Nevertheless he dreamed that from the mighty castle which looks down
on Prizren he would rule the Southern Slavs; his eyes were ever turned
towards the famous legendary land of Old Serbia. One essential was
that he should be a king, and in 1910 with the consent of the Powers
he assumed this title. The spider-webs of which he was so fond began
to join Cetinje and Sofia, Cetinje and the mountains of Albania, while
the master-weaver mitigated in his usual fashion the monotony of life
in his poor capital. The Petrovi['c] have such a way with them
that--if you do not happen to be one of their subjects--you are in
danger of being disarmed. Thus when they were basking in the goodwill
of Austria and when Nikita himself, in the spring of 1911, had been
splendidly received at Vienna, so that on his return to Cetinje he was
welcomed by the whole diplomatic body, save for the Russian Minister,
Count Giers, and General Potapoff, the Russian military attache, who
were exhibiting their Government's disapproval, this appeared to
Nikita a favourable moment for--as the Persians would say--blackening
the face of the Austrian representative.
It was said by many of his discontented subjects that the King of
Montenegro's great solicitude for his own personal affairs caused him
frequently to be quite dull in recognizing other people's merit. But
that day when he received the Austrian Minister he was so very much
delighted with him that he there and then gave him promotion from the
second to the first class of the Order of Danilo. He had some months
before conferred upon this gentleman the second class, with diamonds
of paste, and when the Austrian now told the King of his appreciation
of the honour being so profound that he had ventured to replace the
other diamonds with real ones--"I am enchanted," said the King, "to
see that we have such a real friend in you, and I propose to grant
you," said the King, as he produced another star composed of imitation
diamonds, "to grant you this, the most exalted class. Your Excellency
has deserved right well of our beloved Montenegro. Give me back now
that inferior decoration, and to-morrow, with due ceremony at eleven
o'clock to-morrow," said the King with his paternal smile, "we will
bestow on you what you deserve so richly, and it gives me every
satisfaction, I assure you," said His Majesty.
The Malissori of Albania were also listening to the old man's
blandishments. If they would revolt against the Turks--they were
exasperated at the time against the Young Turk rule--then their
families would be sheltered in Montenegro and their land, after it had
been liberated, would be given independence. With the potent help of
Ferdinand of Bulgaria the Turk was to be overthrown. But nothing came
of all these plans; the Malissori were abandoned to the mercy of
Constantinople.
However, in 1912 that which had been thought impossible was brought
about: Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro were allied against the
Turk. "Onamo, onamo!..."
"Yonder, yonder!--Let me see Prizren,
For it is mine--I shall come to my home...."
but Nikita, who had written these famous words and who had taught them
to his people for a generation, had no cavalry--in the Montenegrin
mountains they would have been of no avail--and thus, while his
warriors were still some hours from Prizren, they had the
mortification of hearing that the Serbs had entered it. With
passionate desire they turned to Scutari. Nikita told them of the old
Slav princes who were buried there--and to the simple-minded
Montenegrins that seemed a good enough reason why 20,000 of them, the
flower of the army, should lay down their own lives on the dreary
hills that barred them from the town. It was hardly necessary for
Nikita to allude to the wealth that would be theirs if they could gain
possession of this outlet to the Adriatic. There in the plain at the
end of the lake was the glittering white town, and if they could have
seen themselves as clearly and their own inadequate resources, they
would have refrained from the attempt. The minarets of Scutari, raised
like so many warning fingers, failed to warn them. Their equipment was
such that munitions and other supplies were frequently carried up to
the lines by women--on the Bardonjolt no less than eighty of these
were killed and wounded in one day. When the Serbs in October pushed
through Albania to the Adriatic they offered to assist in the taking
of Scutari, but Nikita shook his head. And it was not until some time
after this that he accepted the co-operation of three batteries of
Krupp guns, which had been meanwhile taken from the Turks at Kumanovo.
But the Montenegrin army was not only handicapped by its lack of
resources; the Crown Prince, who commanded a division, actually
instigated a revolt among his own men. He had promised the Austrian
Minister, Baron Giesl von Gieslingen, that the Montenegrin army would
not enter Scutari, and the Government could only put a stop to
Danilo's intrigues by invoking the aid of General Potapoff. The Turks
were not wasting their time; they employed Austrian engineers to
strengthen the fortifications, and thus the task had become far more
difficult when finally the Montenegrin Court party availed itself of
Serbian reinforcements. In more ways than one they were badly needed
by the brave but ill-disciplined soldiers. "It is wonderful," they
said to Major Temperley,[70] "their troops do not fire until an
officer gives the word." Primitive men and a venal commander--according
to Dr. Sekula Drljevi[vc], who was Minister of Finance and Justice,
Prince Danilo is alleged to have remembered, just before his country's
entrance into the War, that money could be made on the Vienna Bourse
by judicious selling and, after the declaration of war, by purchasing.
The professional financier who on this occasion, thanks to his
knowledge of the Montenegrin royal plans, is alleged to have realized,
with his friends, the sum of 140 million francs, was no less a person
than Baron Rosenberg, whose subsequent operations in Paris at the
beginning of the Great War and in Switzerland during the War received
the close attention of the French authorities.[71] These financial
methods of Danilo's did less material harm, at any rate to his own
people than the system he employed as a motorist; it was necessary
that he should obtain the latest models, and it suited him that the
Government, not haggling over the price, should take over his
discarded vehicles. Similar hostages to gossip were given by Mirko,
his younger brother; one remembers the smiles of the diplomatic corps
at Cetinje when this young man dispatched, at the cost of the
Government, a telegram of about 500 words to Austria, concerning a
horse which he wanted to buy. Mirko, who died during the Great War in
an Austrian sanatorium, was not one of those rugged and valiant
Montenegrin mountaineers whom Gladstone and Tennyson celebrated; once
when his father ordered him to come back from Paris, where he was
copiously spending his country's substance on an actress with whom he
had decamped, leaving his wife and several young children at Naples,
he dutifully returned and settled down in his palace, a large,
comfortable house outside Podgorica. Since it was less amusing than in
Paris he remained in bed for most of the twenty-four hours; he would
often spend an hour before dinner in superintending the removal of
pictures from one wall to another, and having dined he would immerse
himself in State affairs, which took the form of speculating as to
when he and his heirs--Danilo being childless--would be called to rule
over the great Serbian kingdom of Serbia combined with Montenegro. As
to the fate of the Karageorgevi['c] dynasty, this was wont to vary
from night to night, in proportion to the amount of wine that Mirko
had drunk.
These events occurred in 1913, and in the same year the Montenegrins
entered Scutari. It was not brought about by force of arms, but by
some arrangement with Essad Pasha, the illiterate and clever Albanian
who succeeded to the command of the town after Hussein Riza Bey, the
Turkish leader, had been assassinated on the threshold of Essad's
house, where he had been dining, by a couple of the Pasha's men,
disguised as women. Scutari was not to stay for long in Montenegrin
hands; an International Force arrived, under Admiral Sir Cecil Burney,
and took it over. One need scarcely add that the national sentiment of
the Albanians moved the Powers at this juncture as little as it moved
the Albanians.