[Footnote 46: April 16, 1920.]
[Footnote 47: January 22, 1920.]
[Footnote 48: According to the Rome correspondent of the _Petit
Journal_.]
[Footnote 49: But the wind was considerably tempered for him:
vessels laden with his precise requirements sailed over from
Italy and said they had been captured by d'Annunzio's arditi.
General Badoglio, in command of the royal troops outside the
town, ascertained in November 1919 that Rieka's coal-supply was
nearly exhausted and 7000 tons per month were required for the
public services alone. He accordingly informed a syndicate of
coal merchants in Triest that he would be personally
responsible for the first consignment of coal to d'Annunzio. A
month earlier, when the town was supposed to be blockaded, it
was announced that a limited supply of food-stuffs would,
nevertheless, be introduced, through the Red Cross, for very
young children. This amounted, as a matter of fact, to 21
truckloads a week. It is significant that there was no rise in
the prices charged in the public restaurants of Rieka, and that
persons living outside the line of Armistice found it cheaper
to do their shopping in the besieged city.]
[Footnote 50: February 20, 1920.]
[Footnote 51: September 1921.]
[Footnote 52: However, in the Yugoslav Parliament, although
some of the deputies have spent their lives in far-off,
primitive places--by no means all of those who represent the
Albanians can read and write--one does not hear such deplorable
language as that which, according to the _Grazer Volksblatt_ of
January 19, 1922, disgraced the Austrian Assembly. A certain
Dr. Waneck, of the Pan-German party, wished to criticize the
Minister of Finance, Professor Dr. Guertler of the Christian
Socialists. He remarked that one could not expect this Minister
to be sober at four o'clock in the afternoon, and went on to
say that no less than five banks, whose names he would give,
had received early information from the Minister, which enabled
them to speculate successfully. He repeated this accusation
several times and with great violence, but when he was invited
to reveal the names of these banks--"No, sir!" he cried. "I
will not do so, because I don't want to."]
[Footnote 53: Cf. "The Tri-Une Kingdom," by Pavle Popovi['c]
and Jovan M. Jovanovi['c], in the _Quarterly Review_, October
1921.]
[Footnote 54: He was kept for some time in confinement at
Mitrovica, in Syrmia, and in November 1920 he was liberated in
consequence of the great amnesty.]
[Footnote 55: Cf. _Spectator_, July 17, 1920.]
[Footnote 56: Cf. _Edinburgh Review_, July 1920.]
[Footnote 57: A few months after this, in the course of a
little controversy in the _Saturday Review_ (which arose from
an unsigned and, I hoped, rather reasonable article of mine on
the Adriatic Settlement) I quoted from memory this passage of
Mrs. Re-Bartlett's and said that the Italian captain was giving
chocolates to the children at Kievo. Thereupon Mr. Harold W. E.
Goad of the British-Italian League wrote a highly indignant
letter to the editor, and in the course of it he denounced me
for having egregiously invented the chocolates "for the sole
purpose of throwing her testimony into ridicule.... What do
you, Sir, think of such methods as that?" And he concluded by
declaring that I wallowed in a "truly Balkan slough of
distortion and calumny." Well, on referring to Mrs.
Re-Bartlett's article I find that there is no mention of
chocolates, and I apologize; presumably the children were
crowding round their adored _Capitano_ in order to thank him
for the bridges and waterworks which were being built in
Dalmatia.]
[Footnote 58: During the Italian occupation, said Professor
Salvemini, teachers, doctors and priests were deported or
expelled from the country, while the Italian Government had to
dissolve 30 municipal councils out of 33, so that at the head
of the communes were Italian officials and not properly elected
mayors. Moreover, all liberties were suppressed. No Slav
newspapers, no Slav societies were permitted, and 32 out of 57
magistrates were dismissed--these methods being due not to
cruelty or folly, said the Professor, but to the necessity of
keeping order by forcible means in a country which was wholly
hostile.]
[Footnote 59: November 13, 1920.]
[Footnote 60: November 15, 1920.]
[Footnote 61: This, of course, did not meet with the approval
of Signor d'Annunzio. He made numerous pronouncements with
regard to his inflexible desires, saying that, if necessary, he
would offer up his bleeding corpse. And his resistance to the
Italian Government did not confine itself to rhetoric. During
his usurpation of Rieka this man had done his country grievous
harm. It was not only that he held her up to the smiles of the
malicious who said that she could not keep order in her own
house, but he was guiding the people back to barbarism. When
sailors of the royal navy deserted to his standard, he knelt
before them in the streets of Rieka at a time when from Russia
Lenin was inciting the Italian Communists to revolution and to
the conquest of the State. He refused to deal with Giolitti,
even as he had rejected the advances of Nitti. But the aged
Giolitti grasped the problem with more firmness, which was what
one might expect from the statesman who, after his return to
power, had leaned neither on the industrial magnates of Milan
nor on their Bol[vs]evik antagonists. Giolitti was resolved to
put an end to the nuisance of d'Annunzio; in no constitutional
State is there room for a Prime Minister and such a
swashbuckler. The Nationalists of Italy were furious when they
perceived that the Premier was in earnest and that force would
be employed against their idol. And it had to come to that, for
the utterly misguided man continued to resist--hoping doubtless
for wholesale desertions in the army and navy--with the
deplorable result that a good many Italians were slain by
Italians. Orders were issued by the Government that all
possible care should be taken of d'Annunzio's person; and
eventually when Rieka was taken by the royalist troops the poet
broke his oath that he would surely die; he announced that
Italy was not worth dying for and it was said that he had
sailed away on an aeroplane. He had accomplished none of his
desires; the town had not become Italian, though he had bathed
it in Italian blood. His overweening personal ambitions had
been shipwrecked on the rock of ridicule, for as he made his
inglorious exit he shouted at the world that he was "still
alive and inexorable." But yet he may have unconsciously
achieved something, for his seizure of what he loved to call
the "holocaust city" provided the extreme Nationalists with a
private stage where--in uniforms of their own design, in cloaks
and feathers and flowing black ties and with eccentric
arrangements of the hair--they could strut and caper and fling
bombastic insults at the authorities in Rome, until the
Government found it opportune to take them in hand. The
greatest Italian poet and one of the greatest imaginative
writers in Europe will now be able to devote himself--if his
rather morbid Muse has suffered no injury--to his predestined
task. Those--the comparatively few that read--whose
acquaintance with this writer's work usually caused them to
regret his methods, could not help admiring his personal
activities, his genius for leadership and his vital fire during
the War. But, once this was over, he relapsed; and expressing
himself very clearly in action, so that he became known to the
many instead of the few, he lived what he previously wrote, and
now it is generally recognized that Gabriel of the
Annunciation, as he calls himself, who produced a row of
obscene and histrionic novels, is a mountebank, a self-deceiver
and a most affected bore. When he came to Rieka he thought fit
to appeal to the England of Milton. And, like him, Milton lived
as he wrote. Milton, Dante and Sophocles--to mention no others
of the supreme writers--were as serious and responsible in
their public actions as in the pursuit of their art.]
[Footnote 62: Whatever be the limitations of the _Dom_ as a
newspaper--it is almost exclusively occupied with the person
and programme of Mr. Radi['c]--yet that brings with it the
virtue, most exceptional in Yugoslavia, of refusing to engage
in polemics. This would otherwise take up a good deal of its
space, as Radi['c] has become such a bogey-man that nothing is
too ridiculous for his opponents to believe. A Czech newspaper
not long ago informed the world that this monstrous personage
had told an interviewer that not only had Serbian soldiers in
Macedonia been murdering 200 children but that they had roasted
and consumed them. Furthermore Radi['c] had said that the
British Minister to Yugoslavia had called upon him and had
asked his advice with some persistence, not even wishing to
leave Radi['c] time to reflect, as to whether the Prince-Regent
should rule in Russia, while an English Prince should be
invited to occupy the Yugoslav throne. The first of these
remarks proved conclusively, said a number of Belgrade papers,
that Radi['c] was a knave and by the second he had demonstrated
that he was an imbecile. And my friend Mr. Leiper of the
_Morning Post_ speculated as to whether he was more likely to
end his days in a lunatic asylum or a prison. But Radi['c] was
caring about none of these things; his birthday happened at
about this time and some 30,000 of his adherents came to do him
honour at his birthplace, over 500 of them on decorated horses
having met him at Sisak station the previous evening. When I
asked him what he had to say about the two afore-mentioned
remarks he gave me an amusing account of how the interviewer
had appreciated the various samples of wine which he (Radi['c])
had just brought down from his vineyard. The conversation
lasted for about four hours, and in the course of it Radi['c]
mentioned that a certain Moslem deputy from Novi Bazar,
irritated by the fact that Mr. Dra[vs]kovi['c], Minister of the
Interior, found no pleasure in his continued presence on a
commission of inquiry in the region of Kossovo, had been
throwing out very dark hints about a child which he accused the
Serbs of killing in the stormy days of 1878, and then relating
to the Tsar that this dastardly deed had been committed by the
Turks. This was the basis of that part of the interview. As for
the other absurdity, it was mentioned that some courtiers had
told the Prince-Regent that he alone could establish an orderly
Government in Russia, whereupon Radi['c] observed that England
and France were not likely to allow one person to reign both
there and in Yugoslavia. And when I asked why he had not
published this explanation in his paper, he said that he
couldn't very well charge a guest with having liked his wine
too much.]
[Footnote 63: Cf. _The Quarterly Review_ (October 1921), in
which Messrs. Pavle Popovi['c] and Jovan M. Jovanovi['c]
published a very able survey of Yugoslav conditions.]
[Footnote 64: Cf. _Nineteenth Century and After_, January
1921.]
[Footnote 65: April 26, 1921.]
[Footnote 66: Unhappily it became apparent that the Italians
were not disposed to have the Treaty put in force]
[Footnote 67: March 23, 1922.]
[Footnote 68: Cf. an article in a fascisti newspaper, quoted by
the _Zagreber Tagblatt_ of May 14, 1922.]
[Footnote 69: Cf. "The Rise of the Little Entente," by Dorothy
Thompson. April 1, 1922.]
[Footnote 70: _Fortnightly Review_, May 1922.]
[Footnote 71: The magnates of Hungary and their friends do not
grow weary of lamenting the sad fate of the Magyar minorities.
Whatever may be happening in Transylvania, they have a very
poor case against the Serbs. In the Voivodina there are,
according to Hungarian statistics, about 382,000 Magyars out of
1.4 million inhabitants. These Magyars have their primary and
secondary schools, their newspapers and so forth, whereas in
the spring of 1922 the schools in various Serbian villages near
Budapest were forcibly closed, the lady teachers being told
that if they stayed they would have to undergo the physical
examination which is applied to prostitutes.]