Admiral Cagni was invited by the Yugoslavs to enter the harbour of Pola. But for two and a half days he hesitated outside and heavily bombarded the hill-fortress of Barbarica, which had been abandoned. At last he made up his mind to risk a landing. The Italian girls of Pola, dressed in white, came down in a procession to the port; their arms were full of flowers for the Italian sailors. And the first men who disembarked were buried in flowers and kissed and kissed before the girls perceived that, by a prudent Italian arrangement, this advance guard consisted of men of the Czecho-Slovak Legion. The first care of the Italians at Pola was not to ascertain the whereabouts of the munition depots; they made for the naval museum, where trophies from the battle of Vis in 1866 were preserved. These they removed, as well as whatever took their fancy at the Arsenal. Among their booty was a silver dinner service which it had been customary to use on occasions of Imperial visits. An Italian officer appeared on the Radetzky. Very roughly he asked an officer who he was. "I am the commander," said this first-lieutenant. "No! no!" said the other, "I am that." But the Italians for the most part avoided going on board the ships.... Admiral Cagni himself was very ill at ease, but grew noticeably more confident as he observed the utter demoralization of Pola. His correspondence likewise underwent the appropriate changes. While Koch was in command of 45,000 men, Cagni wrote to "His Excellency the most illustrious Signor Ammiraglio"; when the numbers were reduced to 20,000 the style of address was "Illustrious Signor Ammiraglio"; when they fell to 10,000 it became "Al Signor Ammiraglio"; when only 5000 remained a letter began with the word "Ammiraglio!" and when the last man had left Pola and Koch was alone, Cagni sent word through his adjutant that he knew no Admiral Koch but merely a Signor Koch.

THE SEA-FARING YUGOSLAVS

Talking of numbers, one may mention that the Yugoslavs formed about 65 per cent. of the Austro-Hungarian navy, as one would naturally expect from the sea-faring population of Dalmatia and Istria. In the technical branches of the service only about 40 per cent. were Yugoslavs, for a preference was given to Germans and Magyars. Out of 116 chief engineers only two were Yugoslavs. Serbo-Croat was an obligatory language; but German, as in the army, was the language of command. Thus one sees that, in spite of not being favoured, the Yugoslavs of the Adriatic, who are natural sailors, constituted more than half the personnel of the navy. "These Slav people," writes Mr. Hilaire Belloc,[6] who took the trouble to go to the Adriatic with a view to solving the local problems, "these Slav people have only tentatively approached the sea. Its traffic was never native to them." If he had continued a little way down the coast he would have seen many and many a neat little house whose owners are retired sea-captains. "They are not mariners," says Mr. Belloc. If he had made a small excursion into history he would have learned that Venice—since it was to her own advantage—made an exception of Dalmatia's shipping industry, and while she was placing obstacles along the roads that a Dalmatian might wish to take, allowed the time-honoured industries of the sea to be developed. Such fine sailors were the Dalmatians that Benedetto Pesaro, the Venetian Admiral against the Turks in the fifteenth century, deplored the fact that his galleys were not fully manned by them, instead of those "Lombardi" whom he despised. "They are," says Mr. John Leyland,[7] the naval authority—they are "pre-eminently a maritime race. The circumstances of their geography, and in a chief degree the wonderful configuration of their coast-line, with its sheltered waters and admirable anchorages, made them sea-farers.... The proud Venetians knew them as pirates and marauders long ago." And "there has never been a better seaman," adds Mr. Leyland, "than the pirate turned trader." In 1780 the island of Brač had forty vessels, Lussin a hundred, and Kotor, which in the second half of the eighteenth century quadrupled her mercantile marine, had a much larger fleet than either of them. The best-known dockyards were those at Korčula and Trogir, while the great Overseas Sailing Ship Navigation Company at Peljesac (Sabioncello) occupied an important position in the world of trade. The company's fleet of large sailing vessels was of native construction; both crews and captains were natives of the country, so that it was in every way the best representative of the Dalmatian mercantile marine of the period. When the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 gave Venice, Istria and the Eastern Adriatic to the Habsburgs the vessels plying in those waters were very largely Slav. And with the substitution of steam the Dalmatians are still holding their own, with this difference, that the ships are now built, even as they are manned, not by nobles and the wealthy bourgeoisie, but by men who come from modest sea-faring or peasant families. In the Austrian mercantile marine German capital formed 47·82 per cent., Italian capital 19·37 per cent. and Slav capital 31·80 per cent. One of these Dalmatian Slavs, Mihanović, going out in poverty to the Argentine, has followed with such success the shipbuilding of his ancestors that he is now among the chief millionaires of Buenos Aires. With regard to fishing, there are along the Istrian and Dalmatian coast more than 5000 small vessels which give employment to 19,000 fishermen, of whom only 1000 are citizens of Italy. But Mr. Belloc says that these Slav people have only tentatively approached the sea, that its traffic was never native to them, and that they are not mariners. It is marvellous that you can be paid for writing that sort of stuff.... By Mr. Belloc's side is the Marchese Donghi, who in the Fortnightly Review of June 1922 says: "It is superfluous to add that everything which has to do with navigation [in Dalmatia] is entirely in the hands of the Italians." But I think it is superfluous to contradict a gentleman who ingenuously believes that Dalmatia is largely Italian because on our maps we have hitherto used Italian place-names. Will he say that the population of Praha is not Czech because on our maps that capital is commonly called Prague? It pleases the Marchese to be facetious about what he describes as "that queer thing called the Srba Hrvata i Slovenca Kralji (Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes)"; he should have said "Kraljevina Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca." He says that in Serbia "no industry is possible," whereas in one single town, Lescovac, there are no less than eleven textile besides other factories. He says that one-third of the population of Dalmatia is Italian, and "almost exclusively the nobility and the upper bourgeoisie." I suppose that is why more than 700 of Dalmatia's leading citizens were deported by the Italians after the Great War. He says many other nonsensical things, and sums it all up by telling us of the "bewildered incomprehension" of the Adriatic problem!

WHO SET A STANDARD THAT WAS TOO HIGH

Whether rightly or wrongly, the Yugoslavs had formed their opinion of the Italian sailors, an opinion which dated from the time of Tegetthoff and had not undergone much modification by the incidents of this War. They remembered what had happened when they cruised outside Italian ports; they knew very probably that the British had on more than one occasion to break through the boom outside Taranto harbour, and they may have read[8] of the experience of some French ladies who came to the Albanian coast on the Città di Bari towards the end of 1915 with 2000 kilos of milk, clothing and medical supplies for the Serbian children who had struggled across the mountains. These ladies write that after the torpedoing of the Brindisi their own crew ran up and down without appearing to see them; the crew had life-belts, those of the ladies were taken away. Ultimately they succeeded in having themselves put ashore, and the Città di Bari fled in the night without landing the stores. And in Albania, the ladies say, one witnessed the "stoic endurance of the noble Serbian race, of which every day brought us more examples. In that procession of ghosts and of the dying there was no imploring look, there was no hand stretched out to beg." ... The Yugoslavs may have known what happened to Lieutenant (now Captain) Binnos de Pombara of the French navy. This officer, in command of the Fourche, had been escorting the Città di Messina and, observing that she was torpedoed, had sent to her, perhaps a little imprudently, all his life-boats and belts. A few minutes later, when he was himself torpedoed, the Italians did not see him; anyhow they made for the shore. De Pombara encouraged his men by causing them to sing the Marseillaise and so forth; they were in the water, clinging to the wreckage, for several hours, until another boat came past. The next day at Brindisi, when he met the captain of the Città di Messina, this gentleman once more did not see him; but the French Government, although de Pombara was a very young man, created him an officer of the Legion of Honour.

AN ELECTRICAL ATMOSPHERE AND NO PRECAUTIONS

There was thus a certain amount of tension existing between the military and naval services of the Yugoslavs and those of Italy. Other Yugoslavs were apprehensive as to whether the Italians would not demand the enforcement of the Treaty of London. But the United States was not bound by that agreement, which was so completely at variance with Wilson's principle of self-determination. One presumed that, pending an examination of these matters, the disputed territories would be occupied by troops of all the Allies. But unfortunately this did not turn out to be the case. France, Britain and America stood by, while the Italians and the Yugoslavs took whatsoever they could lay their hands on. As the Yugoslav military forces had to come overland, while the Italians had command of the sea, it was natural that in most places the Italians got the better of the scramble; and where they found the Yugoslavs in possession, as at Rieka, they usually ousted them by diplomatic methods. And in one way or another they managed to make their holdings tally, as far as possible, with the Treaty of London, and even to go beyond it. Baron Sonnino declined to make a comprehensive statement as to the Italian programme. Of course he desired in the end to exchange Dalmatia—the seizure of which would entail a war with Yugoslavia—against Rieka. But as Italian public opinion had scarcely thought of Rieka during the War, he made it his business to cause them to yearn for that town. His compatriots were asking why Mr. Wilson's Fourteen Points should be waived for France in the Sarre Basin, for Britain in Ireland and Egypt, but not for them. And some of his would-be ingenious compatriots pointed out—their contentions were embodied in the Italian Memorandum to the Supreme Council on January 10, 1920—that as the Treaty of London was based on the presumption that Montenegro, Serbia and Croatia would remain separate States, this instrument had been altogether upset by the merging of those Southern Slavs into one country, Yugoslavia; it followed, therefore, that the Treaty which attributed Rieka to the Croats could no longer be invoked. But the other parts of the Treaty which gave the Slav mainland and islands to Italy were absolutely unassailable. The reader will resent being troubled by this kind of balderdash, but Messrs. Clemenceau, Lloyd-George and Wilson may have resented it even more.

ITALIAN MILDNESS ON THE ISLE OF VIS

On November 3 the Italians arrived outside Vis (Lissa), the most westerly of the large islands, where the entire population of 11,000 is Slav, except for the family of an honoured inhabitant, Dr. Doimi, and three other families related to his. Dr. Doimi's people have lived for many years on this island—his father was mayor of the capital, which is also called Vis, for half a century—and now they have become so acclimatized that, as he told me, three of his four nephews prefer to call themselves Yugoslavs. This phenomenon can be seen all down the Adriatic coast. It has often, for example, been pointed out to Dr. Vio, the very Italian ex-mayor of Rieka, that he has a Croat father and several Croat brothers. Thus also the Duimić family of the same town has one brother married to a Magyar lady and very fond of the Magyars, a second brother who is a Professor at Milan, and a third who lives above Rieka and is a Yugoslav. The terms "Yugoslav" and "Italian" have now come to signify not what a man is, but what he wants to be, applying thus the admirable principle of self-determination. Well, in the old days on the isle of Vis between two and three hundred people belonged to the Autonomist party, owing to their great regard for Dr. Doimi; but these say now that they are Yugoslavs, and the Italians—at all events Captain Sportiello, their chief officer at Vis—acknowledged that they must base their demand on strategic reasons. A day or two before the Italians arrived the population had arrested several Austrian functionaries, including the mayor and three gendarmes, who had maltreated them during the War. None of these persons were Italian; and when the Italian boats were sighted a committee went to meet them joyfully and brought the officers ashore upon their backs. The officers explained that they had come as representatives of the Entente and the United States, and for the object—which appeared superfluous—of protecting Vis from German submarines. If the Italians had been everywhere as inoffensive as at Vis, it would be more agreeable to write about their doings. Captain Sportiello, a naval officer, showed himself throughout the months of his administration to be sensible; he frequented Yugoslav houses. The greatest divergence occurred on June 1, 1919, when the Italians planned to have a demonstration for their national holiday, and asked the inhabitants to come to the bioscope, where they would be regaled with cakes and sweets; the inhabitants replied that they preferred to have Yugoslavia.... But there is a monument in the cemetery at Vis to which I must refer. It is a very fine monument of white marble, erected by the Austrians to commemorate their victory in these waters over the Italian navy in 1866.[9] On the top there is a lion clutching the Italian flag, while on two of the sides there are inscriptions in the German language. One of them, some feet in length, relates that this memorial is placed there for the officers and men who on July 20, 1866, gave their lives in the service of their Emperor and country. The Italians screwed two marble slabs across the upper and the lower parts of this inscription, so that the German lettering of the central part remained visible; on the lower slab one read: "Novembre 1918" and on the upper one "Italia Vincitrice" (Victorious Italy). We were taken by several Italian officers to look at this. They were so proud of it that they presented us with photographs of the monument in its altered state. I fear that the Italian mentality escapes me. I should not have written anything about them.

THEIR TRUCULENCE AT KORČULA