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 Skupština, 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 Foča, 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 Janković and Colonel (now General) Pešić, 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. Janković, finding that orders were given without his knowledge, returned to Niš; and later on, after the fall of Lovčen, Nikita tried to foist upon Pešić 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 repetition 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 Maroš. 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 Arzić." She may have been a fearful danger to the Magyar State. Cross No. 716 says merely "Deaf and Dumb," so does No. 774. Jovan Krunić, No. 706, was 1½ year old. There are children even younger. The Magyars seem to have applied to Bosnia that label which the monkish mediæval map-makers applied to the remoter peoples: "Here dwell very evil men." If, however, the commandant, Lieut.-Colonel Hegedüs—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 Maroš for a bath and then to walk them up and down the bank until their clothes were dry; Hegedüs 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 passages that the Magyar soldiers came as rarely as they could manage. It was, said Hegedüs, a provisional arrangement to have about a thousand people in one of these passages 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) Mihailović, 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 Jovanović, 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 grass, 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 Hegedüs, although he was degraded and condemned to prison, made a successful appeal, for his father-in-law was a field-marshal, one Pacor.

A few improvements were made in the casemates towards the end of 1917, as a Spanish commission was expected. But it never came. Some of the long galleries have, since the Armistice, been furnished with windows and electric light; but about four months after the Armistice I found them full of dead flies and heavy with an abominable stench. Amid the débris were many lamps, such as one uses in a mine. There was a proclamation, dated 1918, which tried to lure deserters back; it promised that no punishment would be inflicted on them if they should return, but that robbery or murder would meet with capital punishment, either by shooting or by strangling. The floor was littered with all kinds of paper, with scraps of furniture, a few chains and some prison books, which dated back for years. These gave details of all the punishments and were written in a very ornamental script, as though the clerks had taken a pleasure in their work. The Arad fortress had been partly used as a prison for a long time; but Misko Tatar, a Magyar, who stayed there sixteen years for having murdered his fiancée, his mother and his sister, as well as one Kocian, who remained for more than eighteen years—he had murdered the proprietor of a canteen, his wife and child in the Bocche—and Rujitatzka, a Croat, who together with another man had been accused of theft, had killed their escort and thrown his body into the Danube—none of these culprits could remember having heard of such punishments as the Bosniak civilians had to bear. The iron ring from which people used to be suspended for a couple of hours could still be seen on a large tree. If the relatives or friends could pay a fine this penalty was discontinued. Another method was to fasten a man's right wrist to his left ankle and the left wrist to the right ankle. He would then be left for a week; every night a blanket was thrown over him. But there is something very strange in the composition of the Magyars. When the revolution broke out and the prisoners, after all the years of horror, were gaining their freedom, an acquaintance of mine, a certain Gavrić, whose job for three and a half years had been the comparatively pleasant one of cleaning boots, was on the point of leaving the prison. There he was met by the director's daughter. "And you an intelligent person!" she said. "Are you not ashamed of yourself?" The Hungarian newspapers wrote that Hegedüs was dead, which may or may not have been true; and in another paper, The Hungarian Nation, printed in English, in February 1920, the Rev. Dr. Nally said: "May we not still cling to the hope that chivalrous England will give a helping hand to the nation whose weakness is that she is too chivalrous?" One Englishman—whom the reader may or may not consider worth quoting—is with the Magyars. "No country," says Lord Newton,[85] "treated their prisoners of war so well as the Hungarian, and I know it, because looking after prisoners of war was my job." "My husband," says Lady Newton,[86] "had interested himself in their cause"—of "this delightful race," she terms them in the previous sentence—"and had been able to do their country some slight service, and for this they simply could not sufficiently show their gratitude towards ourselves. From the prince to the peasant the Hungarian is a grand seigneur, with all the instincts of a great gentleman and the manners of a king." May I mention that at the same time, I believe, as Lord and Lady Newton were being entertained, a poor Slovak was being differently treated. Having left his home in Hungary to serve in the Czecho-Slovak army, and having settled in Czecho-Slovakia, after the War he got word that his mother was dying. He thereupon applied for and received a Hungarian visa, and on entering that territory he was arrested! A long time afterwards the Czecho-Slovak Legation at Buda-Pest was vainly trying to have him liberated.

THE SOUTHERN SLAVS IN AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

From the beginning of the War the Imperial and Royal authorities had been exasperated by the Southern Slavs within the Empire. A few extracts from the archives which, after the end of the War, were found at Zagreb, will be of interest:

(A)

[In Serbo-Croat:] Telegram from the Commander of the Balkan Army, received in Zagreb, 3/10/1914

[In German:] His Excellency the Ban Baron
Skerlecz, Zgb. [Zagreb].
sss. Tuzla, 387, 146, 2/10/05.