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 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, 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.