The months go by and Yugoslavia still survives. At the post-office of a
large village in Syrmia, not far from Djakovo, where Bishop Strossmayer
laboured during fifty-five years for the union of the Southern Slavs
which he was destined not to see, a bulky farmer told me that in his
opinion Yugoslavia, created in 1918, was now in 1920 "kaput." He deduced
this from the fact that a telegram used to travel much more
expeditiously in Austrian days; but he did not remember that the
Yugoslavs, in the Serbian and in the Austro-Hungarian armies, had
suffered enormous losses in the War, and that while French, Dutch and
Swiss doctors have been obtained by the Belgrade Government, one cannot
use telegraphists who are ignorant of the language. An excellent
province in which Yugoslavia's solidity can be studied is Bosnia. At the
outbreak of the War the Moslems and Croats were not imbued with the
Yugoslav idea; it seemed to them that the Serbs, one of whom had slain
the Archduke, were traitors to Southern Slavdom. During the War the
Croats and Moslems were taught by their Slav officers to be good
nationalists and were given frequent lessons in the art of going over to
the enemy. After the Armistice one did not see every Serb, Croat and
Moslem in Bosnia forthwith forgetting all the evil of the past. Among
the less enlightened certain private acts of vengeance had to be
performed; but these were not as numerous as one might have expected.
And very soon the population of Bosnia came to be interested far less in
the old religious differences--the two deputies Dr. D[vz]amonia and
Professor Stanojevi['c] smilingly remembered the day when, as
schoolboys at Sarajevo, they had been persuaded by the Austrians to pull
out each other's hair for the reason that one was a Croat and one was a
Serb--and now it was the engrossing subject of Agrarian Reform which
claimed the attention of Catholic, Orthodox and Moslem. This is not a
religious question, for while the landlords are mostly Muhammedan begs
about half the peasants are of the same religion; and the negotiations
have been marked by a notable absence of passion. Most of the begs
acknowledge that the old regime was unprofitable, for with the peasant
paying one-third to one-fifth of his production to the landlord the land
only yielded, as compared with the sandy districts of East Prussia, in
the proportion of five to twenty-two. Under the new order of things,
with the State in support of the "usurping" peasant--so that there are
said to be in Bosnia about a thousand peasants who are millionaires (in
crowns)--there is no longer any dispute with regard to the "kmet" land,
where the peasants with hereditary rights have become the owners; and
with regard to the "begluk," which the beg used to let to anyone he
pleased, it is only a question as to the degree of compensation. Thus,
it is not among the landowners and the peasants that one must look in
searching for an anti-national party. Bosnia contains various iron works
and coal mines, where profession is made of Communism. But when the
Prince-Regent was about to come to pay his first official visit in 1920
to Sarajevo the Governor received a communication from the Communists of
Zenica, which is on the railway line. They asked for permission to
salute "our Prince" as he came past; and a deputation of these
Communists, who are very like their colleagues in other parts of
Yugoslavia, duly appeared and took part in a ceremony at the station.