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.
KING PETER KARAGEORGEVITCH OF SERVIA.
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.