YET THEY ARE INCREDIBLY NONCHALANT
Dalmatia, as is shown by the number of emigrants, is not a wealthy province; and one would have supposed that if the Italians thought it necessary to occupy a country whose inhabitants were so unmistakably opposed to them, it would have been—to put it at the lowest—politic to hamper no one in the getting of his livelihood. Austria had established fourteen military fishing centres (besides others in Rieka, Istria, etc.), and these the Croats joined most willingly, as a means of avoiding service in a hated army. After the war, when their nets were worn out, Italy supplied her Chioggia fisherfolk with new ones. Owing to the conditions of the Triple Alliance, the Italians enjoyed the right to "high-sea" fishing, that is to say, the fishing up to three miles from the Dalmatian coast; but now the Italian boats occupied all the rich fishing grounds among the northern islands. These dispossessed natives were originally more preoccupied with fish than with Italians. Is it strange that they refused to see that Italy was, in the words of Admiral Millo, the friend and liberator?... A German firm, the Steinbeiss Company, had built in Bosnia a very narrow-gauge line for the exploitation of its forests; during the War this line was continued to Prijedor, and with great difficulty it had served for the transport of food-stuff and passengers from Croatia: on the Croatian lines up to Sissak normal gauge; from there to Prijedor narrow gauge; from there to Knin very narrow gauge, and from there to Split or Šibenik narrow gauge. Thus with the loading and unloading between 30 per cent. and 50 per cent. of the goods were lost; but when Italy sat down at Rieka the inhabitants of Dalmatia looked to this line. At Prijedor hundreds of waggons of wheat and corn were waiting to be forwarded, and with Italy blocking the road at Knin they simply perished.
ONE OF THEIR VICTIMS
The Italian administration of Dalmatia—economically, politically, scholastically, ecclesiastically and financially (as we will show)—was thoroughly mistaken. Wherever one goes one is overwhelmed with evidence; it is impossible to print more than a tithe of it. But the mention of Knin recalls the case of Dr. Bogić, who was deported to Sardinia for political reasons. On January 1 he was arrested, together with a Franciscan monk, a schoolmaster and others, transported to Šibenik and put into a cell devoid of bed, light or a window. Thence, with nothing to eat, although the weather was wintry, he was taken on to the s.s. Almissa, bound for Ancona. Near Šibenik the boat collided with the isle of Zlarin; he and the other prisoners attempted to get out of their cabin, but carabinieri kept them there by flourishing revolvers in their faces. At Ancona, Spoleto, Perugia, Florence and Leghorn the doctor was always lodged in prisons, had his finger-prints taken, had to stand up to salute the warders, had to look on while his things were stolen—at Ancona, for instance, they despoiled him of eighty cigars. His wrists were always bound; he was attached not only to his fellow-travellers but to Italians who were under life-sentences. The carabinieri cut up their bread, put it on their knees and then, without unbinding the ropes, left them to eat it as best they could. The journey was very slow; thus from Perugia to Florence—being all the time attached to one another—it took sixteen hours. Dr. Conti, the prison doctor at Florence, said that Dr. Bogić was ill, but as he declined to give him a certificate the journey was resumed. From Florence to Leghorn he was bound so tightly that his wrists were very much swollen. From Leghorn in the s.s. Derna he was shipped to Sardinia, where he had experience of several prisons, including that of Terranuova-Pausania, where water flows down the walls and vermin are everywhere. He received 2.75 lire a day with which to buy his food, and although he is a doctor they refused to let him read any medical books. When I asked him of what he had been guilty, he began by recounting his war work. Over 6000 Italian prisoners were at Knin, and he was there as military doctor for more than two years. These Italians were employed on the railway line and—as is clear from the letters they wrote to him after their release—letters some of which I read—they had very friendly recollections of the doctor. Once in the summer of 1918 a group of Italians arrived who had been, in the doctor's words, "bestially maltreated at Zala-Egerseg by the Magyars." Dozens died on the way to Knin, others while they were being got out of the station, others on the way to the hospital. They were nothing but skeletons, dressed almost exclusively in paper clothes. General Wucherer happened to be at Knin and to him the doctor reported that the Italians had been treated in an absolutely criminal fashion. Wucherer, who was a decent fellow, ordered the doctor to dictate the whole affair and said that if nothing else could be done he would go direct to His Majesty. Then standing up he struck the table, in the presence of his staff, of Dr. Grgin of Split and of the railway commandant Captain Bergmann, and "Wir sind doch die grössten Schuften!" he exclaimed ("After all, it is we who are the biggest scoundrels!").... When the Yugoslavs overthrew the Austrian Government at Knin, the doctor, a kindly-looking, little, bald man, made a speech to the prisoners from the balcony of the town hall. He armed two of the Italians and ten French prisoners, whom he told off to guard the magazine. The two Italians (Cirillo Tomba and Mario Favelli) vanished after a couple of days; the French remained for a week, and when a French destroyer arrived at Split they were taken there, not as prisoners but as soldiers, bearing arms. Dr. Bogić was a member of the National Committee at Knin, and as such he wrote to a colleague at Drniš to ask him whether the Italian troops were coming up from Šibenik. This letter was his undoing. The reason he wrote it was because the population at Knin was extremely agitated by the prospective occupation and begged him to ascertain the latest news. He should have remembered, no doubt, that the Italians regarded this as enemy country and that to make inquiries with regard to the movement of troops was a crime. An officer came and asked him, in the General's name, if he would kindly take part in a conference; on reaching the place which was indicated he found himself surrounded by carabinieri. Their captain, a certain Albano, said that he and two or three others must go to Šibenik to undergo a short interrogatory, and that as he would return in two days at the latest it was unnecessary for him to take any money, clothes or linen. As a matter of fact the doctor had, on the previous day, been warned from Split that the Italians meant to intern him; but he laughed—he had done so much for them and he felt so innocent that it seemed absurd to run away. He could have gone, because he had a written permit issued to him on January 10 by the 144th Italian infantry regiment at Knin, which stated that he and his wife might go, whenever they wished, to Split.
SEVEN HUNDRED OTHERS
During the winter and spring over seven hundred persons, chiefly belonging to the clerical, the legal and the medical professions, had been deported from Dalmatia. The leader of the Italian party at Zadar told me that two of them had written him from Nocera Umbra, saying that this, their place of interment, was a health resort and that they were getting fat. He scouted the idea that they were under any sort of compulsion when they wrote or that they were pulling his leg. One must anyhow congratulate them in not being taken to Sardinia, as were the vast majority. Those who managed to return from that island—among them Dr. Macchiedo of Zadar, through the intervention of Bissolati, on account of Mrs. Macchiedo being at death's door—said that they found in Sardinia what they had expected of a penal establishment. Many priests were deported, on account of crimes which varied in enormity. A very frequent cause was that they refused to preach in Italian to a congregation which only understood Serbo-Croat. One must say that the Italians exhibited no religious partiality, for they treated the Roman Catholic Church just the same as the Orthodox. Some of the persecutions were so fatuous that one could only suppose they must be due to a misunderstanding. To mention only one which came under my observation at Skradin, not far from Šibenik, where the Orthodox priest in his sumptuous vestments had led his congregation out of the old town in order to perform an annual ceremony in connection with the fertility of the fields. In what way was the Italian cause assisted when carabinieri broke up that procession and refused even to allow the people to walk back on the road, so that all of them, including the priest and the other church officials with the sacred emblems, were forced to go back to Skradin as best they could by wading through the marshes?
A GLIMPSE OF THE OFFICIAL ROBBERIES
An allusion has been made to the Italian financial methods. More than one Italian officer, including Admiral Millo, spoke to me about the Austrian currency, which seemed to them one of the gravest problems. In Yugoslavia these notes were only legal tender if they had the Government stamp, and the Italians resolved that in the territories which they occupied the notes must have no stamp upon them. So far, so good. But when some poor peasant came across the line of demarcation from Croatia or else landed somewhere in a boat the Italians were not making good propaganda for themselves when they seized the notes, tore them up and refused to give their victim a receipt. One poor fellow whom I know of came with his mother along that wonderful road which the Austrians built over the mountains and down to Obrovac. He had some serious affection of the eyes and was compelled to go to Zadar to consult an oculist. He took with him practically all his fortune, as he and his mother did not know what otherwise to do with it. They had never yet made use of a bank. Well, the Italians tore up the notes and told him testily to go about his business. The same thing happened to the following persons:
These were the complaints over a period of a month, which were received by the Provincial (Yugoslav) Government at Split. One has to take their word for it that the list is not fictitious. I did not investigate any of the cases; the Italian officers to whom I showed the list said that they were persuaded I would find that in every case the person culpable was an officious, ignorant N.C.O. The list is, of course, no more than a fragment. At Starigrad, on the island of Hvar, I was told that from the people, who were searched both on landing and on leaving, 40,000 crowns had been confiscated, and at first they had been told that the money should be stamped. A merchant whom I happened to meet during the few hours I was at Metković told me that he had gone to the island of Korčula to his brother and, on landing, had been relieved of 34,000 crowns.