During the winter and spring over seven hundred persons, chiefly
belonging to the clerical, the legal and the medical professions, had
been deported from Dalmatia. The leader of the Italian party at Zadar
told me that two of them had written him from Nocera Umbra, saying that
this, their place of interment, was a health resort and that they were
getting fat. He scouted the idea that they were under any sort of
compulsion when they wrote or that they were pulling his leg. One must
anyhow congratulate them in not being taken to Sardinia, as were the
vast majority. Those who managed to return from that island--among them
Dr. Macchiedo of Zadar, through the intervention of Bissolati, on
account of Mrs. Macchiedo being at death's door--said that they found in
Sardinia what they had expected of a penal establishment. Many priests
were deported, on account of crimes which varied in enormity. A very
frequent cause was that they refused to preach in Italian to a
congregation which only understood Serbo-Croat. One must say that the
Italians exhibited no religious partiality, for they treated the Roman
Catholic Church just the same as the Orthodox. Some of the persecutions
were so fatuous that one could only suppose they must be due to a
misunderstanding. To mention only one which came under my observation at
Skradin, not far from [vS]ibenik, where the Orthodox priest in his
sumptuous vestments had led his congregation out of the old town in
order to perform an annual ceremony in connection with the fertility of
the fields. In what way was the Italian cause assisted when carabinieri
broke up that procession and refused even to allow the people to walk
back on the road, so that all of them, including the priest and the
other church officials with the sacred emblems, were forced to go back
to Skradin as best they could by wading through the marshes?