Meanwhile at intervals during this year there had been troubles in
Montenegro. On three occasions the Italians at Antivari had endeavoured
to extend their sphere of influence, but the armed civilian population
had been equal to these emergencies and had each time thrust them back
to the coast. At Gaeta, between Rome and Naples, a very well-paid corps
was stationed--almost every man was either a commissioned or a
non-commissioned officer. The Italian Government was asked by Signor
Lazari, the Socialist deputy, for what purpose it allocated 300,000 lire
a month to support these peculiar troops. They were mostly
Montenegrins--relatives of Nikita, members of the five favoured
families, persons who were stranded and so forth; likewise at Gaeta were
a number of other Yugoslavs who had been liberated from their Italian
internment camps, but many of them, when they discovered what was
expected of them, revolted. Thirty or forty of them managed to escape to
France, and others to Montenegro, as for example the man who for twelve
years had been Nikita's porter. He and three others reached Cetinje one
day in August 1920 when I was there. They had with them a picture-card
of the sixty-nine officers of the Gaeta army. Every one knows every one
else in Montenegro and only two of these officers had held a previous
commission. According to Nikita's Premier, Jovan Plamenac, the Italian
Government considered this as the Montenegrin army and regarded (rather
optimistically) as a loan the money it contributed to keep it up. In
driblets the non-revolting part of this Gaeta army was taken to the
eastern shores of the Adriatic, for the purpose of making "incidents" in
Montenegro. There was a regular scale--so much in cash for the murder of
a prefect, so much for a deputy. One day the father of Andrija
Radovi['c], a man of over seventy, was cut down; they waited until
everyone had left the village to go to some fete in a neighbouring
village, and the old man defended himself to the last.
These emissaries from Gaeta, misguided Montenegrins, other Southern
Slavs and Italians, made considerable use of the mischievous speeches
that were sometimes heard in the British Parliament. They would explain
to some poor, ignorant mountain-dweller that such great people in
England were still discussing Nikita's return, and if he did return and
they had listened to the voice of Radovi['c], woe be to them. Some of
these wretched dupes would follow their seducers, who--I have no
doubt--would not only have declined his decorations if they had been
better informed, but would have placed the matter in the hands of their
solicitor, as Gabriel Rossetti threatened to do if he were ever elected
to the Royal Academy. And yet, after the character of the scoundrel King
was fully exposed, his advocates, so far as I know, had not the grace to
own their error. Of course there was in Montenegro a certain amount of
uninstigated unrest; the wine of politics, which they were now for the
first time freely quaffing, had gone to their heads--it was youth
against age, the students were enthusiastic Democrats, the peasants were
sturdy Radicals and they did not always restrict themselves to
dialectical arguments. A certain number of people had gone to live "u
shumi"--"in the woods." But the reasons that impelled them were not so
much their devotion to the ex-King, as their own criminal past or their
poverty. Others again had taken to this life for what may be called
reasons of "honour."[42] Among the brigands was a man who was captured
on the borders of Herzegovina, and before his execution--he had murdered
seven people--he declared that he was a patriot and had done all this
for the sake of King Nicholas, his victims being members of the
domineering party. But when reminded that one of them was a baby, he
hung his head and said no more.... There was discontent produced by the
high cost of living--as the Italians not only held Antivari but even
fired on French boats that were taking supplies up the river Bojana, it
was necessary to revictual all except the new parts of Montenegro from
Kotor. The lack of petrol, from which even the American Red Cross units
were suffering, compelled the authorities to fall back on ox-waggons,
which at any rate are not expeditious. By the way, it was the staff of
another mission, calling itself the International Red Cross, which was
to blame for adding to the country's troubles; after they had been
installed for a month or two at Cetinje the people themselves, and not
the authorities, turned them out, on the ground that they had used the
Red Cross to conceal their machinations in Nikita's interest. The
Yugoslav Government was held up to reprobation in the British Parliament
and press for having hampered more than one British mission in the work
of relieving the Montenegrins. The resources of these missions appeared
to be moderate--the head of one of them had a meeting with Colonels
Fairclough and Anderson of the American Red Cross and suggested that
they should provide him with the wherewithal for carrying on. But even
if their resources had been scantier their co-operation would have been
very welcome if they had satisfied the authorities that they were as
non-political as the Americans. It was curious that those who in the
British press ventilated the grievances of these missions were the same
people who championed Nikita.
The Italians persevered in their manoeuvres--Nikola Kova[vc]evi['c],
the police commissary of Grahovo, sent in the month of May a
confidential man of his to the Italian General at Dobrota, near Kotor.
This man, who speaks perfect Italian, told the General that ever since
1916 he had haunted the forests as the leader of a band. Fifty persons,
he said, had attached themselves to him; and he had now come in for a
supply of arms and money, also for instructions. It would be impossible,
said he, to endure the Serbian troops much longer in the country.