we have no more ammunition,” said the corporal. ”Each man has a knife?” asked George. The corporal nodded. ”Then let us go on.”

The Prince has a great wound across his breast, from one side to the other. He is very much the descendant of Kara George; he dislikes making a secret of his opinions. King Peter, who was present at the inauguration of the Belgrade synagogue, always refrained from entering the Roman Catholic Church, since it was included in the buildings of the Austrian Legation. His elder son was not averse, when relations were strained, from taking an enthusiastic part in anti-Austrian demonstrations, so that the Austrians were delighted to spread a report that this ebullient youth had killed his orderly and must be set aside from the succession. The truth was that George happened to catch this orderly reading a private letter of his; in a sudden fit of rage he struck him a blow, even as Kara George would have done--unluckily the man rolled down some steps and from the resulting injuries he died. A good many Austrian and German writers have said that George is mad; he is certainly less fitted to govern Yugoslavia than is Alexander, his brother. One remembers George, so dark and lean and hawk-eyed, traversing the broad Danube at Belgrade in a most original fas.h.i.+on; as the blocks of ice swept along he made his horse leap from one of them to another. And one thinks of that more patient prince, Alexander, poring for hours over papers of State, gazing up a little wearily through his gla.s.ses, wondering for month after month whether the crisis between Government and Opposition in Yugoslavia will ever be solved. George will seek relaxation in driving a motor-car as if the Serbian roads were a racing track; Alexander's relaxation is to hear a new musical play, then to go home and repeat the whole score by heart on his piano.

All through the War Alexander, the Prince Regent--for King Peter felt himself, on account of his age and his rheumatism, unequal to anything save the personal encouragement of his soldiers in the trenches[84]--throughout the War Alexander was with his army. In his eloquent proclamations one sees the student; on the battlefield he conquered his shyness. And now he is a truly democratic King, at whose table very often is some non-commissioned officer or private whose acquaintance he has made in the War. He asked the man to come and see him one day in Belgrade, so that the royal adjutants are always busy with this stream of warriors.

The men are well aware that their own peasant costume, with the sandals, is admissible at Court--even at a ball you see some fine old peasant, who is perhaps a deputy (and who does not, like a certain Polish Minister of recent years, remove his white collar before entering the Chamber). You can see him in his thick brown homespun with black braiding, breeches very baggy at the seat and closely fitting round the legs; as he comes in he knocks the snow from off his sandals, and strides, perfectly at ease, across the Turkish carpets.

With such a man the King loves greatly to go hunting; last winter in the Rudnik region the inhabitants were being plagued by wolves, so the King went down there with some officers and peasants. Though he is so short-sighted that he constantly wears gla.s.ses--if you met him casually you would suppose that this keen-faced young officer was probably a writer of military books--though he is short-sighted he is one of the best shots in Europe. On the Slovenian mountains he has brought down many chamois and, before he succeeded, at a summer resort in Serbia he was always first at target practice. Nor is he less skilled at cards, particularly bridge. He gathers round him the best players in the town. Such are his relaxations after the long round of audiences and hours of other work. During the day he will have very likely undertaken to pay the expenses from his own pocket of another Serbian student, at home or abroad. So many of them are his pensioners. And it may be said without flattery that in the pursuit of knowledge he affords them an example. His subjects number about 14 millions, but when in conversation I happened to allude to a remote border village, his subsequent remarks made me wonder whether he had just been reading an article about the chequered history of that little place. He is, in fact, like his late grandfather of Montenegro, the father of his people. But they have different ideas about the duties of a father; and while Nikita's laugh was pretty grim, the deep whole-hearted laugh of Alexander takes you into the sincere recesses of the man.

During the Bosnian offensive there was launched an expedition over the Save into the goodly land of Syrmia, one of those Yugoslav provinces of which the Austro-Hungarian Empire was to be stripped. This expedition had a varying success, for the a.s.sault that was attempted in the neighbourhood of Mitrovica was not skilfully conducted; and the Serbian army, for the first time in the War, was worsted. Then troops in Bosnia, just before the grand attack on Sarajevo, were thrown into confusion by an order from the Montenegrin King who, without vouching any reason, called his army back. The Serbian troops had no other course than to retreat as well; and their enemies delivered, all the rest of September and throughout October, a tremendous thrust against the army that was s.h.i.+elding Valjevo. The Serbs, who were lamentably short of arms, munition, clothing and every sort of hospital equipment, did not care to think of the approach of winter. They hurled themselves against the Austrian swarms--and up to this period they had lost, in dead and seriously wounded, more than 130,000 men.

THE TACTICS OF THE MONTENEGRIN KING

The co-operation between Serbs and Montenegrins for the Bosnian campaign was the occasion of some of Nikita's usual devious diplomacy.

He summoned, as we have seen, a superfluous Skuptina, whose resolutions would enable him to go to Francis Joseph, his secret ally, with a tale of _force majeure_. And he telegraphed to his grandson, the Serbian Prince-Regent: ”My Montenegrins and myself are already on the frontiers, ready to die in the defence of our national independence.” While his ill-equipped warriors pushed on to Budva, arrived before Kotor, seized Foca, Rogatica and other towns, pressing on until they stood before the forts of Sarajevo, the disreputable Royal Family, jealous as ever of Belgrade, were plunging deeper and always deeper into treachery. The Serbian officers, General Jankovic and Colonel (now General) Peic, who, mainly at the instance of Russia, had been sent to reorganize the Montenegrin army, saw themselves hampered at every turn by the Court clique at Cetinje.

Jankovic, finding that orders were given without his knowledge, returned to Ni; and later on, after the fall of Lovcen, Nikita tried to foist upon Peic the odium of a surrender which his own machinations had brought about.

THE MAGYARS AND THEIR PRISONERS

As one might have expected, the withdrawal from Bosnia was followed by a repet.i.tion 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. 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 Arzic.” She may have been a fearful danger to the Magyar State.

Cross No. 716 says merely ”Deaf and Dumb,” so does No. 774. Jovan Krunic, No. 706, was 1 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 Hegedus--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 for a bath and then to walk them up and down the bank until their clothes were dry; Hegedus 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 pa.s.sages that the Magyar soldiers came as rarely as they could manage. It was, said Hegedus, a provisional arrangement to have about a thousand people in one of these pa.s.sages 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) Mihailovic, 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 Jovanovic, 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 gra.s.s, 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 Hegedus, although he was degraded and condemned to prison, made a successful appeal, for his father-in-law was a field-marshal, one Pacor.