Meanwhile the Serbs had, ever since the early days of 1916 when they
began arriving in Corfu, been hard at work upon their army. Thousands
landed at Corfu in such a state that only with continual care, with
warmth and nourishing food could they be rescued. But on the little
island of Vido where they were deposited the tents were few, the beds
were fewer, wood was lacking, so that fires could not be made, and
thousands died where they sank down, amid the olive groves and orange
trees. The doctors nursed as many as they could in that one empty
building; but for very long about a hundred corpses were each day
piled in a little boat and taken out to sea. Usually they had died of
pure exhaustion. Out of the 16,000 boys who had scrambled along with
the army as far as Durazzo, about 2000 died on the sea and another
7000 on the Isle of Vido.
At Corfu the Serbs, with the other Yugoslavs, had also to set about
securing the foundations of their State that was to be. The Russians,
at the time of the negotiations which ended in the Treaty of London,
had been looking forward to an Orthodox State, a Greater Serbia,
bounded by the river Narenta. This, if it had been carried out, would
have jettisoned, and probably for ever, the Croats and Slovenes. That
was the incredibly stupid old Russian policy of identifying Slav
patriotism with the Orthodox Church, a policy held up to ridicule by
Strossmayer. It was the Yugoslav Committee, working chiefly in London,
assisted by English friends, working there and at Corfu, which caused
the Serbs, the Croats and Slovenes to publish on July 20, 1917, the
historic Corfu Declaration, which laid it down that the nation of the
three names was resolved to free itself from every foreign yoke and to
become a constitutional, democratic and Parliamentary Monarchy under
the Karageorgevi['c] dynasty. It is said that those two excellent
friends of the Southern Slavs, the brilliant Mr. Wickham Steed and Dr.
Seton-Watson, than whom no publicist is more conscientious, had to
face a determined opposition on the part of M. Pa[vs]i['c] before it
was agreed that the Roman Catholic religion should in the prospective
State have equal rights with the Orthodox. One would be disposed to
criticize the Serbian Premier on account of a narrow policy dictated
by his excessive wish for self-preservation--he saw very well that
these clauses of equality might undermine the long reign of the
Radicals--but it must be acknowledged that if the Southern Slavs had
limited themselves to a Greater Serbia, in which the Radical party had
been supreme, they would not have wasted so much of their energy,
after the War, in domestic political conflict. They would also, very
probably, have gained more favourable terms from the Entente; and the
union with the Croats and Slovenes might have been effected later. But
against this is the opinion of those who argue that the separation
would have become permanent. However, if the union of the Southern
Slavs could not be postponed, we may believe that it would have been
wise to call the new country, for a couple of years, Greater Serbia.
No doubt the logical Italians would have pointed out to the rest of
the Entente that their bugbears, the Croats and the Slovenes, were
included in this State; but the Allies as a whole would have been more
inclined to be indulgent towards a country whose name they honoured
than towards the same country whose various new-fangled
designations--Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; or
Yugoslavia; or S.H.S.--they found so puzzling. The Transylvanians who,
one supposes, will play the chief role in Greater Roumania have as
yet, much to the profit of all the Roumanians, permitted the retention
of that name. This course was not adopted by the Southern Slavs, and
Pa[vs]i['c] giving way to Messrs. Steed and Seton-Watson, appointed M.
Yovanovi['c] to London with the object of working on the lines of the
Declaration of Corfu.