[57] A few months after this, in the course of a little controversy in the Saturday Review (which arose from an unsigned and, I hoped, rather reasonable article of mine on the Adriatic Settlement) I quoted from memory this passage of Mrs. Re-Bartlett's and said that the Italian captain was giving chocolates to the children at Kievo. Thereupon Mr. Harold W. E. Goad of the British-Italian League wrote a highly indignant letter to the editor, and in the course of it he denounced me for having egregiously invented the chocolates "for the sole purpose of throwing her testimony into ridicule.... What do you, Sir, think of such methods as that?" And he concluded by declaring that I wallowed in a "truly Balkan slough of distortion and calumny." Well, on referring to Mrs. Re-Bartlett's article I find that there is no mention of chocolates, and I apologize; presumably the children were crowding round their adored Capitano in order to thank him for the bridges and waterworks which were being built in Dalmatia.
[58] During the Italian occupation, said Professor Salvemini, teachers, doctors and priests were deported or expelled from the country, while the Italian Government had to dissolve 30 municipal councils out of 33, so that at the head of the communes were Italian officials and not properly elected mayors. Moreover, all liberties were suppressed. No Slav newspapers, no Slav societies were permitted, and 32 out of 57 magistrates were dismissed—these methods being due not to cruelty or folly, said the Professor, but to the necessity of keeping order by forcible means in a country which was wholly hostile.
[59] November 13, 1920.
[60] November 15, 1920.
[61] This, of course, did not meet with the approval of Signor d'Annunzio. He made numerous pronouncements with regard to his inflexible desires, saying that, if necessary, he would offer up his bleeding corpse. And his resistance to the Italian Government did not confine itself to rhetoric. During his usurpation of Rieka this man had done his country grievous harm. It was not only that he held her up to the smiles of the malicious who said that she could not keep order in her own house, but he was guiding the people back to barbarism. When sailors of the royal navy deserted to his standard, he knelt before them in the streets of Rieka at a time when from Russia Lenin was inciting the Italian Communists to revolution and to the conquest of the State. He refused to deal with Giolitti, even as he had rejected the advances of Nitti. But the aged Giolitti grasped the problem with more firmness, which was what one might expect from the statesman who, after his return to power, had leaned neither on the industrial magnates of Milan nor on their Bolševik antagonists. Giolitti was resolved to put an end to the nuisance of d'Annunzio; in no constitutional State is there room for a Prime Minister and such a swashbuckler. The Nationalists of Italy were furious when they perceived that the Premier was in earnest and that force would be employed against their idol. And it had to come to that, for the utterly misguided man continued to resist—hoping doubtless for wholesale desertions in the army and navy—with the deplorable result that a good many Italians were slain by Italians. Orders were issued by the Government that all possible care should be taken of d'Annunzio's person; and eventually when Rieka was taken by the royalist troops the poet broke his oath that he would surely die; he announced that Italy was not worth dying for and it was said that he had sailed away on an aeroplane. He had accomplished none of his desires; the town had not become Italian, though he had bathed it in Italian blood. His overweening personal ambitions had been shipwrecked on the rock of ridicule, for as he made his inglorious exit he shouted at the world that he was "still alive and inexorable." But yet he may have unconsciously achieved something, for his seizure of what he loved to call the "holocaust city" provided the extreme Nationalists with a private stage where—in uniforms of their own design, in cloaks and feathers and flowing black ties and with eccentric arrangements of the hair—they could strut and caper and fling bombastic insults at the authorities in Rome, until the Government found it opportune to take them in hand. The greatest Italian poet and one of the greatest imaginative writers in Europe will now be able to devote himself—if his rather morbid Muse has suffered no injury—to his predestined task. Those—the comparatively few that read—whose acquaintance with this writer's work usually caused them to regret his methods, could not help admiring his personal activities, his genius for leadership and his vital fire during the War. But, once this was over, he relapsed; and expressing himself very clearly in action, so that he became known to the many instead of the few, he lived what he previously wrote, and now it is generally recognized that Gabriel of the Annunciation, as he calls himself, who produced a row of obscene and histrionic novels, is a mountebank, a self-deceiver and a most affected bore. When he came to Rieka he thought fit to appeal to the England of Milton. And, like him, Milton lived as he wrote. Milton, Dante and Sophocles—to mention no others of the supreme writers—were as serious and responsible in their public actions as in the pursuit of their art.
[62] Whatever be the limitations of the Dom as a newspaper—it is almost exclusively occupied with the person and programme of Mr. Radić—yet that brings with it the virtue, most exceptional in Yugoslavia, of refusing to engage in polemics. This would otherwise take up a good deal of its space, as Radić has become such a bogey-man that nothing is too ridiculous for his opponents to believe. A Czech newspaper not long ago informed the world that this monstrous personage had told an interviewer that not only had Serbian soldiers in Macedonia been murdering 200 children but that they had roasted and consumed them. Furthermore Radić had said that the British Minister to Yugoslavia had called upon him and had asked his advice with some persistence, not even wishing to leave Radić time to reflect, as to whether the Prince-Regent should rule in Russia, while an English Prince should be invited to occupy the Yugoslav throne. The first of these remarks proved conclusively, said a number of Belgrade papers, that Radić was a knave and by the second he had demonstrated that he was an imbecile. And my friend Mr. Leiper of the Morning Post speculated as to whether he was more likely to end his days in a lunatic asylum or a prison. But Radić was caring about none of these things; his birthday happened at about this time and some 30,000 of his adherents came to do him honour at his birthplace, over 500 of them on decorated horses having met him at Sisak station the previous evening. When I asked him what he had to say about the two afore-mentioned remarks he gave me an amusing account of how the interviewer had appreciated the various samples of wine which he (Radić) had just brought down from his vineyard. The conversation lasted for about four hours, and in the course of it Radić mentioned that a certain Moslem deputy from Novi Bazar, irritated by the fact that Mr. Drašković, Minister of the Interior, found no pleasure in his continued presence on a commission of inquiry in the region of Kossovo, had been throwing out very dark hints about a child which he accused the Serbs of killing in the stormy days of 1878, and then relating to the Tsar that this dastardly deed had been committed by the Turks. This was the basis of that part of the interview. As for the other absurdity, it was mentioned that some courtiers had told the Prince-Regent that he alone could establish an orderly Government in Russia, whereupon Radić observed that England and France were not likely to allow one person to reign both there and in Yugoslavia. And when I asked why he had not published this explanation in his paper, he said that he couldn't very well charge a guest with having liked his wine too much.
[63] Cf. The Quarterly Review (October 1921), in which Messrs. Pavle Popović and Jovan M. Jovanović published a very able survey of Yugoslav conditions.
[64] Cf. Nineteenth Century and After, January 1921.
[65] April 26, 1921.
[66] Unhappily it became apparent that the Italians were not disposed to have the Treaty put in force