In Bosnia, for some time after the Austrian collapse, it was inconvenient to travel. If you went by rail you were fortunate if you secured a good berth on the roof of a carriage; by road you went less rapidly and therefore ran a greater risk of being waylaid by the so-called "Green Depot," who were deserters from the Austrian army—either through national or other reasons—with their headquarters in the forests. Some of them were simply men who had gone home on leave and stayed at home. Here and there a National Guard of peaceful citizens, irrespective of nationality, was formed against them. But it was some time before they were induced to lead a less romantic life. What happened afterwards in Bosnia between the Serbs, the Croats and the Moslems was so much a matter of routine that the Italians should not have run off with the idea that this imperilled Yugoslavia. Of the 1,898,044 inhabitants in 1910 the proportions were as follows: Orthodox, who call themselves Serbs, 43·49 per cent.; Moslem, 32·25 per cent.; and Catholics, who call themselves Croats, 22·87 per cent. (The remainder are miscellaneous persons, such as 850,000 Jews, who speak the usual Balkan Spanish; they play an inconsiderable part in public life.) The Serbs, the Moslems and the Croats are identical in race and language, but have hitherto been much divided. Those who joined together in the Turkish days were led to do so as companions in distress; the rule of Austria, or to speak with greater accuracy the rule of Hungary—no one knew exactly who possessed the land, but the Magyars took it for granted that it was theirs—this rule, of course, did nothing to unite the various religions. The Moslems, especially after their complete isolation from Turkey, were the most favoured, while the Serbs, owing to the proximity of Serbia, were the most oppressed. And during the War it was the Serbian population which was chiefly tortured. Besides all those who were dragged away to such places as Arad, hundreds and hundreds were hanged in their own province. Not satisfied with using, as we see in so many of those ghastly photographs, their own army as the executioners, the Austro-Hungarians also organized local bands among the lower classes of the towns, and in so doing they availed themselves of any latent religious fanaticism among the Moslems. From the day of the Archduke's assassination it was the Serbs who suffered most; and many onlookers must have expected in the autumn of 1918 that they would take a very drastic revenge. For some weeks the people were left very much to their own devices, with no troops or police—the Austrian gendarmerie having to be protected by the better classes, who explained to the peasants that it was not right to regard only the uniform of those who had so often maltreated them; yet the gendarmes took the earliest opportunity of getting into mufti. There was also for several months a dearth of detectives. Many of those who had worked under Austria and were more or less criminal, fled at the collapse; others continued to act, but in a half-hearted way. Sixty new detectives were taken on by the Yugoslav authorities, and fifty-six of them had to be dismissed. After all, if one can judge a person's character from his face, the detective who allowed you to do so would be so incompetent as not to warrant a trial. And after six or seven months of Yugoslav administration only thirty-three out of fifty-two detective appointments in Sarajevo had been definitely filled. So there was not much restriction on the peasants in their dealings with each other. A few of them were murdered. In Sarajevo the National Guard was largely composed of well-meaning street boys; the Serbian troops did not arrive until November 6, and in many parts of Bosnia not until the end of the month. And yet in the whole country, with people on the track of those who in the pay of Austria had denounced or murdered their relatives, and with the poor kmet at last able to rise against the oppressive landlord, there were in the first six months under fifty murders, and these were mostly due to the desperate straits of the Montenegrins, who came across the frontier in search of provisions, during which forays they assassinated various people. In the Sandjak of Novi Bazar there was no doubt less security; but to anyone who knew, say the Rogatica district, under Austria's very capable administration, it will seem that Bosnia, after the collapse, was singularly tranquil. Anyhow the population, in the summer of 1919, were living on much more amicable terms with one another than for many years. The Government met with some criticism, for it was alleged to be reserving all the lucrative appointments for the Serbs; one had to take into account, however, that it was the Serbs who had been chiefly ruined by the War, and it was just that the concessions for the sale of tobacco, for the railway restaurants and so forth, should be, for the greater part, given to them. Nevertheless it may interest travellers to know that the restaurateurs at the stations of Ilidže and Zenica are Catholics—the Moslems are not yet very competent in such affairs. They are, as their own leaders sadly confess, the least cultured and the least progressive class. As elsewhere in Islam there has been a total lack of female education—the mothers of the Sarajevo Moslem intelligentsia can neither read nor write, while their sons are cultivated people who speak several languages. A change is being made—there are already five Moslem lady teachers employed in the mixed Government schools; this a few years ago would have been thought impossible. It is to be deplored that these divisions into Moslem and Orthodox and Catholic should be perpetrated—the Moslem leaders look forward to the time, in a few years, when their deputies will no longer group themselves apart on account of their religion; but it is unwise to introduce too many simultaneous innovations, considering that the illiterates of Bosnia number about 90 per cent. of the population. The Yugoslav idea will prosper in this country; and, by the way, while you meet an occasional Serb who hankers for a Greater Serbia, an occasional Croat who would like a Greater Croatia, the Moslems have no aspirations save for Yugoslavia. [They speak of "our language," since the word "Serbian" has for them too much connection with the Orthodox religion, the word "Croatian" with Roman Catholicism.] They are not indifferent to the fact that to their own 600,000 in Bosnia they will add the 400,000 of Macedonia and Old Serbia, together with the 200,000 of Montenegro and the Sandjak.... One was inclined to think that the least desirable person of the new era in Sarajevo was the editor of the Srpski Zora ("Serbian Dawn"); his methods had a resemblance to those of Lenin, for he printed lists of persons whom he called upon the Government to prosecute, and when he was himself invited to appear in court and answer to some libel charges he declined to go, upon the ground that the laws were still Austrian and the judge a Magyar. He disapproved of such tolerance, he disapproved of the Croats because they declined to recognize that the Serbs had more merit than they, and as for Yugoslavia—it was a thing of emptiness—he laughed at it and called it Yugovina, the south wind. The only chance of life it had was if you left the whole affair to the Serbs and then in two years it would be a solid thing. It may be thought that the local Government, since they left him at large, endorsed his theories; but they were reluctant to give him a halo of martyrdom. They imagined that he was nervous because he was losing ground—they acknowledged, though, that he still gave pleasure to a great many Serbs, who were carried away by his appeals to their old prejudices. It is undeniable that with the peculiar traditions and customs of Bosnia, that province must for some years have a Government—whatever method is evolved for the other parts of Yugoslavia—whose eyes are not turned constantly to Belgrade. It might even be well to set up a local Chamber in which all classes would be represented. The Moslems and Croats would thus lose any lurking fear that they were being swamped, and by coming into contact with other political parties even the less cultured classes would gradually tend to discard these fatal religious, in favour of political, divisions. A somewhat primitive Balkan community cannot be expected of its own accord to love henceforward in the name of politics those whom hitherto it has hated in the name of religion. And as yet they are much more interested in the harvest than in politics; from day to day they change their views, according to the views of the last orator from Belgrade, Zagreb or Ljubljana. Only the Socialists appear to be well disciplined. Of course the present political parties in Yugoslavia are not wholly free from religious prejudices, an important party, for example, among the Slovenes being based on Roman Catholicism. But as the Slovenes are, as yet, the best upholders of the Yugoslav idea, it is obvious that education covers all things, and that with the increase of education in Bosnia the religious differences will be less important. Anything that can be done against this tyranny is beneficial, whether the St. George be a political orator or a schoolmaster. And as the effects produced by the former are more rapid, so should he be encouraged. He is, in fact, appearing in Bosnia, he will carry away, more or less, the clientèle of the Srpski Zora, and the shattered nervous organism of its editor, Mr. Čokorilo, will be, one trusts, reconstituted and devoted, as it can be, to a nobler purpose. One of its deplorable effects has been that the organ of the Croat party, a paper called Jugoslavija, has been compelled to write in a similar strain, whereas the editor, a dapper little priest, assures one that he would prefer a more elevated tone.
RADIĆ AND HIS PEASANTS
Those who wished that Yugoslavia would be an idle dream have had their hopes more centred in Croatia. They told the world that horrible affairs took place, that there has been a revolution, several revolutions, that castles have been sacked and that the statesman, Radić, was imprisoned. If you met this little pear-shaped man, who is a middle-aged, extremely short-sighted person, with a small, straggling beard, an engaging smile and a large forehead, you would say that surely he had spent a good many hours of his life in some university garden where the birds, knowing that he could not easily see them, were in the habit of alighting for their dinner on his outstretched hands. He is a very learned little man, who started his career by obtaining the first place at the famous École des Sciences Politiques in Paris. But Stephen Radić happens also to be very much interested in politics and extremely impulsive, so that his wife and daughter have often had to look after the bookshop, since the Government—that of Austria-Hungary and afterwards that of Yugoslavia—had consigned him to prison. He probably expected nothing else, for his eloquence—and he is an orator in several languages—has frequently carried him along and swept him round and round, like a leaf, not only in a direction opposite to that which he previously travelled but flying sometimes in the face of the most puissant and august authorities. So, for example, he began to agitate in 1904 against the vast territorial possessions of the Church in Croatia. This resulted in the then Archbishop issuing an interdict against him and his meetings—a measure which, I believe, is still in force. He was described as Antichrist, with the consequence that his audiences, out of curiosity to see what such a personage might look like, became larger than ever. For many years he was the only Croat politician who gave himself the trouble to go amongst the peasants. "In politics," said Radić to me—he said a great many other things in the course of our first conversation, which lasted for four hours, though it seemed a good deal shorter—"In politics," said he, "one should not, as in art, try to be original. One should interpret not only the living generation but the ancestors." The peasant, who feels what Radić expresses, has repaid him well, for there is now no party in Yugoslavia which is more devoted to its leader. He has taken the place once occupied by the clergy—he is by no means hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, but he is the foe of clericalism. "Praised be Jesus Christ! Long live the Republic!" is the usual beginning of one of his orations, so that his enemies accuse him in the first place of being a hypocrite, and in the second of holding views which cannot possibly amalgamate with those of monarchical Serbia. But the reference to Christ appears perfectly natural to the Croat peasant—at an open-air meeting of 10,000 of them I saw their heads uncovered, and all bowed in prayer for a few minutes on the stroke of noon. As for the Republic, this first came into the picture on July 25, 1918, when the cry was raised at a meeting of the Peasants' party. A large number of peasants had imbibed this idea in America—those who emigrated have been in the habit of returning, and even if their home is in the desolate parts of Zagorija or among the rocks of Primorija, the coastal region. And thousands of Croats had spent part of the War as prisoners in Russia—having deserted from the Austro-Hungarian army—so that they had seen how the Great White Tsar, previously regarded as an almost divine being, could be dethroned. Four months after this famous meeting a Convention was held, in the American fashion, with 2874 delegates, who represented some 100,000 people. They pronounced themselves to be Republicans and Yugoslavs. It is quite true that many of the farmers in Croatia have a pretty vague idea of the Republic. "Long live Mr. Republic!" has been heard before now at one of their meetings, while a landowner of my acquaintance was asked by two of his aged tenants whether in the event of this Republic being established they should choose as President King Peter or the Prince-Regent or King Charles. But we should remember that in 1907 a printing press was founded by the Peasants' party at Zagreb, and those who gave their money for this cause were, to a great extent, illiterate. The people are groping towards the light, and they are willing to be told by those they trust that they have much to learn as to the nature of the light. Republicanism was fanned into flame by Radić's imprisonment and other causes, so that he says he is uncertain whether he can now persuade them to modify their demands. But if he tells them that in his opinion a constitutional monarchy will meet the case, they will probably still consent to accept his view—and this has of late come to be his own opinion. It may very well be that he adopted the republican idea with no other purpose than to obtain for the peasants the social and economic legislation which they would otherwise not have secured. And, after all, there was something of a republican nature in Croatia's autonomy under the Magyars. As for his imprisonment, it was strange that the Belgrade Cabinet, who should have known their man, treated him as if he were a De Valera; and perhaps the conduct of a subsequent Cabinet, that of Mr. Protić, who came out for Croatian Home Rule, was also strange in appearance, for while Radić was still in prison he was invited to decide as to whether the Ban, Croatia's Governor, should or should not remain in office. But Mr. Protić understood that at this period Radić's republicanism was somewhat academic.
His party had, in years gone by, been small enough in the Landtag; but the fact that his followers then numbered only two is anyhow of no importance, as his very real power was derived from the peasants, who were largely voteless. How often in his prison he must have yearned for those old Landtag days—apart from his advocacy of the peasants, he loves to speak. In two hours he would traverse the whole gamut of human thought, expressing opinions to which John Hampden and Jack Cade and Montaigne and Machiavelli would in turn assent. The words used to rush from his lips in a torrent, while to many of his faithful peasant followers he seemed, throughout his discourse, to be in direct contact with the Almighty. Next to the Almighty the Croatian peasant had been taught to revere Francis Joseph, so that when the heir to the throne was murdered in 1914 it was not very difficult to make the Croat peasants rise against this sacrilege by plundering the Serbian shops at Zagreb—Austrian officers coming with their children to look on—just as in other parts of Croatia and Bosnia. There is as yet within the Croat peasant a certain hostility against the Serb and for various reasons: one of them is that he was always taught by Austria to detest the adherents of the Orthodox religion, another reason is that for centuries they have had a different culture; and so, since Austria's collapse, when it has been explained to them what is a republic and what is a monarchy, they have often demanded the former for no better reason than that the Serbs prefer the latter. They were taught by Austria to look forward to a Greater Croatia, which would eliminate the Slovenes by delivering them to the Germans, for that celebrated corridor to the Adriatic. And it is from the Slovene Socialists that the peasants of Croatia might very profitably learn.... The Slovene influence, coming from a more highly organized province, would be beneficial both for Serbs and Croats, for the industrial workers and for the peasants. The nature of the Southern Slavs, say these Socialists, is democratic, and the State mechanism might be made more so. Now that the various parts of Yugoslavia have liberated or are liberating themselves from various yokes, they have approached one another with a different mentality; they will become much better known to one another. And it was hoped that when Mr. Radić regained his freedom and his book-shop he would find that his devotees preferred to hear him not as a Croat Jack Cade but as a Yugoslav Hampden. In his absence the party was leaderless.
As for the other Croats, only Frank's Clerical party, which numbered five or six deputies, and did not hide its persistent sympathies with the House of Habsburg, kept up Separatist tendencies. All the Coalition (now the Democrat) party and two-thirds of the so-called Party of Croatian Right were for a close union with Serbia and the regency of Prince Alexander. That is not to say that there was perfect unanimity with regard to the interior arrangements of this union; in fact Dr. Ante Pavelić, one of the Vice-Presidents of the Yugoslav National Council, who was received in special audience by the Prince at Belgrade, is also the leader of the old Starčević party and as such an opponent of complete centralization. The Obzor, Zagreb's oldest newspaper, maintains this point of view, not paying much attention to the form of the State, monarchic or republican, so long as it is organized in a manner which would prevent the Croats being subordinated. Zagreb, it thinks, is destined to play the New York to Belgrade's Washington—but nowadays it looks very much as if Zagreb's rôle were to be that of Yugoslavia's Boston.
Among the Slovenes this anxiety for decentralization—which is very proper or exaggerated, according to the point of view—is less accentuated. It appears as if the Christian-Socialist party of Monsignor Korošec[29] is rather centralist in its Belgrade words and decentralist in its Ljubljana deeds. This party has shed some of its extremist clerical members, who to the cry, "The Church is in danger!" were very good servants of the Habsburgs. Such of them as were unable to accept the new order of things—elderly priests, for the most part—retired from the political stage.
THOSE WHO WILL NOT MOVE WITH THE TIMES
There remains the Voivodina (Banat, Bačka, etc.) party, some of whom are as much frightened of Croat predominance as the Obzor, for instance, is of Serb. The argument of these Voivodina politicians is that Serbia has lost so many of her intelligentsia during the War that she must have special protection; they also found it hard to swallow the old functionaries whom the State took over from Austria. Of course it does not follow that if a Slav has been a faithful servant of Austria he will be an unsatisfactory servant of the new State. Obviously the circumstances of each case must be considered; and, as a barrister, a dissentient member of this party told me at Osiek, one must often put personal feelings aside; he himself had been arbitrarily imprisoned during the War by an official who was then an Austrian and is now a Yugoslav functionary. The most extreme exponent of this anti-Croat party seems to be a well-known editor at Novi Sad, Mr. Jaša Tomić. In his opinion you cannot join by means of a law in twenty-four hours people who have never been together; let it be a slower and a surer process. He is ready to die, he says, but he is not ready to lose his national name. Let the Serbs and Croats and Slovenes retain what is most precious to each of them. Let them not be asked to give up everything. In the matter of the flag Mr. Tomić is justified, for now their former flag has been taken from each of them and a totally fresh one created, which is particularly hard on the Serbs after the sublime fashion in which their old colours were carried up the Macedonian mountains in the Great War. It would not have required much ingenuity—as they all three share the colours, red, white and blue, differently arranged—to have devised, not a mere new and unmeaning arrangement of the simple colours, but a method on the lines of the Union Jack or of the former Swedish-Norwegian flag, wherein all three would have remained visible. Mr. Tomić believes that a real intelligentsia would demand of the people what it can execute, and he regrets to think that at least two-thirds of the intelligentsia want the people to call themselves Yugoslavs. But Mr. Tomić has a far greater majority than two-thirds against him, because while his arguments would be admirable if the Serbs and Croats and Slovenes had no neighbours, they must be—and the vast majority of Yugoslavs feel that they must be—superseded on account of this imperfect world. By all means let each one of the three retain every single custom that will not interfere with the national security and will not interfere too much with the national welfare. If Mr. Tomić, who is much respected but generally looked upon as rather old-fashioned, is going to die sooner than give up something which the State considers essential he will be following in the footsteps of those whom Cavour, in the course of the welding of Italy, had to execute.
It may be said without fear of contradiction—in fact I was given the figure by one of the decentralization leaders of Croatia—that at least 90 per cent. of the Croat intelligentsia wants the union with Serbia, and if a republic is decided upon they will mostly vote for King Alexander as President. While they discuss their internal organization—no simple matter when one considers their varied antecedents, their different legal systems and so forth—they will not let Yugoslavia go to pieces. The work of construction and of more or less strenuous, but necessary, criticism occupies by far the greater number of the politicians. They have not yet, all of them, given their adherence to this or that group, while new groups are arising—such as the Agrarian, which being far more interested in the peasant's material welfare than in anything else will give their alliance to that political party which is prepared to assist the villages towards improving their cleanliness and their manure.
THE YUGOSLAV POLITICAL PARTIES