THE DREAMS OF AN OLD REALIST

Nevertheless he dreamed that from the mighty castle which looks down on Prizren he would rule the Southern Slavs; his eyes were ever turned towards the famous legendary land of Old Serbia. One essential was that he should be a king, and in 1910 with the consent of the Powers he assumed this title. The spider-webs of which he was so fond began to join Cetinje and Sofia, Cetinje and the mountains of Albania, while the master-weaver mitigated in his usual fashion the monotony of life in his poor capital. The Petrović have such a way with them that—if you do not happen to be one of their subjects—you are in danger of being disarmed. Thus when they were basking in the goodwill of Austria and when Nikita himself, in the spring of 1911, had been splendidly received at Vienna, so that on his return to Cetinje he was welcomed by the whole diplomatic body, save for the Russian Minister, Count Giers, and General Potapoff, the Russian military attaché, who were exhibiting their Government's disapproval, this appeared to Nikita a favourable moment for—as the Persians would say—blackening the face of the Austrian representative.

It was said by many of his discontented subjects that the King of Montenegro's great solicitude for his own personal affairs caused him frequently to be quite dull in recognizing other people's merit. But that day when he received the Austrian Minister he was so very much delighted with him that he there and then gave him promotion from the second to the first class of the Order of Danilo. He had some months before conferred upon this gentleman the second class, with diamonds of paste, and when the Austrian now told the King of his appreciation of the honour being so profound that he had ventured to replace the other diamonds with real ones—"I am enchanted," said the King, "to see that we have such a real friend in you, and I propose to grant you," said the King, as he produced another star composed of imitation diamonds, "to grant you this, the most exalted class. Your Excellency has deserved right well of our beloved Montenegro. Give me back now that inferior decoration, and to-morrow, with due ceremony at eleven o'clock to-morrow," said the King with his paternal smile, "we will bestow on you what you deserve so richly, and it gives me every satisfaction, I assure you," said His Majesty.

The Malissori of Albania were also listening to the old man's blandishments. If they would revolt against the Turks—they were exasperated at the time against the Young Turk rule—then their families would be sheltered in Montenegro and their land, after it had been liberated, would be given independence. With the potent help of Ferdinand of Bulgaria the Turk was to be overthrown. But nothing came of all these plans; the Malissori were abandoned to the mercy of Constantinople.

However, in 1912 that which had been thought impossible was brought about: Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro were allied against the Turk. "Onamo, onamo!..."

"Yonder, yonder!—Let me see Prizren,
For it is mine—I shall come to my home...."

but Nikita, who had written these famous words and who had taught them to his people for a generation, had no cavalry—in the Montenegrin mountains they would have been of no avail—and thus, while his warriors were still some hours from Prizren, they had the mortification of hearing that the Serbs had entered it. With passionate desire they turned to Scutari. Nikita told them of the old Slav princes who were buried there—and to the simple-minded Montenegrins that seemed a good enough reason why 20,000 of them, the flower of the army, should lay down their own lives on the dreary hills that barred them from the town. It was hardly necessary for Nikita to allude to the wealth that would be theirs if they could gain possession of this outlet to the Adriatic. There in the plain at the end of the lake was the glittering white town, and if they could have seen themselves as clearly and their own inadequate resources, they would have refrained from the attempt. The minarets of Scutari, raised like so many warning fingers, failed to warn them. Their equipment was such that munitions and other supplies were frequently carried up to the lines by women—on the Bardonjolt no less than eighty of these were killed and wounded in one day. When the Serbs in October pushed through Albania to the Adriatic they offered to assist in the taking of Scutari, but Nikita shook his head. And it was not until some time after this that he accepted the co-operation of three batteries of Krupp guns, which had been meanwhile taken from the Turks at Kumanovo. But the Montenegrin army was not only handicapped by its lack of resources; the Crown Prince, who commanded a division, actually instigated a revolt among his own men. He had promised the Austrian Minister, Baron Giesl von Gieslingen, that the Montenegrin army would not enter Scutari, and the Government could only put a stop to Danilo's intrigues by invoking the aid of General Potapoff. The Turks were not wasting their time; they employed Austrian engineers to strengthen the fortifications, and thus the task had become far more difficult when finally the Montenegrin Court party availed itself of Serbian reinforcements. In more ways than one they were badly needed by the brave but ill-disciplined soldiers. "It is wonderful," they said to Major Temperley,[70] "their troops do not fire until an officer gives the word." Primitive men and a venal commander—according to Dr. Sekula Drljevič, who was Minister of Finance and Justice, Prince Danilo is alleged to have remembered, just before his country's entrance into the War, that money could be made on the Vienna Bourse by judicious selling and, after the declaration of war, by purchasing. The professional financier who on this occasion, thanks to his knowledge of the Montenegrin royal plans, is alleged to have realized, with his friends, the sum of 140 million francs, was no less a person than Baron Rosenberg, whose subsequent operations in Paris at the beginning of the Great War and in Switzerland during the War received the close attention of the French authorities.[71] These financial methods of Danilo's did less material harm, at any rate to his own people than the system he employed as a motorist; it was necessary that he should obtain the latest models, and it suited him that the Government, not haggling over the price, should take over his discarded vehicles. Similar hostages to gossip were given by Mirko, his younger brother; one remembers the smiles of the diplomatic corps at Cetinje when this young man dispatched, at the cost of the Government, a telegram of about 500 words to Austria, concerning a horse which he wanted to buy. Mirko, who died during the Great War in an Austrian sanatorium, was not one of those rugged and valiant Montenegrin mountaineers whom Gladstone and Tennyson celebrated; once when his father ordered him to come back from Paris, where he was copiously spending his country's substance on an actress with whom he had decamped, leaving his wife and several young children at Naples, he dutifully returned and settled down in his palace, a large, comfortable house outside Podgorica. Since it was less amusing than in Paris he remained in bed for most of the twenty-four hours; he would often spend an hour before dinner in superintending the removal of pictures from one wall to another, and having dined he would immerse himself in State affairs, which took the form of speculating as to when he and his heirs—Danilo being childless—would be called to rule over the great Serbian kingdom of Serbia combined with Montenegro. As to the fate of the Karageorgević dynasty, this was wont to vary from night to night, in proportion to the amount of wine that Mirko had drunk.

These events occurred in 1913, and in the same year the Montenegrins entered Scutari. It was not brought about by force of arms, but by some arrangement with Essad Pasha, the illiterate and clever Albanian who succeeded to the command of the town after Hussein Riza Bey, the Turkish leader, had been assassinated on the threshold of Essad's house, where he had been dining, by a couple of the Pasha's men, disguised as women. Scutari was not to stay for long in Montenegrin hands; an International Force arrived, under Admiral Sir Cecil Burney, and took it over. One need scarcely add that the national sentiment of the Albanians moved the Powers at this juncture as little as it moved the Albanians.

VERY HIGH POLITICS

We have seen that Prince Danilo, before flinging himself against the infidel Turk, is alleged to have transacted a little business on the Bourse—a former Montenegrin Minister of Finance says that he may well have netted between 25 and 30 million crowns—and his royal father, though his methods often had a tinge of mediævalism, was not the man to rush, like some old knight, in succour of distress. When Serbia was attacked in 1914 he refrained from flying to her side. Montenegro "stood up spontaneously to defend the Serbian cause: she fought and she fell," says Mr. Devine. There is not the least doubt but that the vast majority of Montenegrins would have acted in this fashion. To some degree they had deteriorated under the example of Nikita—"A fish stinks from its head," says a Turkish proverb; but when their brother Serbs were in deadly peril all else was forgotten. And they were bewildered and suspicious when the Skupština was summoned, seeing that the Constitution laid it down that the declaring of war was a royal prerogative. As practically every man was thirsting for battle—after all they were Serbs and incapable of committing high treason against their brethren—they marvelled at the King's delay. But to the politicians his manœuvre explained itself; they recognized that Nikita had some secret arrangement[72] with the Austrians and that he wanted to tell Francis Joseph that the War had been forced upon him. From that moment he was playing a double rôle; a Serbian officer was chief of the Montenegrin staff. "They have placed my army under Serbian command," he told the Austrians. "So faithful was I," he said to the Entente, "that I even took a Serbian commander."