I have already sufficiently described the territorial gains of
Roumania, Servia, and Greece. But I must not pass over Montenegro in
silence. As the invincible warriors of King Nicholas opened the war
against the Ottoman Empire, so they joined Servia and Greece in the
struggle {117} against Bulgaria. On Sunday, June 29, I saw encamped
across the street from my hotel in Uskub 15,000 of these Montenegrin
soldiers who had arrived only a day or two before by train from
Mitrowitza, into which they had marched across Novi Bazar. Tall,
lithe, daring, with countenances bespeaking clean lives, they looked as
fine a body of men as one could find anywhere in the world, and their
commanding figures and manly bearing were set off to great advantage by
their striking and picturesque uniforms. The officers told me next day
that in a few hours they would be fighting at Ghevgheli. Their
splendid appearance seemed an augury of victory for the Serbs.
Montenegro too received her reward by an extension of territory on the
south to the frontier of Albania (as fixed by the Great Powers) and a
still more liberal extension on the east in the sandjak of Novi Bazar.
This patriarchal kingdom will probably remain unchanged so long as the
present King lives, {118} the much-beloved King Nicholas, a genuinely
Homeric Father of his People. But forces of an economic, social, and
political character are already at work tending to draw it into closer
union with Servia, and the Balkan wars have given a great impetus to
these forces. A united Serb state, with an Adriatic littoral which
would include the harbors of Antivari and Dulcigno, may be the future
which destiny has in store for the sister kingdoms of Servia and
Montenegro. If so, it is likely to be a mutually voluntary union; and
neither Austria-Hungary nor Italy, the warders of the Adriatic, would
seem to have any good ground to object to such a purely domestic
arrangement.