CHAPTER II

DEMOCRATIC SOCIETIES
ee elt movements, often represented as the spontaneous expression of popular desires, have usually proved to be the instruments of hidden hands, still difficult if not impossible to discern. Their apologists defend them by their ultimate results, as a disease might be lauded for the convalescence which ensues when a fever has abated, or a seismic catastrophe for the subsequent reconstruction. M. Paul Bourget, a shrewd student of history as well as a bril- liant contriver of tales, has elaborated his point of view. “ It happens after a convulsion,” he says, “ that social nature in its struggle to live, makes a reconstructive effort, specially directed against the work of destruction which the revolu- tionists accomplished. In the same way that an architect, _ employed to rebuild a ruined house, is obliged to use the old stones at hand for his new edifice, so natura medicatrix, healing nature, restores a country by utilising some of the elements which the devastators have spared. Thus Buona- parte, then the Restoration, in their work of reconstruction, made use of what property the frightful catastrophe had failed to destroy. They recognised the purchase of national lands as a lawful act and thereby re-established order. Are we to attribute order to this transfer of private estates? Are we also to explain the consolidation of national unity by the abolition of ancient provinces and the creation of departments ? Are we to consider the easier rise of talent to high places as a consequence of the assault upon heredi- tary privileges ? In reality, by acquiescing in the criminal misappropriations voted by the revolutionaries, the healers of the body politic only limited the spread of an evil whose consequences are still endured to-day. The sacred principle of property has lost its strength, retaining only what has come down from our forefathers of old France and old Rome. Similarly, our unity is only the result of the long labours of our Kings, and as to the facilities for the rise of talent, which
47
48 ‘ SECRET SOCIETIES
apologists of 1789 acclaim as a victory of that period, talent rose under the old régime—Colbert affords a case in point— assisted by conditions which time would have rendered more and more easy. Time! There indeed is the real, living force which elaborates all beneficient changes. Revolu- tions, pretending to dispense with it, have never accelerated a single one of those changes. They have retarded many of them, as we may observe to-day in respect of the charter of labour, which the violent suppression of corporations delayed for more than a century.”
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 49
(1) France
Secret societies after Waterloo—The United Patriots—The Friends of Truth—The New Reform of France—Friends of the People—Union of the Rights of Man, a military organisation—Society of Families—Society of the Seasons—The Paris Commune.
The French are too garrulous and demonstrative for privy conspiracies, besides lacking discipline and solidarity. But their sense of mimicry has led them to borrow subversive methods from abroad, and they cherish an _ instinctive resentment of authority.
The French Revolution had been brewing for generations. A modern French bureaucratic tyrant or imperialist still glories in it as the assertion of French democracy, though it was probably not a French, and certainly not a democratic movement. M. Paul Bourget has described the French Revolution as “a veritable fit of folly, or, in scientific lan- guage, a collective psychosis (organic lesion)... Let us dare to assert,” he exclaims, “ that this revolution was none other than an act of brigandage inaugurated by simpletons, developed by intriguers and consummated by scoundrels.”
But who pulled the strings of all these puppets ? Copin- Albincelli accuses the Freemasons of having prepared the French Revolution, but he has to admit that many free- masons were guillotined under the Terror. Other believers in Hidden Hands discern a German conspiracy continuing the work of the Illuminati, and a plausible argument is to be found in the evil influence of the mocking, atheistical, subversive Encyclopedists, poets and philosophers, who received encouragement at the Court of Frederick the Great. The enemies of France being the only people who had anything to gain by an upheaval and a reign of terror, it is not incredible that Prussian or English gold should have found its way into the pockets of Mirabeau and Robespierre, providing the sinews of war for a disintegrating movement. And the movement nearly succeeded. If General Buona-
D
50 &. SECRET SOCIETIES
parte had not picked up a derelict crown from the gutter and consolidated the battered fragments of his country, France would have proved an easy prey to her enemies and faded away like Poland. Buonaparte may have been little less criminal than his predecessors, but he possessed logic and powers of organisation, might have established a new order permanently if he had not yielded to his overweening personal ambition.
After the transportation of Buonaparte to St. Helena, France enjoyed a prospect of good government. The restoration of the rightful sovereign promised a restoration of law and order, family and society, religion and manners, a national convalescence after the hideous fevers of revolu- tion and imperial tyranny. But though the revolution had killed many of its own children, the poisons of false philosophers and licensed criminals had not been completely eliminated from the body politic. Some still read Rousseau in their garrets, old soldiers scouted peace, students specially sought to prove themselves modern by harking back to the bad old times of Marat and Robespierre and the Mountain.
The first symptom of trouble was provided in the South of France by the secret society of the United Patriots, which was soon and easily suppressed. Then, in 1820, the Friends of Truth were recruited in Paris on masonic lines among students, artists, authors, tradesmen and the loafers of the Latin quarter. Their objects were to overthrow the dynasty and set up a republic, but a vigilant government soon dis- solved them, and their leaders had to choose between flight and imprisonment.
Others subversive societies, however, arose like mush- rooms, copying if not inspired by freemasonry. Among them was the Society for the New Reform of France, whose novices swore to be the everlasting foes of tyrants, to follow them with deadly hate and to kill them whenever opportu- nity arose. The following is an extract from their cate- chism :
Q. What wilt thou do?
A. Overthrow thrones and erect gallows.
Q. By what right ?
JULY REVOLUTION 51
A. By natural right.
More important was the Society of the Friends of the People, formed to resist Charles X’s Ordinances for press control and parliamentary reform. It formed a rallying centre for the Paris insurrection of July 1830, when barri- cades were set up in the streets, the troops deserted and the King abdicated. His successor, Louis Philippe, failed to stem disaffection and, though the Friends of the People were proscribed, they continued to work secretly for the overthrow and murder of the constitutional monarch. In 1832 they succeeded in setting fire to the church of Notre Dame in six places as the signal for a revolution that did not take place. They took advantage of the funeral of a general, who had died of cholera, to erect barricades, occupy public buildings and fight desperately in the street, but they were defeated with much slaughter and their leaders were transported.
Their society, however, soon reappeared under a new name, the Union of the Rights of Man, with a sort of military organisation allover France. At their head was a committee of eleven, with twelve commissioners and forty-eight sub- commissioners and many sections of twenty members under them all pledged to obedience. In 1834, they possessed what they called an “ army of the rights of man,” and on April the 13th it took the field with organised risings at Lyons and other large towns. Once more the Government overcame and suppressed the society; once more it was resuscitated under. another name, professing still more violent principles.
Now it was known as the Society of Families, and pro- claimed the doctrines of the republican Louis Blanc and the anarchist Proudhon, who is chiefly remembered for his assertion that “all property is theft.” The “ families ”’ were restricted to twelve members, who met in each other’s houses and borrowed extensively from the ritual and pre- cautions of much older secret societies. None of them was acquainted with their leaders, and, they were so skilfully organised that they possessed their own powder-factory and succeeded in making a number of fruitless attempts
52 * SECRET SOCIETIES
against the life of Louis Philippe. In July 1835, one of their infernal machines miscarried only by an apparent miracle.
At last the society was suppressed and some members proceeded to form the Society of the Seasons, to which Mr, G. K. Chesterton owed the inspiration of his romance, “The Man who was Thursday.”’ Groups, known as ‘“‘ weeks,”’ consisted of six members under a seventh called Sunday ; four ‘“‘ weeks ”’ constituted a “‘ month ” under a man named July ; three “‘ months ”’ were a “ season ”’ under a “ Spring” ; four seasons were under the “revolutionary agent,’ an unknown chief. The members were for the most part working men, and swore “to put to death all kings, aris- tocrats and other oppressors.’’ They also engaged in ordi- nary murders, robberies and acts of destruction for their private ends.
The Society of the Seasons was thought to have been suppressed after the failure of a revolution in Paris on May r2th, 1839, but reappeared as the life and soul of the rising of February 1848, when Louis Philippe was driven into exile and Louis Blanc appeared at the head of a commission of labourers, apparently a precursor of the Russian Soviets.
Secret Societies continued under the rule of Louis Napoleon Buonaparte and were probably responsible for Orsini’s attempt upon his life. They enjoyed a temporary success, organising the anarchy and terrorism of the Paris Commune in 1871, and have doubtless continued their machinations ever since as branches of foreign and international organi- zations for the subversion of society.
AUTHORITIES
De la Hoddes: Histoire des Sociétés Secrétes et du Parti Répub- licain de 1830 41848. Paris, 1850. Vill-Castel : Histoire de la Restauration. Paris, 1868-70. K. Hillebrand: Geschichte Frankreichs von der Thronbesetzung he Philippe bis zum Fall Napoleons III. Gotha, 1877- I
Ely: French and German Socialism in Modern Times.
SONS OF PADILLA 53
(2) Spain
Communeros, 1821—Ceremonies of initiation—Suppression by France, 1823—-Subsequent secret societies—Anarchists—Catalonians.
The Spanish character is more suited to secret societies than the French, being more consistent and cruel, less frivo- lous and treacherous. Indeed, the persistency of Spain’s secret societies may be counted among the chief causes of her political failures.
Before the French revolution, they seem to have been restricted to associations simulating philanthropic ideals, similar to those in Germany. It was only after the fall of Buonaparte and the return of Ferdinand VII, that Spanish democrats began to work actively against royal authority, but their conspiracy was prompt and extensive. Innumer- able societies were formed all over the peninsula, and a specially intensive propaganda was carried on at Granada, Madrid and Barcelona.
Undoubtedly the most important agitators were the Communeros, or Sons of Padilla, founded in 1821, the year following the restoration of the suspended constitution of 1812. Both names were relics of the days when Juan de Padilla led Castilians against the Emperor Charles V, in defence of their communal privileges, but the new Sons of Padilla were mere republicans without even the pretext of patriotism.
Initiation was accompanied by various fantastic cere- monies, and all meetings were conducted with impressive andromanticrites. Novices were ledintoa “ Hallof Arms” and informed of their duties, then led with bound eyes into a pitch dark room, where they made their application for membership. One of the brethren, known as a sentinel, now cried, ‘‘ Let them advance. I will accompany them to the guardroom of the castle.’’ No castle existed, but they were conducted over a drawbridge to a room where their eyes were unbound, and they contemplated a melodramatic
54 * SECRET SOCIETIES
scene. The walls were adorned with armour and trophies of war; a vast congregation of members clad in rich robes sat enthroned, awaiting them in solemn silence. Not a sound was to be heard, not a breath, not a rustle, as the Grand Castellano or Governor of the Order stood forth before them.
““ Now,” he exclaimed, ‘‘ you stand beneath the shield of our colonel, Padilla. Repeat in your hearts the oath which I will deliver unto you.” .
And they swore to defend the rights and freedom of the human race, especially those of the Spanish people, to take vengeance on every tyrant, to kill all those whom their superiors denounced as traitors. If they failed to keep their oath, they declared themselves willing to consign their necks to the hangman, their bodies to the flames and their ashes to the winds,—a declaration borrowed from Freemasonry. Then they donned the Padilla shields, all present drew their swords and extended them over the heads of the new Knights, and the Gran Castellano exhorted them : “ The shield of our Lord and Protector Padilla will protect you from every danger, save your lives and your honour, but if you should break your oaths, we will take away your shields and pierce your breasts with our swords.”
All this mummery appealed to the less intelligent youth of Spain, especially to those of the very lowest orders, and the membership soon amounted to sixty thousand, mostly desperadoes.
A successful rising led to the imprisonment of Ferdinand VII, but the King of France sent an army to release him in 1823, and disaffection was satisfactorily repressed. Then dissensions arose among the Communeros, the milder elements seceded to freemasonry, and loyalists founded secret societies of their own to combat revolution. Sub- versive societies, however, were never entirely stamped out. Severity merely led to additional secrecy. Again and again, they brought Spain to the verge of disaster, and they are still busy to-day, largely influenced and directed by foreign agencies.
Outside Catalonia, there is nothing distinctive about
CATALONIA eG
modern Spanish conspiracy. The plotters are chiefly Anarchists of a specially bloodthirsty type with some of that ill-balanced spirit of sacrifice which was observable in Russian Nihilists. Ferrer, who may have been the victim of an error of justice, has been canonised and celebrated wherever two or three subversive persons are gathered together. .
Catalonia, a survival of old Aragon, once the freest king- dom in Europe, has long been the centre of discontent, but with nationalist rather than democratic ideals. The Catalans are to a certain extent a race apart and despise the rest of Spain. They are the most enterprising and indus- trious people in the kingdom, at the same time grasping and generous, rich and honest, austere and turbulent, sober and revengeful, excellent soldiers and sailors. They always go to extremes in religion and politics, combining absolute belief in all the picturesque legends of the Middle Ages with modern democratic ideas sometimes bordering on Bol- shevism. Their propaganda relies mainly on their language, which is related to Provencal and Limousin. Philip V, vainly tried to suppress it in 1714, and it has thriven ever since with a highly developed literature. In many ways this movement resembles those of Ireland, Flanders, pre-war Bohemia and Alsace-Lorraine of to-day. It is actively sup- ported by the lower clergy, but all supporters are welcome, from the loftiest Legitimists to the lowest spawn of anarchy.
Catalan hopes were flattered by the French Revolution and the revolutionary epidemic which scourged Europe in 1848. Yet we find Catalonia rallying to the Carlist stan- dards from 1833 to 1840 and again from 1873 to 1875. A semi-secret Catalan Union was founded in 1885, demanding separate laws, army and parliament as well as a monopoly of administrative posts, perhaps under the nominal suzer- ainty of Spain. Great hopes were again aroused and shat- tered by the Serajevo War, which, as we all know, was fought for democracy and self-determination. But still the separa- tists seethed underground, their plots coming to a head in 1926, when Colonel Macia, an amiable septuagenarian, arranged for the advent of conspirators disguised as tourists
56 é SECRET SOCIETIES
to proclaim a Catalonian republic. Once more, hidden hands seem to have been at work from abroad, and the evidence of the French police goes to prove that the con- spirators were sold, like the anti-Fascists of Italy, by Ricciotti Garibaldi. But the Spanish Government has tempered justice with mercy and the materials for fresh turmoil await only some such opportunity as a civil war or a national disaster. So far General Primo de Rivera has disappointed them by the mildness of a dictatorship that seems mainly directed to the regulation of street traffic and the efficiency of public services.
AUTHORITIES
Jullian: Précis historique des principaux Evénements qui ont amené la Révolution d’Espagne. Paris, 182t.
B. von Schepeler: Geschichte der spanischen Monarchie von 1810 bis 1823. Aix-la-Chapelle, 1829-30.
H. Baumgarten: Geschichte Spaniens vom Ausbruch der franz6- pe Revolution bis auf unsere Tage. Leipzig, 1866-71. 3 vols.
H. Bruck: Die geheimen Gesellschaften in Spanien und thre Stellung zu Kirche und Staat von thren Eindringen in das Kénigreich bis zum Tode Ferdinands VII. Mayence, 1881.
CARBONARI 57
(8) Italy
Early secret societies—Carbonari—Organisation and ritual—Insurrec- tions of 1820-1—Suppressed by Austrians—Reorganisation by Mazzini— Young Italy—United Italy, a centre of disaffection—Long period of cor- ruption, leading to dictatorship.
The home of Machiavelli and Mussolini has long been the cradle of statesmen, desperadoes and lazzaroni, the ideal forcing house of secret societies, courage, diplomacy and dreams. For whatever the debt may be worth, it is to secret societies that Italy owes the overthrow of her small independent states with all their chivalry and charm, and the subsequent imposition of an united kingdom.
All sorts of secret societies have thriven in Italy from very early times, but their history has been highly coloured by romance and legend. No more can be stated with safety than that they begat the Carbonari, who devoured their progenitors. |
The first definite record of the Carbonari goes back to the days of Buonaparte, when political conspirators used to take refuge in the forests and mountain fastnesses, disguising themselves as carbonari or charcoal-burners. After 1815, they recruited discharged officers and such members of the lower clergy as were dissatisfied with their conditions. Their slogan was “‘ Free the forests from wolves,” by which they meant the representatives of constituted authority, and they soon spread all over the peninsula, attaining at their zenith to several hundreds of thousands of members.
The fundamental unit was the bavacca or hut, where members met, and the “‘ huts” of a province constituted a “republic ’’ under an alta vendita or grand lodge, the mem- bers of a “hut” being styled “ good cousins” and out- siders pagani or heathens. Two wooden stumps stood outside each hut as seats for sentinels, three other stumps inside for the president, orator and scribe. The master and sentinels carried an axe as an emblem of authorit y
58 a SECRET SOCIETIES
In each hut were a crucifix with two candles, a rope and a red-white-and-blue ribbon, receptacles for charcoal, water, salt, earth and other symbols, while a portrait of St. Theo- bald, the patron of the society, hung on a wall. The masters wore their hats and occupied raised seats on the right ; the novices sat bareheaded on the ground to the left.
The ritual resembled that of freemasonry, but followed religious lines seriocomically, with a touch of mockery, recalling the ‘‘ rhetoric”’ societies, election of mock bishops,* and declamatory passion-processions of medieval Flanders, which survive there at Furnes to the present day. At Carbonari ceremonies, Christ was mentioned as “ our good cousin Jesus,”’ the hands of novices were bound and they were led before a member representing Pilate in a scarlet cloak, while others took the part of Caiaphas, Herod and the people, as penitents now do in the Furnes procession. Novices were taken to a ‘‘ Mount of Olives,” laid under a cross and ceremonially released.
Real secrets were revealed only to Masters, or members of the Third Degree. These were restricted to men of at least thirty-three, the age of Christ at the time of His cruci- fixion, and were elected by a ballot of Masters, three black balls excluding. Initiation took place in a remote spot with elaborate ritual, and it was then revealed to the novices that the society aimed at the overthrow of all the rulers of Italy, that the cross was the symbol of the intended cru- cifixion of tyrants, the rope of their hanging on the gallows. Then the novices were told that they must prove their merits by provoking conflicts with the representatives of authority, and, if they failed to do so satisfactorily, they soon found themselves excluded from the councils of the Carbonari. At the conclusion of the ceremony, the whole congregation knelt, held daggers to their naked breasts, and declared “ the devotion of their whole lives to the principles of liberty, equality and progress, which are the soul and purpose of all the secret and public acts of the Carbonari.”
There was also a fourth or supreme degree, to which very
* It may not be a coincidence that the French word for a chess bishop remains fou, a lunatic or fool.
CONGRESS OF LAIBACH 59
few were admitted, and later on lodges, known as “ gardens,” were opened for women. All members were given special names and taught pass-words, grips and other methods of recognition.
The Carbonari attained to enormous political influence. Their branches spread all over Italy. Their brethren contrived to insinuate themselves into the highest position in the land. Some hidden hand was certainly pulling the strings, for it became a measure of prudence for persons in authority to join their ranks. Pope Pius IX is said to have become a member. Byron joined them, seeking support for his melodramatic co-operation with conspiracies in Greece and elsewhere, and we can imagine the gusto with which he participated in their romantic ritual, prostrating himself beneath a cross destined for the torture of “‘ tyrants,”’ reciting poetical patter with a dagger pointed at his breast.
In 1820 and 1821, the Carbonari organised insurrections in Naples and Piedmont. Old King Ferdinand of Naples was forced to don the Carbonari colours, red, white and blue, and to take an oath to the Spanish constitution of 1812, which the Carbonari had imposed. At the same time, they mode- rated their democratic zeal, repressing anarchists and insisting on a semblance of order. Pretending to protect the Parliament, they insinuated themselves into its councils with the intention of establishing a republic.
Monarchy and order were now threatened all over Europe, and the Sovereigns of Austria, Prussia and Russia summoned a congress at Laibach in October 1821, to deal energetically with revolutions. An Austrian army was despatched to Naples and encountered ineffectual resistance. The Car- bonari continued to arouse feverish excitement all over Italy and raw recruits hurried in thousands to their banners. But their enthusiasm did not compensate for their lack of training and discipline, and when most of the Italian regulars went over to the invaders, Carbonari leaders lost heart and fled abroad. The revolution was thoroughly repressed. Order and absolutism reigned once more in Naples.
The same thing happened in Piedmont, where nobles, officers and students had rallied to the Carbonari and demon-
60 SECRET SOCIETIES
strated in favour of an united Kingdom of Italy. An Austrian army soon cooled their hot heads, the dawn of democracy was indefinitely adjourned.
Indeed, for many years, the operations of the secret society were perforce carried on so secretly that they ceased to have any practical importance. The police were orga- nised efficiently and traced every rebellious movement to its hut, seized compromising documents, cast leaders into prison or drove them into exile. France proved their securest sanctuary, and there they kept alive an impotent movement, tending the vapours of liberty, equality and progress in the slums of Paris, founding clubs, slaying tyrants with their mouths, continuing their childish ritual and delivering bloodthirsty speeches in the safety of pot- houses.
A more practical direction was given to the Italian democratic movement by Mazzini, a young man who con- trived to re-organise the less futile fragments of the Car- bonari. In 1831, he founded a new secret society called Young Italy, for securing the unity and independence of Italy by revolutionary means. The times were now more propitious, for the French had exiled King Charles X, and set up Louis Philippe of Orleans as a democratic puppet. His Government supported Italian conspirators, and French soldiers helped them in 1832 to seize the fortress of Ancona as a base against renewed Austrian intervention. This seizure was not only a gross violation of international law and the comity of peoples, but was accomplished by the blackest treachery, and must be reckoned among the most signal examples of international crime. A long period of disturbance ensued, culminating in 1848, the year of revo- lutions, with a war between Austria and Sardinia. Charles Albert, King of Sardinia, joined the opposition to Austria and was followed by most of the Italian rulers under popular pressure. Pope Pius IX was one of the few to hold aloof and he was driven into exile at Gaeta, Mazzini establishing a short lived republic in Rome. The Austrians, however, were eventually victorious in the war and recovered their Italian provinces ; the Pope returned to the Papal states.
UNITED ITALY 61
It was now clear that Italian conspirators stood no chance against Austria in the open field, and subterranean methods were accordingly resumed with more zeal than ever. The Carbonari were revived, with Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour as their ringleaders, Cavour taking advantage of his official position as Prime Minister of Sardinia to promote conspiracy.
In 1859, France supported Sardinia in another war against Austria, who was defeated at Magenta and Sol- ferino, and the French appropriated Nice and Savoy in payment for their support. Lombardy, Tuscany, Modena and Parma were annexed to Sardinia. Garibaldi raided Sicily, the King of Naples was driven out, and in February 1861, Victor Emmanuel, King of Sardinia, was enabled to take the title of King of Italy, which then comprised the whole peninsula save Venetia and Rome. In 1866 he seized the opportunity to join Prussia in her war against Austria and was rewarded by the annexation of Venice, though he had been defeated in every battle. In 1870, a French garri- son had been withdrawn from Rome owing to the Franco- German war, and Victor Emmanuel took advantage of this to break in and suppress the temporal power of the Pope.
The union of Italy was now compiete; the self-imposed mission of the Carbonari was accomplished, and they recog- nised that no reason remained for their survival. They could pride themselves on having kept their country in a state of bloody turmoil for over halfacentury. Innumerable deaths, crimes, dastardly actions lay at the doors of their “huts.” They were responsible for creating and perpetuat- ing a spirit of unrest and insubordination that only a stern dictator could eventually conjure. Owing to them, Italy became a plague-spot, infecting all Europe and great parts of the world beyond the seas. They kindled and for gene- rations fanned disaffection in France, indefinitely delaying a recovery from the sharp calenture of her revolution. They spread to Spain over a century ago and perpetuated civil wars. They founded branches in Germany and begat other secret societies there, including the Totenbund, or Band of Death, which was exposed in 1849 with its solemn oath to rid the world of all tyrants.
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Their activities may have ceased in the old form, but the Carbonari undoubtedly infected human minds everywhere with ideas that may be flattered by such titles as liberal, progressive, popular, emancipatory, and fraternal, but have undoubtedly hindered peace, honest work, Christian charity and material prosperity. How many dastardly assassina- tions of philanthropic rulers and innocent persons in high places, how much corruption, oppression and persecution, what infinite expropriation of public and private property are due, directly or indirectly, to their fiendish machinations!
That the motives of their individual members may often have been honest need not be denied. The plea of insanity is accepted on behalf of many common criminals. The plea of success is usually held to justify the most hideous excesses. And to this day, public opinion persists, though with less and less conviction, in glorifying the memory of such men as Garibaldi, Mazzini, Cavour and many other leaders and accomplices of this criminal conspiracy. The whole Italian peninsula still bristles with their hideous effigies ; the humblest villages are plastered with memorial tablets setting forth their pompous praises. After all, the Carbonari were brought into existence with one object, the unification of Italy, and they succeeded. But new Peterkins are arising to ask what good came of it at last. Is a single Italian happier or richer or more blessed because the Duke of Parma has been replaced by a profiteering prefect, or because the revenues of monastic orders have been spent on the electoral campaigns of Signor Giolitti ? The old farce of the Risorgimento was long accepted in England as the triumph of a popular cause and Garibaldi was welcomed in London with what Queen Victoria described as “extravagant excitement revealing little dignity or sense of discrimination on the part of the nation.” Refer- ring to Victor Emmanuel’s death in her diary (9th January, 1878) she recognised the courage and energy of her old Crimean ally, but confessed herself ‘‘ less pleased with what he accomplished for the unification of Italy, because it was accomplished with much treachery, especially towards his good uncle, the Grand Duke ot Tuscany.” Indeed, it is not
RHETORICAL DUSTBIN 63
too much to say that the passage of time has now reft the Garibaldian legend of much of its tinsel. England recog- nises that her old idol’s feet were of clay, and educated Italians are now free to confess that the praises of their territorial unity have been exaggerated, that the Risor- gimento is fit only for the dustbin of slimy rhetoric and sugary songs. |
The Bolshevik movement of 1920 exhibited to them the legitimate offspring of Carbonarism in all its nakedness, and the chief pride of modern Italy is to be found in its suppres- sion. Italy now cherishes more wholesome aims and ambi- tions, and will live to be ashamed of her Carbonari no less than of her Mafia and Camorra and Black Hand and Mala Vita. She may yet delegate Mazzini and Garibaldi to repre- sent her in an international chamber of horrors as fitting companions to Marat and Robespierre and Trotski and Mashin and Prinzip and other militant exponents of prac- tical democracy.
AUTHORITIES
Bartholdy: Denkschriften wiber die geheimen Gesellchaften im muttiglichen Italien und tnsbesondere tiber die Carbonart. Stuttgart, 1822.
H. Reuchlin: Geschichte Italiens von der Griindung der regieren- den Dynastien bis auf die Gegenwart. Leipzig, 1859-73, 4 vols.
Anelli: Storia d'Italia del 1814-1863. Milan, 1864. 4 vols.
The O’Clery : The Making of Italy. London, 1892.
A. Luzio: Giuseppe Mazzini Carbonaro. Turin, 1920.
G. E. Buckle: Letters of Queen Victoria. London, 1926.
64 a SECRET SOCIETIES
(4) Turkey
Origin of Turks—Abdul Hamid’s difficulties and diplomacy—Placid con- dition of Turkey—Young Turks mainly adventurers—Their organisation— Committee of Union and Progress—Headquarters at Salonica—Rapid and secret growth—Establishment of a constitution—Self-denying ordinance— Dissensions and discontent—Muhammadan League—Discomfiture and fresh rebellion of Young Turks—Deposition of Abdul Hamid—Rise of Mustapha Khemal—Suppression of Young Turks—Republican tyranny and confusion.
We first hear of Turks in the year 1300, when vast hordes of Turkoman nomads, known as Osmanli, founded an Empire in Asia Minor under Osman I. During the four- teenth century, they extended their conquests all over Western Asia, went on to invade Europe and established their capital at Adrianople. In 1453, Osman’s successor, Sultan Muhammad II, took Constantinople and destroyed the Byzantine Empire, which had been in existence for some thousand years. Then the Turks spread over a great part of South Eastern Europe, battered at the gates of Vienna in 1683, dominated Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Macedonia for centuries.
Abdul Hamid II was called to the Turkish throne in 1876 by a palace revolution at a time when his country was in the throes of war. Within a few months, he pro- mulgated a constitution for the whole Empire with equal rights for his Christian subjects. In the following Spring, Russia seized the opportunity for invasion and contrived, after a hard campaign, to reach the gates of Constantinople, where she was stopped by a demonstration of the British fleet. Then the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 deprived Turkey of a large portion of her European possessions.
It was not an auspicious beginning for the new reign of a young Sovereign, but Abdul Hamid proved himself one of the cleverest, if not wisest, diplomatists of his age, playing one Power off against another, staving off wars and contriving to retain the fidelity of his subjects during many critical years. Massacres of Christians occurred, but his complicity
ABDUL HAMID 65
was never proved, and massacres were far more terrible after his deposition. His many spies and counter-spies were probably necessary, but they exposed him to wide- spread criticism.
There was nothing of the Haroun-er-Reshid about him, for he never went about among his subjects. The only times they beheld him was on Fridays, when he proceeded in state to the mosque in the grounds of Yildiz, a sallow black-bearded figure crouching in a carriage amid innumer- able guards—a figure of intense loneliness that might have aroused pity. He was a conscientious patriot, anxious for the glory of his Empire and the welfare of his people, but infinitely removed from them, infinitely removed also from the modern world. A characteristic story tells how he long refused to admit electric light to his palace because dynamos suggested dynamite to his mind. His was a pathetic figure, not warranting the unmeasured abuse which was lavished upon him from every quarter. Gladstone did not hesitate to call him “ the great assassin.” Crazy poets and scribes denounced him as “the Red Sultan,” or “ Abdul the Damned.’ Yet such nicknames were singu- larly inappropriate to this oriental Louis XI, this delicately walking Agag, who recalled a Cenobite rather than a Ter- rorist.
The origins of revolutionary movements are nearly always obscure, their protagonists an apparently despicable hand- ful, their successes due in a great measure to chance. A case in point is the French Revolution, where a few ugly stones produced a vast avalanche. And for those who have no eyes to perceive the hidden hands releasing the stones, the Turkish Revolution of 1908 was an even more incredible reality.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, any one acquainted with Turkey would have laughed the idea of a revolution to scorn. Apart from brigands, the rayas or Chris- tian subjects alone possessed grievances, and they were the most abject, grovelling cowards ever imagined. I have travelled much among them and carried away the most unpleasant memories of their cowardice and fecklessness.
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They used to barricade themselves in their houses, slink to their fields and shops like hunted criminals, tremble at the sound of a shaken leaf, scarcely dare to raise their ceaseless whines above a fearful whisper. And what had they to whine about ? The most patient cross-examination never elicited more than a general statement that their condition was “very grievous.” Never could they produce any plausible details.
Naturally, in an oriental atmosphere, security was not assured on the lines of a modern, police-ridden land. The law-courts were corrupt, though probably not more corrupt than under the Serbian regicide rule in Macedonia at the present day. There was no efficient control from the capital, and every Beg was a local despot. Taxes were heavy, for Valis and Kaimakams received no salaries and had to collect their incomes in their district by haphazard methods. But, apart from officials, the Turks were jovial, good-natured folk. They considered themselves a superior race, and despised Christians as well as Jews. Like dogs, who know when boys are afraid of them, they presumed on the terror of the rayas, and the attitude of the rayas invited persecution, but actually aroused little or nothing worse than genial contempt.
And the Turkish masses were as foreign to any idea of democratic revolution as the timid Christians. No people have ever been more conservative, more insular, more rooted to their race and religion. Change was to them an abomina- tion, and their habits, business, pleasures, methods of pro- duction and locomotion remained almost identical with those of their ancestors in the middle ages. They con- formed to a Parliament in 1876 because they were accus- tomed to do what they were told, but they saw no sense in it. And, more recently, they acquiesced in the moderni- sation of their country with reluctant fatalism, regarding the unveiling of their women, the wearing of hats instead of fezzes, the disbanding of howling dervishes as blasphemous wickedness,
No doubt there have been many palace revolutions in Turkey, but these and the recent upheaval must be attri-
YAO: UN GUM KS 67
buted entirely to the official and military castes, supported in some measure by professional theologians and financed by foreigners in the background. What was known as the Young Turkish Party was entirely out of touch with the Turkish masses, comprised far more adventurers than patriots, and was at first inefficiently organised. The ring- leaders had received a smattering of European education in foreign armies, embassies and schools, where they had imbibed the fetishes of Whiggery, come to regard democratic institutions as panaceas of prosperity or at least as high- roads for their own advancement. Atheism had replaced the simple faith of their compatriots with its stories of magic carpets and Jinn confined in bottles. They flouted the law of the Prophet by drinking wine. They shaved their patriarchal beards, danced like American negroes, took kindly to the vices of the West.
The origin otf their organisation is nebulous. Traces of it may be found as early as 1866, and they received encourage- ment from Midhat Pasha, who is remembered as the leading figure of Abdul Hamid’s first Parliament. Midhat had previously advocated representative government and suf- fered eclipses in his career through his intempestive zeal. He was convicted on a charge of murder in 1882 at the age of fifty-eight, and is said to have been strangled in gaol. Many of his colleagues were exiled, and in 1867 a small group of them published a subversive Turkish newspaper ‘in London and Paris. This was edited by Mustapha Fazil Pasha, a statesman whose pockets must have been well lined, for he maintained many ambitious young students in London and Paris, including the poet Khemal. Most of them, however, either died in exile or faded away and were heard of no more.
But the Softa, or religious students of Turkey, were imbib- ing modern ideas, and their riots at Constantinople contri- buted to the summoning of Abdul Hamid’s first Parliament in 1876, though it was rather intended to pacify the Powers, who were then clamouring for changes in the administra- tion of Christian provinces.
Gradually, a number of subversive Committees were
68 SECRET SOCIETIES
founded in various parts of the Empire—at Cairo, Smyrna, Beyrut, Trebizond, Tripoli; in Bulgaria, Macedonia and the archipelago as well as in France and England. Plenty of hidden hands can be pictured behind the scenes. The Americans had planted Robert College on the Bosphorus to teach turmoil in the name of progress, as they did subse- quently in China; the Buxtons and other English busy- bodies buzzed; the German Emperor, with his eye on Baghdad, posed as the Sultan’s friend, but did not withhold secret encouragement from his possible successors. The open agitation relied chiefly upon publications in Turkish, Arabic and French. In Paris, the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress was headed by Ahmed Riza, the Turko-Syrian Reform Committee by Emir Emin Arslan. The French Prefect of police tried to bribe Riza to leave the country, for the French press had prevented his deportation. He refused to go, but the publication of his paper was for- bidden in France, and its offices were removed to Geneva, that everlasting sanctuary of sedition and leagues and intrigues.
Abdul Hamid could never satisfy his critics. Any show of firmness was denounced as bloodthirsty terrorism, any attempt at conciliation as abject weakness. “ Abdul Hamid was a coward,” wrote an English Liberal critic ; “if he had been otherwise, it is possible that the decadence of the Ottoman Empire might have taken another course. His cowardice has proved his solitary virtue as a ruler. It was responsible for the Young Turkish régime.”’ Yet the same scribe admits that His Majesty instituted a vigorous campaign against the subversive elements, and asserts that, during a period of ten years, “ no less than 30,000 educated Turks fled the country or were banished to the Siberias of the Empire.” ;
As a matter of fact, the Sultan’s chief mistake lay in not banishing his rebels to “the Siberias of the Empire” or strangling them in his dungeons according to the traditions of his predecessors. Mere exile to foreign lands enabled them to continue and perfect their intrigues against him. They found the great Powers at work upon the disintegration of
“ UNION AND PROGRESS” 69
the Turkish Empire, and only too anxious to support any form of disaffection in European Turkey, whether Moslem or Christian. But this did not suit the Young Turks. They knew that they could not hope to secure the support of their compatriots for cat’s-paws of Christians ; their only plausible card was to play the patriot and promise an aggran- disement rather than a disintegration of Turkey. Bulgaria, Eastern Roumelia, Bosnia and Herzegovina had already passed from the crescent to the cross, and Macedonia was permeated by foreign agents. .
Macedonia was clearly the most promising base for their operations, and it is not surprising that the Young Turks should have founded a secret society at Salonica. Details of its organisation and propagation are lacking, but it was known as the Committee of Union and Progress, and seems to have been modelled on freemasonry. It spread with astonishing rapidity, founding branches in every consider- able city throughout European Turkey, then extending its operations to Anatolia and Syria. The leadership was shrouded in mystery. Orders came from “ the Committee ” and had to be obeyed, but the composition of the Committee was unknown to the members. A different chairman pre- sided over every sitting, each committee-man taking his turn. |
The Powers had imposed an international gendarmerie at Constantinople, and the success of its British section in training Turkish soldiers had been conspicuous. This en- couraged the Young Turks to believe that they could develop the same material, and they knew that, without an army, they were foredoomed to failure. Accordingly, they set to work to secure the third army corps, then occupying Mace- donia. This was accomplished with surprising facility and by the end of 1907, every soldier in Macedonia had taken the oath of fidelity to the proposed constitution. Then came further propaganda to seduce the sixth army corps, so that, when the time should come for open revolt, troops might not be sent from Anatolia to quell their brethren in Mace- donia.
The two outstanding features of this strange movement
70 4 SECRET SOCIETIES
were the rapidity and secrecy of its growth. The rapidity was due to the credulity of the troops, who were easily persuaded that the integrity of the Empire and the existence of Islam were menaced. The secrecy was so profound that the Sultan’s government refused to believe in the possibility of a revolt, though Paris exiles were openly proclaiming the imminence of victory.
And when the revolt came, it was as sudden and surprising as a cloud-burst. On the 5th of July, 1908, Niazi Bey, an officer of the Macedonian army, raised the standard of rebel- lion on the hills of Resna, and on the following day mani- festoes were posted on the walls of Monastir announcing a constitution. General Shemshi Pacha was sent to quell the mutineers, but at Monastir a Macedonian officer walked up to the carriage in broad daylight, shot him dead and sauntered away unhindered. Then Nazim Bey was sent to Salonica and success seemed to attend his activities. On the 8th of July, he arrested forty-eight rebel officers and des- patched them in chains to the capital. But on the 11th he was wounded in the streets and found it more prudent to return and report the desperate situation to the Sultan. Then Enver Bey, the pinchbeck Napoleon of the movement, declining overtures from the Sultan, joined Niazi Bey on the Resna hills, and, on the 13th, the Committee of Union and Progress publicly associated itself with the rebels. The second army corps, stationed at Adrianople, now showed signs of disaffection, and the Committee telegraphed to the Sultan, that, unless he granted a constitution, the second and third army corps would march on Constantinople.
But the Sultan, despite his reputation for cowardice, was in no hurry to yield. Osman Pasha was sent to Monastir and delivered an uncompromising speech, promised rewards to the faithful and threatened dire retribution to mutineers. He, too, was answered with shots.
Now came a dramatic incident. The Committee informed Hilmi Pasha, the Sultan’s representative in Macedonia, that he must proclaim the constitution on the 24th, or take the consequences. He replied that his sympathies were with the movement, but that his loyalty forbade him to act
TRIUMPHANT RIFFRAFF 71
without authority from the Sultan. The Committee gave him twenty-four hours in which to procure that authority, and he regarded this as a sentence of death, for no one believed that the Sultan would give way. But when crowds assembled outside the White Tower at Salonica on the mor- row, what was their amazement to hear from the Pasha’s lips that His Majesty had been graciously pleased to grant a constitution to the Empire! The Young Turks had won all along the line.
The result, as with Bolshevism, as with Fascism, was that the secret society threw off its cloaks and came out into the open. A strange, unsatisfactory set of leaders was revealed to the wondering gaze of the world. Many of the ‘‘ Young Turks’ proved to be senile officials driven to revolt by resentment of the punishment of their inefficiency. Then there were raw youths, the usual discontented and brainless students, styling themselves intellectuals because they did not know how to work with their hands, and now leaping at the prospect of personal advancement. Ahmed Riza had been féted in the marble halls of the National Liberal Club. His Paris colleagues had been adulated in the coffee-houses of the Paris Latin quarter, hailed as exiles and martyrs, encouraged to bibulous loquacity in the purlieus of gutter journalism. All this riff-raff now flocked back to Constan- tinople with the airs and graces of conquerors, while the soldiers, who had carried out the revolution, found them- selves relegated to the background. The secrecy which had characterised their movement had kept their names obscure, so that it was difficult to press their claims for preferment. Moreover, their professions of patriotism and unselfishness made it difficult for them to assert themselves, while with- out those professions, they would never have secured the essential support of the simple troopers.
The Young Turks may have been good conspirators, but they were bad diplomatists, lacking tact as well as experience. They thought that methods which had been useful during a revolt could continue to be utilised by a settled government. And they were filled with intense intolerance for all who disagreed with them in the minutest particulars. Thief,
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murderer, Yildiz spy were among the mildest criticisms they applied to all who did not see eye to eye with them on every detail of the new constitution.
One of their first acts was to release all the gaol-birds of Constantinople, their excuse being that they had no record of convictions and could not distinguish ordinary criminals from criminal politicians,—theretore all must go free. The result was that a great part of the capital was looted and burnt down by these exponents of democracy.
Still, the Sultan remained on his throne, probably smiling to himself over his new réle as a constitutional monarch. During his long reign, he had found patience a very good card in the game of international diplomacy, and there seemed no reason why it should not trump the lead of inexpert rebels. Elections were held without much dis- order and a Parliament assembled slightly less grotesque than its predecessor of 1876-8. The next step was to appoint a Government on ordinary constitutional lines, and the fighting elements of the Young Turks were persuaded to return to their military duties. They had fulfilled their mandate and must now relinquish the administration of the Empire to its duly elected representatives. This self- denying ordinance, however, did not at all suit the book of the young fops who had returned from London and Paris to constitute themselves saviours.
Disappointed of the chief offices of State, many of which were entrusted to more sober and experienced men, they resumed their secret activities and aspired to rule as the power behind the throne and the ministry.
The result was a serious split in the ranks of the trium- phant rebels. The older statesmen, who had welcomed the idea of reform and national self-government, resented the menace of an irresponsible control, that seemed to them no improvement on the old system. And they found con- siderable support amid the disillusions of the country.
The business people of Salonica had anticipated an era of peace and order, an end to the anarchy which ruined their trade. But they found corruption unchanged, even accen- tuated.
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MUHAMMADAN LEAGUE 73
The Christian rayas, who had been promised a golden age of universal goodwill, were not immediately provided with impartial justice, or relief from taxation, or security of life and property, or equality of treatment by their Moslem neighbours, and still declared that their condition was “ very grievous.”
Then again there was intense indignation among the Turkish masses over the tendency ot the new rulers towards female emancipation. Ahmed Riza actually inaugurated a school for Turkish girls at Candilli. Similar schemes were in the air, threatening the old-fashioned home-life of Islam, conferring equality upon a sex to which the creed of the Prophet denied the possession of souls. The fact was that women had played an active part in the revolutionary movement and now claimed their reward. One of the leaders was a daughter of Kiamil Pasha, another a sister of Abdul Hamid himself. One of the methods of insurrec- tionary young women had been to submit to be sold as slaves, spying upon the households they entered and then being bought back by the Committee of Union and Progress when their mission was completed. Others entered harems or became courtesans in order to pick secrets.
The result of all the disaffection was the formation of the Muhammadan League by the old-fashioned people who remained the great majority of the population. The Young Turks grew alarmed, overthrew Kiamil, who was succeeded as Prime Minister by Hussein Hilmi Pasha, a creature of the Committee of Union and Progress. But the Muhammadan League, supported by the Sultan, soon proceeded to vigorous action. On the 13th of April, 1909, the Constantinople garrison, led by non-commissioned officers, rose against the Young Turks, shot several of their officers and demanded a government according to Muhammadan law. The Young Turk leaders fled to Salonica, their rank and file went into hiding.
But the old tactics of the Committee proved successful once more. They persuaded the soldiers in Macedonia that the constitution was in danger and that the Muhammadan League had been formed to restore absolute monarchy.
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Within a few days, alarming rumours reached the capital that a vast army was advancing upon it with the most blood- thirsty intentions, and it was not long before troops, variously estimated between fifteen and thirty thousand men, con- centrated near San Stephano seven miles away On the 24th of April, the invaders began to enter the suburb of Shishli, aragged crowd in khaki or blue canvas with white caps inscribed ‘‘ Liberty or Death.’’ Heavy fighting ensued, the loyalists were defeated and many of them joined the rebels in looting the houses. The Sultan trembled in his palace, expecting the bowstring which had been the fate of so many of his predecessors. He was dragged before the triumphant officers and informed that the Senate and Chamber had voted his deposition. Then he was smuggled away to a steamer and conveyed to Salonica, where he sur- vived for several years in a gilded prison-house. The dis- integration of Turkey had definitely passed into the hands of an unscrupulous and incompetent gang.
The rebels, however, did not benefit themselves any more than they benefited the Empire. For awhile they enjoyed the sweets of office under a puppet Sultan, Muhammad VI, a half-witted brother of Abdul Hamid, whom they brought blinking out of the palace where he had been kept in con- finement all his life. They committed the mistake, which Abdul Hamid would have spared the country, of joining the Germans in the great war. Perhaps they were repaying a debt to their financiers. They certainly paid the penalty of their treachery to their Sovereign and people. Enver Pasha, who had aspired to a Napoleonic dictatorship, perished obscurely in Turkestan while seeking to raise the Muhammadans of Asia against the Russian Soviets. Djemal Pasha and Talaat Pasha were assassinated by Armenians.
After the war, Turkey secured a certain rehabilitation through the victory of Mustapha Khemal Pasha over the Greeks, but he made himself a tyrannical dictator and con- temptuously refused all overtures of co-operation from the old men who still called themselves Young Turks. They continued a futile conspiracy, and in 1923, Djavid Bey issued a manifesto in the name of the Committee of Union and
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THE=FTURKISH DICTATOR 75
Progress, demanding the return of the government from Angora to Constantinople, the re-establishment of two Chambers instead of one, and various other pettifogging changes which the dictator regarded as treasonable. Kara Khemal, formerly Young Turk Minister of Supplies, was about to be arrested on a charge of attempting to murder Mustapha Khemal, when he escaped a public execution by sudden suicide. In August 1926, Djavid Bey, ex-minister of Finance, the brain and soul of the movement; Mazim Bey, the real founder of the Committee of Union and Pro- gress; Nail Bey, secretary of the Committee; and Reouf Bey, ex-Premier, were condemned to death and executed at Angora. The Committee of Union and Progress was no more. Ail its funds were confiscated and all its powers assimilated by Mustapha Khemal Pasha.
His dictatorship is the sole remaining fruit of the revolu- tion. After the great war, the victors came to terms about their sphere of influence, and Turkey seemed about to become a British province. But Khemal, a soldier of fortune, con- trived to rally nationalists in the Asiatic provinces and called a congress at Sivas in October 1919, where an Anatolian constitution was voted and Angora announced as the capital. The puppet Sultan ordered a new election for his imperial Parliament, but Khemal obtained a majority and the Con- stitution of Sivas was adopted on the 20th of May, 1920. The British retorted by deporting most of the Khemalist deputies to Malta in March. Khemal held a Grand National Assembly on the 23rd of April, deposed the Sultan and called upon his compatriots to deliver the nation from a foreign yoke. The British government then encouraged the Greeks with lavish promises to make war upon Turkey, but left them shamefully in the lurch, with the result that Khemal drove their armies into the sea, imposed his own terms at Lausanne on the 24th of July 1923, tore up the Treaty of Sévres, and restored Turkish independence. On the 29th of October, the Grand National Assembly decreed the des- titution of the dynasty of Osman, the abolition of the Khali- fate and the erection of a republic.’
The constitution of the 20th of April, 1924, was an attempt
46 “SECRET SOCIETIES
to modernise and nationalise Turkey. Khemal directs the executive as President of the republic with a council of ministers appointed by himself and a Grand National Assembly restricted to his partisans. It is a model par- liament with no debates, questions, recriminations, parties or opposition, meeting only once or twice a week to receive the reports of its commissions.
Khemal’s policy is summed up in the slogan, “ Turkey for the Turks !’’ The Treaty of Lausanne provided for an ‘exchange of populations,” and Anatolia is restricted to Turks and Moslems. All Greeks have been expelled from Constantinople save those established there before the 30th of October, 1918, and the exodus of Greeks, Armenians and Jews from Asiatic Turkey has been so complete that sporting Anatolians complain that there is no one left for them to shoot. Perish commerce so long as Turkey is restricted to the Turks !
Accordingly, we find the port of Constantinople utterly deserted in 1927, while that of the Piraeus attracts shipping from all parts of the globe. Perishable goods are detained so long in the Turkish custom-house that nothing of value remains: cement, for instance, is deliberately exposed for months to the action of the elements. Corruption and exactions are infinitely more scandalous than they were ever imagined under the Sultans. The Capitulations, which assured some justice to foreigners, have been abolished, and litigation has become a matter of baksheesh. Foreign trade and industry are harassed out of existence. Business houses must keep all their books in Turkish and restrict half their staff to Turks, who are useless for technical work. Monopolies are innumerable and vexatious.
I may mention two cases related to me by traders in Turkey. One of them was visited by a young man, who made some purchases and asked to leave his bag until it was time for him to go to the station. A few minutes later, two policemen came to search the premises for contraband, ransacked every corner but found nothing. Then they espied the young man’s bag and found it contained a packet of cigarette papers that had not issued from the State
A FALLEN EMPIRE 77
monopoly. The result was that the trader was fined £T350, and the young man is supposed to have been a police agent. On another occasion, the director of a big commercial house forgot to declare a parcel of foreign cigarette papers when he was transferred to Constantinople from the provinces, so he threw them into a drain, whence they were recovered by the police on information received from one of the director’s Turkish clerks. This time the fine was £13,000, and the director thought it so monstrous that he appealed, with the result that it was increased to £T83,000.
The national finances are in a state of hopeless confusion. Budgets do not balance, cannot even be cooked plausibly to disguise deficits. Indeed, the new Turks seem incapable of dealing with figures. Their census is drawn up by guess- work, and the population is variously estimated at ten or twelve millions when it cannot possibly amount to more than seven and a half. Turkey possesses vast natural riches, but there is neither labour nor capital to exploit them, and it would be madness to think of investing there. The only countries to whom some semblance of commercial honesty is extended are Germany, who supplies railway material, and Soviet Russia, whose Nepht syndicate parts with petroleum for cash on delivery. The harvests remain unsold. The banks give no credit. There is scarcely any money, not even enough paper currency to go round. Crush- ing taxes are arbitrarily imposed.
Whatever can be collected by fair means or foul is devoted to the army, without which the dictatorship would not endure for an hour. Its only appeal to popularity is a policy of decentralisation, an attempt to revive the village self- government of the middle ages. Otherwise the adminis- tration is one frantic effort to ape and hurriedly incorporate the ways of the West, to become a second Japan without the Japanese virtues of industry, thrift and_ self-sacrifice. There are rumoured intentions of rallying Persia, Afghanistan and the worst elements of Russia, of securing the connivance of a restored Germany, and of destroying Western civilisa- tion with its own weapons; perhaps also of invoking the
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black peril in the name of Islam, which the new Turks have contemptuously betrayed.
The oriental, medieval Empire of Turkey has disappeared like a dream. Ancient glamour, childlike faith, simple pleasures, all the poetic charms down to friendly street-dogs, turbans and fezzes, veiled ladies, musherrabieh lattices have departed with the Sultans and the Sheikh-ul-Islam and the dervishes. Only discontent remains, breeding new secret societies to undermine the horrors of a new tyranny, conjured up in the name of progress.
AUTHORITIES
B. George-Gaulis : La Nouvelle Turquie.
R. Lauren-Vibert : Ce que 7’at vu en Orient. 1923-24.
S. Lauzanne: Au chevet de la Turquie.
Richard Davey : The Sultan and his Subjects. London, 1907.
(1) Panslavism
Intellectual societies—Conspiracy for Slav aggrandisement—Omladina— Dynastic rivairies in Serbia—Withdrawal of Turkish garrison from Bel- grade—Murder of Prince Michael by Omladina—Complicity of Kara- georgevitch—Russian Panslavist policy—Omladina deposes Prince of Bulgaria ; harasses Milan of Serbia, who retaliates—His abdication—King Alexander dismisses his Regents—initiates a national policy—Vladan Georgevitch—The Knezevitch plot—Queen Draga—disappointed of an heir—Russian plots to promote the great war—Peter Karageorgevitch —His long career of conspiracy-—-The Alavantitch plot—The Belgrade murders—Peter chosen King—Regicide rule—Recognised by Sir E, Grey—Heroic Montenegro—Slovenski Jug secret society—Plot against King Nicholas—Serbian Government complicity—Narodna Odbrana —Black Hand—Its organisation—-The Serajevo murderers—Dimitrije- vitch—Serbian authorities facilitate murderers’ journey to Serajevo— Murder of the Archduke—Austrian ultimatum—Salonica trial— Execution of Dimitrijevitch—Complicity of Pashitch in Serajevo crime— The White Hand—-Russian and French complicity—-Bohemian Omladina —State trial at Prague—The Czecho-Slovak Mafia.
HE idea of expanding Russian influence by a racial appeal to Slavs all over Europe and Asia first germi- nated in the minds of Catherine II and Alexander I, but efforts seemed mainly confined to religion, literature, music and art. It was not until 1848, the year of revolutions, that conspirators in Slav countries began to use the various intellectual societies for political purposes.
These purposes must be distinguished from those of demo- cratic societies, which were inspired by the French revolu- ‘tion and sought to “ strangle the last King with the guts of the last priest ;’”’ also from those of the Carbonari, who shared such impious opinions but concentrated on a campaign for united Italy. The Panslavists shrank from no crime, but viewed crime as a means rather than an end. All their thoughts and energies were bound up in the consolidation and aggrandisement of the Slav nationality. This may be regarded as patriotism, at least according to Dr. Johnson's definition of the word as “‘ the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
The first Panslavist secret society’to secure much notoriety was named Omladina, or Youth, a favourite watchword of
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the reckless‘and inexperienced. It began as a literary and scientific association of Slav students with headquarters at Pressburg in Hungary, now Bratislava in Czecho-Slovakia. During the sixties, it became more and more political in Serbia, holding meetings, founding branches, distributing newspapers and pamphlets all over Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Herzegovina, from the Danube to the Adriatic and the Aigean. The Austrian, Turkish and Serbian Govern- ments vainly issued edicts of suppression, but the only result was to render it more secret, more dangerous and less capable of control.
Serbia was now a comparatively independent principality with a Turkish garrison installed at Belgrade. Her venerable liberator, Milosh Obrenovitch, died on the 26th of September, 1860, and was succeeded by his son Michael. Both had spent long years in exile owing to the intrigues and usurpa- tions of the rival Karageorgevitch dynasty. Michael proved a resolute ruler, curtailing the privileges of a wilful parliament, establishing a standing army and doing much to raise the position of his country. In spite of his severity, he was universally popular, and, as a fitting complement to the work of his father, he was successful in expelling the hated Turkish garrison.
A pretext for raising the question was afforded by the bombardment of Belgrade on the 17th of June, 1862. The responsibility for that occurrence was undoubtedly due to the Omladina, then in the pay of Russia and always striving to stir up trouble in the interests of the pretender Alexander Karageorgevitch, mainly because he always proclaimed himself a Panslavist, while Michael preferred a peaceful foreign policy.
The presence of an alien garrison was a standing grievance at Belgrade and it was an easy matter for the Omladina to foment quarrels. One day, two youthful members of the society and two Turkish soldiers disputed who should first draw water from a well near the rival police stations. They came to blows and the youths were killed in the scuffle. Serbian gendarmes rushed out to arrest the soldiers, but were killed by a discharge of musketry from the Turkish guard-
PRINCE MICHAEL’S MURDER 83
room. Omladina emissaries ran about inflaming the popu- lation, fighting became general, the Turkish quarter was pillaged. The consuls of the Powers intervened, and an armistice was concluded, but next day the garrison took alarm and bombarded Belgrade for a period of five hours. Peace was restored only by the efforts of the British and French consuls, who risked their lives by becoming hostages to the contending parties. The excitement died out, but Michael naturally agitated for a withdrawal of the garrison, the Powers encouraged him, and, though the Turks showed all their traditional genius for delay, his wishes were at last gratified in 1867;
t is a significant fact that, for some days before the riot and bombardment, very many persons were aware that important events were imminent. Evidently the Omladina had sent word round to their numerous adherents. Their plots continued, frequent and audacious, all through the ensuing years, and culminated on the 10th of June, 1868, in the murder of Prince Michael at Topchider, a few miles from Belgrade.
This park is full of trees and thickets and beautiful green glades where herds of deer disport themselves. All round it are thick palisades, some fourteen feet high, designed to keep out the wolves who come down from the mountains in winter time. Human wolves proved more difficult to exclude.
At five o’clock on the afternoon of the 10th of June, 1868, Prince Michael was taking a walk along a narrow path in the woods, accompanied by his aunt Tomanja Obreno- vitch, his cousin Anka Constantinovitch, her daughter Catherine, then eighteen years of age, Captain Garashanin (the son of a former Minister), and a courtier named Timar- ’ tchevitch. At a clearing in the forest, they met four men, who stood aside and doffed their hats. The Prince replied to their greeting, and they immediately fired a volley with pistols, killing the Prince and Anka Constantinovitch, and wounding her daughter Catherine. Captain Garashanin attempted to defend the body of his master, but was shot
through the arm and then stunned with the butt end of a
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pistol. The rest of the party took to flight, but were pur- sued and wounded by one of the murderers. Meanwhile, another of the criminals took out a long knife and stabbed the face and body of the Prince again and again with savage ferocity.
Three of the murderers were named Lazar Maritch, (formerly President of a judicial tribunal in the district of Pozharevats), Constantine Radovanovitch and Stanjevo Rogitch, all members of the Omladina, who had organised this conspiracy on behalf of Alexander Karageorgevitch, intending to proclaim him Prince immediately after the murder. The plot failed, however, because the army remained faithful to the Obrenovitch dynasty, and the people were filled with horror by the terrible deed. Milan Obrenovitch, a boy of fourteen, was summoned from his school in Paris as next of kin and began his troubled reign unopposed.
The actual murderers were condemned to death and shot in Belgrade, as were the following members of the Omla- dina, convicted of being accessories to the crime, Captain Mladen Nenadovitch, Captain Sima Nenadovitch, Svetosar Nenadovitch, and Captain Matsajlovitch. The Serbian Courts also condemned Alexander Karageorgevitch to twenty years’ penal servitude for complicity, but the Hun- garian Government refused to give him up. He was, how- ever, brought before the Hungarian Courts at Budapest, imprisoned in the fortress there in January 1870, and ac- quitted a few months later on account of insufficient evid- ence. A superior Court overruled this acquittal and con- demned him to eight years’ imprisonment, but this sentence was again reversed on appeal, and Karageorgevitch was set free. The extent of his guilt is difficult to determine, but there can be little doubt that he was aware of the plot and took no steps to prevent it.
To understand the policy of the Omladina in the Balkans, we must remember that it was inspired by Russia, and that any Slav State or ruler refusing to be the cat’s-paw of Rus- sian imperialism was relentlessly opposed. In 1876, as a foretaste of the Russo-Turkish war, a rising was instigated
OMLADINA’S ACTIVITIES 85
in Bosnia, while Serbia and Montenegro were persuaded to attack the Ottoman Empire. Serbia, however, fell into disfavour and Russia punished her at the Treaty of Berlin by ceding Bosnia to Austria and by making Bulgaria an independent State instead of handing the territory over to Serbia in accordance with Panslavist ideas. There was widespread indignation, but the Omladina did nothing, doubtless restrained by Russia. The new Prince of Bul- garia (Alexander of Battenberg) however, refused to become a Russian puppet, and in 1885 presumed to annex Eastern Roumelia, which had been left under Turkish suzerainty. The Omladina was at once let loose, and Serbia seethed with jealous fury, insisting upon war. Everyone anticipated a mere military promenade but on the 18th of November, the Bulgarians were completely successful at Slivnitsa.
The Powers, however, did not allow them to profit by their victory, and the Omladina soon displayed its strength. On the 21st of August, 1886, a gang of its members broke into the palace at dead of night, kidnapped the Prince of Bulgaria and carried him off to Russia. There his spirit seems to have been broken, for on his release at the end of the month, he sent an abject telegram to the Czar and fol- lowed it up by abdicating on the 6th of September.
His successor, Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Kohary, was even less agreeable to the Panslavists. Russia refused to acknowledge him and induced the other Powers to adopt the same attitude; the Omladina organised conspiracies against his life almost every day. But he was imperturbable and so full of craft that he contrived to weather every storm.
Meanwhile, Milan, King of Serbia, was harassed with no less intensity by the same secret society. Every sort of trouble beset him—matrimonial, financial, political. He contrived to keep his head above water only by a system of tyranny, which was probably necessary but made him very unpopular. Not content with punishing men who were really conspiring to kill him, he would often invent a plot at a critical juncture, arresting members of the Opposition wholesale and choosing which should be shot or imprisoned for life. In some ways it was preferable to be shot, for
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thus a man escaped torture. Many unfortunate politi- cians, probably members of the Omladina, were flogged or starved to death in gaol, and the world was then informed that they had committed suicide. His methods sound more reprehensible than they really were, for we must remember that the men he killed had often been conspiring to kill him. And regular trials for treason would have been impolitic in view of the unsettled state of the country. The publicity would have had a dangerous effect, and the Omladina might have secured acquittals by packing the juries. Moreover, to give Milan his due, he usually offered convicts a chance of saving themselves by turning King’s evidence. And he certainly possessed a forgiving nature. It was no unusual thing for a man to be condemned to death one day, and in a few weeks to be invited to form a ministry. Milan was a good judge of character, and, though he trusted nobody, he knew when it would serve his ends to accept a recantation in exchange for a reprieve. Milan’s justice was rough and ready, but it was often justice all the same.
Many years later, Pera Todorovitch, one of the cleverest journalists in Serbia, was explaining to me the prison system of his country, and I ventured the opinion that its hardships had been exaggerated.
“ Perhaps,” he said, relapsing into thought.
Then, after a pause, he suddenly pulled up his trousers and showed me two broad _ black bands round the flesh of his ankles.
“ Do you know what that is ?” he asked.
“You have had some accident ? You must have been caught in a trap for wild beasts ?” I surmised.
“A trap for wild beasts |!” he repeated bitterly. ‘‘ That is a very good description of the prisons of Serbia. When I was a young man I belonged to a Radical Committee, and that Committee was compromised in an attempt on the life of King Milan. I knew nothing of that, but my name was on the books of the Committee. I was thrown into prison, sentenced to death, reprieved on account of my youth, and let off with a sentence of twenty years. They riveted irons to my ankles and loaded me with chains. The chains
SECRET MACHINATIONS 87
did not worry me much, for I could carry them over my arms after a fashion, but the irons were tight and arrested my circulation. The flesh swelled, became sore and festered, so that I could understand the expression, ‘ the iron entered into his soul.’ I was only two years in prison, for I benefited by a pardon on the occasion of some national festival, but, as you see, I shall retain the badge of my servitude until my dying day.” |
At the time of this conversation, I had no idea that Todorovitch was, like nearly every member of the Radical party, an adherent of the Omladina, and that the Committee he mentioned was in fact a branch of that society. It is indeed significant of the Omladina’s secrecy that, though I travelled all over Serbia when its activities were most pro- nounced, and though people of all parties talked freely with me on almost every subject, I never heard the name of Omladina mentioned or became aware of its existence. Nor did I meet anyone who admitted a belief that the Kara- georgevitch family stood the faintest chance of succession in any circumstances.
The Omladina, however, was doing as much to revolu- tionise South Slav lands as the Carbonari did to unite Italy. Its work was proceeding feverishly in secret, and a serious revolution broke out at Topola, which was the cradle of the Karageorgevitch dynasty, as Takovo was that of the Obre- novitch. Disaffection spread to Zajechar and all through South Eastern Serbia. Fifteen thousand men took the field against Milan but were easily suppressed, and suppression was followed by a fusillade.
Travelling down the Danube in a steamer, I was shown a little bay with sandy cliffs where the chief conspirators met their doom. Milan, it appears, was not content with in- flicting the death penalty on these members of the Omladina, but issued an order that no crosses should be set up over their graves. This was disregarded during one of his absences from the country, but so soon as he returned, he personally superintended the removal of the offending crosses and saw to the punishment of those who had defied
his orders.
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On Milan’s behalf, however, it must be remembered that his existence was one long, feverish nightmare, with an ever present menace against his life. Anxiety and dissipation undermined his health. He had only himself to rely upon. His personal vigilance was his sole safeguard, for Serbian armies are broken reeds and every Serbian statesman is a potential traitor. No wonder that his mind showed signs of giving way and he was to be found consulting wizards, attending séances, acting upon omens. It would not have been surprising if it had been sheer weariness and despon- dency that drove him to abdication, as they have driven weaker characters to self-destruction. There is, however, a more fantastic, though not utterly incredible, explanation that was supplied me by Chedo Mijatovitch, who long enjoyed his intimacy, if not his confidence, as Minister of State, diplomatist and mystic. That mysticism and credulity can prove useful weapons in crafty hands is shown by the history of the last years of the late Czar of Russia.
Milan’s reign had been full of surprises, but he never succeeded in amazing the world so completely as he did by his abdication in March 1889. There seemed no intelligible cause or pretext for it. It was a time when he had trium- phed over his enemies, banished his wife, silenced his critics. He was hated, but he was feared. There seemed no reason why he should not continue to disgrace his throne to the end of his days. But just as Serbia had apparently settled down to a respite from her seething turmoils, there came a bolt from the blue. After introducing an extremely demo- cratic constitution and summoning the Radicals, his tra- ditional enemies, to power, Milan suddenly sent for the diplomatic body, his ministers and the leading officers of his household. The diplomatists were placed in one room of the palace, and the household in another. room, separated only by acurtain. Mijatovitch, then in office, stood beside Milan while he addressed the diplomatists, announcing his abdication and requesting the friendship of their Govern- ments for the son who should succeed him. The moment Milan began to speak, Mijatovitch looked up with a start.
HYPNOTISED MONARCH 89
The King was evidently speaking, but it was not the King’s voice.
At the close of the audience, Mijatovitch went into the next room where the members of the household were assembled. They had been able to hear, but not to see, and their first question was :
“Who made that long speech ?”
“Why,” was the answer, “‘ the King read it himself.”
“ But we know King Milan’s voice, and we could swear that it was not his.”
“Tt certainly sounded strange, but I saw him read his statement.”
A very general belief long prevailed that Milan had no desire to abdicate, but that he was compelled by some mystical or hypnotic means to speak with the voice of another. This has never been presented in a very convinc- ing way but Milan certainly seems to have abdicated when there was no valid cause for his action, and he subsequently made serious efforts to regain the crown which he had thrown away. And he was in the habit of associating with many undesirable persons and strange bed-fellows, some of whom may have been chosen to influence him by the hidden hands of the Omladina.
This subversive society continued to work secretly for Peter Karageorgevitch as it had done for his father, but its practice was to relax efforts when the Serbian Sovereign submitted to the guidance of Russia, and to intensify them whenever he showed signs of entering the orbit of Austria. There was accordingly a respite from active conspiracy when Alexander Obrenovitch ascended the throne in 1889, not yet thirteen years of age, and Ristitch, the moving spirit of the three Regents, took the reins. Ristitch was a Radical, his first act was to appoint a Radical cabinet, and Radicals were hand in glove with the Omladina; more often than not, they were actually members of the society.
Ristitch, however, became inflated with supreme power, and made himself distasteful not only to the mass of the people, but, what was infinitely more important, to Russian intrigues and therefore to the Omladina. In July, 1892,
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King Alexander paid a visit to the Czar of Russia, who took the opportunity of instilling restiveness against the arbi- trary rule of Ristitch. Russians and members of the Omladina encouraged the King on his return, assisted his inclination for a dramatic act. Dr. Dokitch, his tutor, had more influence over his mind than anyone else, and missed no occasion for urging him to assert himself.
At noon on the first of April, 1893,—I give the date in the Old Style as remarkably apposite—the Regents Ristitch and Belimarkovitch and six ministers received the usual printed invitation to dine at the Palace at eight o’clock. They arrived without any suspicion of what was to come, a rumour having been spread that His Majesty had some com- munication to make about his parents, whose bitter feud was causing anxiety. There was a feeling of exictement in the air, but the King greeted his guests with a calm smile. After the first three courses, a servant came and whispered in the ear of Major Tchiritch, one of the adjutants, who thereupon leaned across to His Majesty and said, “ Gotovo ge,” (itis ready).
The King rose with his glass in his hand, and, as no Serbian entertainment is complete without a toast, usually proposed in the middle of a meal, this action aroused no surprise. The Regents and Ministers settled themselves comfortably and awaited the expected communication about the King’s parents. Raising his glass to the Regents, he acknowledged in suave tones his deep sense of their services to his person and country. After enlarging with subtle irony upon their patriotism and self-sacrifice, he calmly expressed his regret at parting with them now that he had determined to take the reins of government into his own hands and rule alone. In conclusion, he required them to write out their resig- nations.
Amazement would be a mild word to describe their feel- ings. Pale and angry, they gazed upon their young Sove- reign, who stood smiling upon them with a revolver in his hand. After a short pause that seemed interminable, Ristitch rose amid breathless silence and stammered out a few words of protest. The Regency had been fixed by the
A PALACE REVOLUTION gt
constitution for a certain period. It was therefore a con- stitutional impossibility to surrender their office.
As he sat down, the door of the adjoining saloon was thrown open, and the guests perceived a number of soldiers in waiting. General Bogitchevitch, the War Minister, stepped up to them and asked their commander in loud tones, “ How dare you bring troops into the Palace without my knowledge and authority ?”
“ General,” was the answer, “ I now obey none but the orders of His Majesty.”
General Belimarkovitch, the second Regent, alone showed
signs of resistance. Leaping to his feet, he would have rushed upon the King, had he not been restrained by Major Tchiritch, whom he engaged in an unseemly scuffle. The King then withdrew to visit the barracks and fortress, addressed the troops, and received the allegiance of the officers amid loud cheers. - Meanwhile, the Ministers and Regents looked at one another in speechless dismay. No one proposed to resume the interrupted repast. They were informed that rooms had been provided for them in the New Palace, but they refused this hospitality and were accordingly locked up all night in the dining-room. General Belimarkovitch alone snatched a few hours of slumber. The others remained awake, discussing the situation in angry murmurs. In the morning, they were provided with breakfast, and at 11.30, Major Tchiritch informed them that the King’s carriages were in waiting to take them to their homes. Each carriage was accompanied by an officer on horseback, and they realised that it was now too late to offer any resist- ance.
At the age of sixteen, Alexander had executed a palace revolution that might well have cost him his crown, and the ease of its accomplishment afforded a high tribute to his ingenuity and statesmanship. The event was received with immense enthusiasm by the whole people. All houses were beflagged by day and illuminated by night. A general holiday was taken as a matter of course, and bands of men promenaded the streets in a delirium of joy over the deposi-
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tion of their tyrants. Perfect strangers embraced as though in celebration of a national victory. ‘‘ Now,” the King remarked to one of his friends, ‘‘ I can resume my interrupted studies.”
He then entrusted his tutor Dokitch with the formation of a Government. Dokitch was a Radical,—doubtless a member of the Omladina—and the Radicals represented the large majority of the nation. A general election resulted in an enormous Radical majority, ratifying the state- stroke, but the Regents had left the finances in hopeless confusion, and Dokitch found it difficult to set them in order, more especially as the Radicals disliked paying taxes. He died in the following December, and the King’s parents began to make trouble once more. It must be remembered, apart from conjugal difficulties, that they represented con- flicting policies. Milan looked to Austria as his patron and paymaster ; Nathalie was the daughter of a Russian colonel and supported Russian influence. They came and went like the little man and the little woman in an old-fashioned weatherglass. And whenever Milan returned, the prog- nostics were stormy, the Omladina multiplied plots.
Scarcely ten months had elapsed after the state-stroke when Milan returned to Belgrade, the Radicals were turned out of office and he was appointed deputy commander-in- chief. Alexander sought to smoothe matters by a royal edict restoring both his parents to their full rights as Serbian subjects, but the Court of Appeal pronounced this edict to be invalid. Indignant at such opposition to his will, Alexander proceeded four days later (May 21, 1894) to a second state-stroke, abrogating the constitution of 1888 and provisionally restoring that of 1869, which was much less democratic. This was the signal for another outbreak from the Omladina, and at the beginning of 1895 we find the King confirming a sentence of death on one Tchebinats, who had been convicted of high treason, and pardoning some other conspirators, who had sought to poison His Maiesty.
By this time, Milan had grown tired of Belgrade and taken his departure with what money he could secure ; Alexander
A PATRIOTIC KING 93
had received fresh inspirations from Russia when attending the funeral of Czar Alexander III, and when visiting his mother in Paris. She now returned and the Omladina became quiescent though still discontented.
It is the fashion to regard frequent changes of ministry as evidence of political chaos, but it would be equally fair to argue that the permanent predominance of one party proves political stagnation. King Alexander had definite ideas and principles. He was in a sense himself a party leader, and he had this advantage over professional poli- ticians, that he had no axe to grind, his only aims were the peaceful development of his people. If he incessantly called different parties and coalitions to office, this merely illustrated his desire to utilise all the best wits in the land. Again, it was a ceaseless effort to resist the interference of Austria and Russia. Whenever the Radicals were in office, Austria took umbrage and closed her markets to Serbian produce on a plausible pretext of swine-fever. Whenever the Liberals came in, Russian agents redoubled their in- trigues and represented the country as verging on anarchy. The keynote of Alexander’s whole policy was the desire that Serbia should work out her own destiny, independent of foreign control, and he discerned the best means to that end in a ministry that should be bound up neither with Austrophils nor Russophils. .
A first step in that direction was provided by the Nova- kovitch Ministry, which lasted less than a year, doing little good and littleharm. Then in October 1896, Queen Nathalie having left Serbia, Alexander met his father in Paris and all sorts of rumours were immediately afloat. Milan, tired of
_ penury and exile, had begun to mature plans for seizing
his son’s throne. He was now in the pay of Austria and sought to earn his wage by exterminating the Radicals. He had long been looking for an instrument to execute his plans, and now his choice fell on Vladan Georgevitch, a Hebrew adventurer, whose sensational administration aroused many violent and conflicting criticisms.
Whatever else he may have been, Vladan Georgevitch was, drastic and fearless and for a while successful. In
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June 1898,‘through terrorism, corruption, and the falsifi- cation of returns, a general election provided a Skupshtina, consisting of 112 Liberals and one Radical. The Omladina, however, was soon up in arms, and on the 6th of July 1899, Knezevitch, one of its members, nearly succeeded in murder- ing Milan. There seemed no end to the ramifications of the plot. The most determined efforts were made to stamp out the Omladina once for all. Whenever a Radical raised his head or opened his mouth in the country, witnesses appeared to connect him with Knezevitch and he was immediately committed to prison. Members of the Omladina spread rumours everywhere that the whole plot had been invented, while it was generally believed by the impartial that it had been greatly exaggerated. Milan had certainly been attacked but he had received a mere scratch, and mis- chievous people whispered that he found it difficult to re- member which was his wounded arm, wearing one day the right and another the left in his unnecessary sling.
On the Ist of September, 1899, a State trial for high treason was commenced against twenty-nine persons, including Pashitch, the Radical leader and eventually the dictator of Serbia and Jugo-Slavia for nearly a quarter of a century; Protitch, editor of the Radical organ, Odjek ; Ranko Tajsitch, a demagogue who had long been promi- nent in the ranks of the Omladina; Taushanovitch and Colonel Nikolitch. Examining magistrates were certainly not very successful with the chief culprit, Knezevitch. At first he declared that he had acted entirely on his own initiative. Then he implicated Nikolitch and exonerated Pashitch. Finally, he withdrew his accusation and returned to his original statement that he had acted without accom- plices. The Court condemned him to death, ten prisoners to twenty years’ penal servitude, Taushanovitch to nine years, Pashitch and seven others to five years’ imprisonment, and acquitted the others. Ranko Tajsitch, who had fled the country, was sentenced to death in his absence, and actually died in exile on the very daysof the murder of King Alex- ander and Queen Draga.
Draga Lunjevitsa was born of poor, but well-bred parents
A lea hi
QUEEN DRAGA 95
in 1867, at Milanovats, a little fishing village on the Danube, near the remains of a Roman camp. When still a child, she was married to a Bohemian engineer named Mashin, a drunkard and a gambler, with a small reputation for probity. _ He had been agent for a swindling French bank, which col- lapsed after defrauding the Comte de Chambord of £20,000 and Leo XIII of £100,000. He treated his wife with brutal _ violence, and she obtained a divorce on that account. He died of delirium tremens not long after. The future Queen _ was exceedingly musical, and one of her few distractions was to attend the weekly meetings of a choral society called the Omladina. These were held in a big, bare room on the ground floor of the house which contained her humble apartment. There she might have been seen seated on a wooden bench with the arm of a professor or a forester or a tradesman round her waist—there are few class distinctions in Serbia—singing the melancholy old national songs about Czar Lazar and the battle of Kosovo or the doughty deeds of Marko Kraljevitch, “‘ the King’s son,” or the supernatural help given to Serbian heroes by the fairies of Mount Avala. She knew that the society was patriotic as well as choral, but no one told her of its secret activities, no soothsayer was present to warn her.of the terrible menace with which it overshadowed her destiny.
In fairy tales, the village beauty endures hunger, rags and all the other consequences of poverty until Prince Charming comes to lead her away to the altar and the throne ; then all her troubles are forgotten and she lives happily ever after. In real life, however, her old friends are consumed with jealousy when such fairy tales come true. So with Draga. People were kind enough in adversity, but when she became Queen, they sought to overwhelm her with mischievous memories of the past. Not content with vulgar taunts about poverty, ugliness and old age, they asserted—what does not always follow—that she was no better than she should be.
The best answer to this calumny is provided by the fact that Queen Nathalie chose her as lady-in-waiting. Draga’s tact and sympathetic manners attracted all who met her,
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and her béauty was at that time truly remarkable. No one could see her without being struck by her wonderful eyes,— dark, fiery, and at the same time caressing when they chose.
No wonder that King Alexander fell in love with her at first sight. They met at Biarritz about a year after she had been taken up by Queen Nathalie, and stories are told how he would linger in a fireless room on her return to Belgrade, trembling with cold, in the hope of exchanging a few words with her.
Queen Nathalie, one of the most observant of women, soon expressed disapproval of this infatuation, and invited Draga to resign her post—not very good diplomacy, for it drove her back to Belgrade, into the arms of the King. Scarcely had she returned than a torrent of malicious gossip was let loose, fed by the fact that she was now able to take a fine house and wear jewels and drive about in her carriage. But the King had by this time determined to marry her, and it was not to be expected that he would permit his destined bride to remain in penury.
Rumours gathered in volume, more especially when the Russian minister began to visit her and seek her favour for his policy. Very soon all the chief people in Belgrade, including diplomatists and their wives, came to her evening parties on Wednesdays and Saturdays. She held a quiet little Court, charming everyone with her wit, grace and versatility.
At first the rumours that he intended to marry her were received with incredulity. Gradually, however, they became more definite, and opposition was manifested in many quarters. Russia and the Panslavists of the Omladina favoured the match, hoping it might lead to the overthrow of Milan and Vladan Georgevitch, those impenitent parti- sans of Austria. It was remembered that Draga herself had been a member of the Omladina. She was a patriot and should help on their cause. If not, their conspiracies could still be resumed on behalf of Peter Karageorgevitch, the exiled representative of the rival dynasty.
One night, at a State ball in Berlin, the German Empress took aside the Serbian Minister and congratulated him on
A ROYAL MARRIAGE 97
the approaching marriage of King Alexander with a certain German princess. Next day, the newspapers announced the betrothal of Alexander and Draga.
The sensation was enormous throughout Serbia. The Ministers, the Archbishop, the Speaker of the Parliament besought the King to abandon the idea. Denunciations of Draga were poured in upon him and several attempts were made to kidnap her and convey her abroad. It was neces- sary to maintain a strong guard outside her house day and night. But the opposition, bitter as it was, did not extend beyond a few politicians who feared to lose office, a few jealous ladies of the Court, and the partisans of Milan and Nathalie, now united for the first time. The mass of the people welcomed the prospect of relief from Vladan George- vitch’s tyrannous rule and felt flattered that the King should have chosen a Serbian bride. The army, too, was loyal.
The wedding took place in the Cathedral on the 5th of August, 1900, amid great enthusiasm. Guns were fired, bells rang, the streets flowed with wine, an endless chain of Serbians of all classes gaily danced the kolo round the statue of Prince Michael in the Square outside the theatre.
'The honeymoon was one triumphant progress throughout
the length and breadth of Serbia.
Fresh joy was soon provided by rumours of a happy event expected for June or July 1901. Professor Caulet, a dis- tinguished gynaecologist, was summoned to Semendria, and, after examining the Queen, issued a bulletin confirming the rumours. The Czar and Czarina of Russia sent costly presents to the Queen and promised to be god-parents.
But in the spring of 1901, fresh rumours began to take shape and it was whispered that there had been a mistake,
_ that no heir was to be expected after all. The Czar took the
matter up and sent two physicians to investigate. Early in May they reported that Queen Draga could never hope to bear children.
From such archives and statesmen’s memoirs as have been published since the war, it seems probable that Russia was already preparing for a great European conflict, which
G
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she intended to precipitate when a convenient occasion arose. She had plans for the assimilation of Asia and for the establishment of a religious hegemony, a sort of anti- Papacy at Constantinople, and she regarded Panslavism as the prime instrument for dominating Europe and the Mediterranean. And Panslavism required that the King of Serbia should have heirs. But Alexander steadfastly refused to put away his wife. He defied persuasion and menaces alike. He began to dream of a really independent Serbia, freed from Russian and Austrian trammels, working out her own salvation with wisdom and prudence.
Peter Karageorgevitch, on the other hand, the pretender of the rival dynasty, was an unscrupulous exile, eking out his destitution in the back streets of Geneva, eager to sell himself to a Russian king-maker.
He had joined the Omladina at an early age and kept upa correspondence with its leaders. Whenever disaffection arose in the country, from personal or political motives, he was regarded as a possible alternative to the reigning sove- reign. As we have seen, his father was privy to the murder of Prince Michael in 1868, and Peter, then twenty-two, cannot have been kept in the dark.
The first serious attempt made by the Omladina on his behalf is known as the Alavantitch incident and occurred at Shabats in the spring of 1902. It was passed off at the time by the Court party as the act of a madman, with a tendency towards opera-bouffe ; by the Opposition as a pretended plot such as King Milan had been wont to organise when he sought a pretext for casting his enemies into prison.
A strange adventurer, with three companions, suddenly arrived at Shabats at four o’clock in the morning from Mitrovitsa on the other side of the Save. In his hand was a brown-paper parcel, which contained the uniform of a Serbian general. Having retired to a shed and put this on, he made his way to the Custom House and ordered the officials to follow him. This they did, either out of curiosity or under the impression that the man really was a Serbian general. With his increasing band, which now included a few soldiers from a guardhouse near the quays, he went to
A-FANTASTIC) PLOT 99
the Town Hall and ordered the firemen to join him. Some of them laughingly refused, but, when he threatened to shoot them, they thought better of it and followed him to the Prefecture. There he proclaimed Peter Karageorgevitch King of Serbia and ordered the gendarmes to support him. They refused, whereupon some of his followers, who proved to be members of the Omladina and had had intelligence of the plot, occupied all the exits of the Prefecture. Two gendarmes, however, made their escape by a window and told Colonel Nikolitch, their commander, what was taking place. He hurried to the Prefecture and Alavantitch threatened him with a revolver, but the Colonel was too quick for him and terminated the affair by wounding him mortally.
It is a significant fact that the 6th regiment, which after- wards carried out the murder of the King and Queen, was then quartered at Shabats. But the plot does not seem to have been well organised, for even if Colonel Nikolitch could have been won over and the 6th regiment had declared for Peter, the only result would have been a short, sharp civil war, in which King Alexander would certainly have been victorious.
As it was, Peter hastened to disavow the plot in a letter to the newspapers, qualifying it as “‘ a ridiculous riot,” and stating that he knew nothing of Alavantitch. “I deny all participation in the political publications, tracts and pamph- lets which are inundating the country,’”’ he wrote. “ Once and for all I affirm loudly that I am not conspiring in Serbia, that I am not fomenting any trouble there. Why should I employ agents to excite discontent, to provoke revolt, and to work in the interests of my dynasty, when King Alex- ander, more efficaciously than anyone else, has charged himself with the task ?”
All the same, there were found upon Alavantitch a letter from Nenadovitch, Peter’s private secretary, and a number of postcards bearing Peter’s likeness. King Alexander ordered these to be destroyed, but the Prefect locked them up in his desk, where they were found and distributed to the crowd after the revolution. It is also significant that
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on his way to Belgrade, Peter was presented with a bunch of flowers by a little niece of Alavantitch, and that he gave her a specially gracious greeting in remembrance of this abortive conspiracy.
In the autumn of 1902, only a few months before the palace murders, I found every outward appearance of pro- found calm at Belgrade. The King enjoyed the confidence of the people ; a military ministry, under the presidency of General Tsintsar-Markovitch, carried on the government with wisdom and prudence, and the only signs of discontent were manifested by a few professional politicians, represented in the press by noisy, insignificant newspapers.
Yet the plot was rapidly maturing. Early in 1903, the Omladina obtained employment for a young man as scul- lion in the royal kitchens, and instructed him to put some poison into a dish which the King and Queen were sure to eat. The head cook, however, happened to come in just as the youth was scattering a white powder into the saucepan. His suspicions were aroused and a series of questions elicited
—e.F
unsatisfactory answers. At last the cook said, “ Let us —
see you eat some of this stuff.’”’ The boy protested and re- sisted, only increasing suspicion thereby. At length he was forced to eat the poisoned food and died in great agony before half an hour had passed, though doctors were sum- moned and did all they could for him. Then various foreign newspapers, active supporters of Karageorgevitch, published sensational fictions, asserting that King Alexander was mad with suspicions and had actually gone down into the kitchen and shot a scullion, whom he falsely accused of attempting to poison him.
Undismayed by these failures, the Omladina determined to make sure on the third attempt. The Serbian proverb was quoted, “ Tri put pomozhe Bog,’’—God helps the third time. Some officers belonging to the society arranged to shoot the King and Queen as they came out of a con- cert, but the enthusiasm of the crowd frightened them and they abandoned their design.
Meanwhile the plot, which culminated in one of the most savage and resounding murders in all history, had been pre-
MURDEROUS CONSPIRACY IOI
-pared with diabolical cunning during the greater part of two years. Only the more desperate members of the Omla- dina were concerned in it, discredited politicians and dis- charged officers for the most part, but the knowledge that some conspiracy existed was widespread. The ringleaders signed a document similar to that known in Scottish history as a “ Band,” pledging themselves to kill the King and ‘Queen. Very slowly, very cautiously they enrolled fresh -desperadoes and developed all their plans until the oppor- tune moment arrived. Then they struck surely and swiftly, all the details being mapped out with such consummate craft that the slightest hitch was almost impossible. All through this long period, many of the traitors were enjoying the confidence and generosity of the Sovereign they had sworn to kill, eating at his table, wearing his livery, fawning for promotion and presents. _ Surely never can a conspiracy to kill a King and Queen have been known beforehand to so many people. The ‘number of the conspirators has been variously estimated at figures ranging from 50 to 150, and they were constantly sounding their army colleagues in the hope of increasing their numbers, so that scarcely a single officer can have failed to be informed. The plot was almost common gossip inevery coffee-house in Belgrade. Warnings poured in upon the palace from every quarter. The Serbian Ministers at Vienna, Budapest and Sofia sent a variety of details. Anonymous letters came in by almost
every post.
The King, however, remained absolutely convinced of the loyalty of his whole people. ‘I am not afraid of revolu- tions,”’ he said with a smile. ‘‘If any one rebels against me, I am ready to meet hin sword in hand at the head of my faithful army.”
The 10th of June, 1903, had been chosen for the deed because it was the anniversary of the murder of Prince Michael. That morning, Colonel Mishitch drew up a list of etghty-six conspirators and they signed a document swearing to kill the first who showed any sign of betraying the plot. They were to spend the evening together in various
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parts of the town, some of them at the Military Club to the west of the Palace, others in houses of ill-fame, and others at the Srbska Kruna (Serbian Crown), a coffee-house with a long veranda full of little tables immediately facing the gardens at the extreme east of the town.
These orders were carried out, all the officers being in a high state of excitement, and at the Serbian Crown up- roarious applause was aroused when one of them called upon the gipsy band to play Queen Draga’s March. It seemed as though they could not hear it too often, and inno- cent observers must have wondered at this sudden display of enthusiasm for the Queen, or else at the wild laughter which accompanied each fresh demand for the tune.
It was a great carouse. The faces of the officers grew redder, their eyes sparkled like those of wild beasts, and there was something peculiarly devilish about the madness of their laughter. At last someone made a move, and groups of unsteady figures in full uniform stumbled over the rough cobbles of the street towards the palace. Someone began to hum the Queen’s March, and another exclaimed with a hiccough, “‘ To-night, Draga will dance to a different tune.”
All the details had been drawn up minutely. A lieutenant was to give up the keys at the gate of the Palace and let the conspirators into the courtyard, where the King’s Guards were stationed. Captain Kostitch was to disarm the guards. Colonel Mishitch was to go on to the barracks of the 6th Regiment and bring the men out on a pretext of defending the King. Further troops were to be summoned by Mashin on the pretext that the King wished to expel the Queen and they were to escort her to the frontier. Colonel Naumovitch, the friend of King Alexander’s infancy and now his trusted aide-de-camp, was to drug General Lazar Petrovitch, the chief aide-de-camp, who could not be cor- rupted, and open the door of the palace. Naumovitch, however, fell into a drunken sleep, and the door had to be blown open with dynamite. Petrovitch had been insuffi- ciently drugged and found time to cut the electric wires before the explosion, plunging the palace into darkness.
PALACE SHAMBLES 103
He then enquired into the meaning of the invasion, and the officers replied that they had come to demand the King’s abdication and the expulsion of Draga. They pointed out that resistance was useless, and some of them forced their way into the royal bed-chamber, where neither the King nor the Queen could be found. Returning to General Petro- vitch, they threatened to shoot him at once unless he re- vealed the hiding-place of the Sovereigns. This made him realise that everything might be gained by delay, so he replied that they had taken refuge in the cellars. The keys of the cellars had to be found, and this was made as difficult as possible.
Some two hours were passed groping about in the semi- darkness, the General doing all he possibly could to gain time. The gang of officers searched every hole and corner, peering into recesses and overturning barrels. They grew more and more wildly exasperated, knowing that their own lives were at stake, for loyal troops might arrive at any moment. At last it became quite clear that their victims were not in the cellars, so the officers returned upstairs, killing General Petrovitch on the staircase.
They proceeded to the royal bedroom once more and began probing about with their swords and firing wildly in every direction. One bullet went through the wall into a dress-cupboard where the King and Queen had taken refuge. The door had a spring-lock and was papered like the wall of the room, thus escaping notice. But the bullet grazed the Queen’s ear, and she could not repress a little cry, which betrayed the hiding-place. Another ten minutes, it is said, and troops from Shabats would have brought relief, the revolution would have been quelled, the conspirators brought to trial.
As it was, axes were fetched and the door was broken open. The King and Queen were now at the mercy of their murderers.
Then a strange thing happened. These wild desperadoes, inflamed with wine and the lust of blood, were overawed in the presence of that divinity which hedges a King. In- stinctively they shrank back, and it was only under the
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taunts of tht Queen’s brother-in-law, Colonel Mashin, that they recovered themselves.
The King was trying to shield the Queen and showed no sign of fear. Without a word, Mishitch shot him in the neck, and he sank to the ground, the Queen rushing forward to support him. Mashin then stepped forward, having stipu- lated that he should be allowed to kill his sister-in-law. His shot missed, but Lieutenant Sauritch shot over his shoulder and hit her in the breast. Ten other officers rushed in and fired at the helpless pair, hacked them with their swords, and ripped open the Queen’s stomach. At last both bodies were taken up and flung through the window into the garden. :
Then the murderers proceeded to ransack the Palace in search of money, carrying off every valuable they could find. For weeks afterwards all sorts of mementoes could be bought cheaply at street-corners in Belgrade.
While the Queen’s brothers and various Ministers were being murdered, the bodies of the King and Queen were left in the garden. Towards dawn, the Russian Minister, Tcharikoff, who lived immediately across the road and had been watching the proceedings from behind his blinds (like Moray who watched Rizzio’s murder “ through his hands’), went across with his servants and ordered the bodies to be taken indoors. They were then laid upon a kitchen table and some surgeons were ordered to hold a post-mortem. An official account of their investigation was published, intended to prove that the King was insane and that the Queen could never have had a child.
The first intimation of the news was conveyed to the capital by the appearance of a number of young officers who galloped about waving their swords and screaming that ‘“‘ the tyrants ” had fallen. Other assassins were carried about in triumph on men’s shoulders. Zhivkovitch, one of the heads of the Omladina, drove about in a Court carriage, stopping every now and then to harangue the people, announcing that the golden age had dawned and the country been saved from the hands of oppressors.
Except at Shabats, where the King’s partisans were able
A BLOOD-STAINED THRONE 105
to hold out for awhile, the Omladina organised demon- strations in favour of the revolution all over the country, but the mass of the people remained passive, almost dis- interested.
On the 24th of June, 1903, Peter Karageorgevitch arrived at Belgrade, greeted by a large crowd outside the station. As a diplomatic agent remarked on the occasion, they were the same people who had come to thank the late King for each successive constitution, who had conveyed to him the thanks of the nation when he married Draga, and who had decorated their houses as soon as they learned that he and Draga had been butchered.
But the views of such mobs matter little to anyone. The regicides had no concern for the establishment of democracy. They had risked their lives and won. Fora while, no doubt, they would have to pretend to support Russia, and Pan- slavism remained a good card to play—but they could now afford to dispense with the Omladina, to kick: away the ladder which had raised them, and set up a scaffolding of theirown. It will accordingly be seen that the Omladina was superseded, and ceased to exist for any practical pur- pose beyond choral societies and legends and ballads.
To many regicides it seemed also a question whether Peter had not also served his purpose. I heard a significant anecdote soon after the murders. One group of yokels was gazing into a Belgrade shop-window where Peter’s unfamiliar portrait was exposed for sale. .
“Who is that ?” said one.
“That is the new King, Karageorgevitch,” was the reply.
“ But why did they kill the last King ?”’
“ That I do not know. I suppose the army did not like him.”
“Well, now, suppose the army does not like the new King ?”
‘“* Bogami! then they will kill him too.”
Which was much more likely than many imagined. But vain, ill-balanced, wine-sodden Peter, hearing of his unani- mous election to the throne, realising the dreams of a life-
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time, had not the faintest notion how precarious was his tenure.
On the 25th of June, he attended a review of the brave Serbian army at Banitsa, a few miles outside the town. After a few evolutions, a critical incident occurred. The famous 6th Regiment, which had carried out the murders, marched past with Colonel Mishitch at its head.
There was a murmur of expectation as everyone watched to see how Peter would behave. Of course, everyone knew he had been privy to the crime, but it was remembered how, before he left Geneva, he had announced his inten- tion of punishing the murderers. He had submitted to receiving some of them as members of the deputation which came to announce his election, and he had shaken hands with others on the platform at Belgrade, but he had treated them with some stiffness and was popularly supposed to wish to be rid of them, if only to satisfy the prejudices of Europe. Now, however, he went out of his way to put his seal upon the conspiracy, saluting Mishitch with great cordiality and singling his regiment out for the special display of his royal favour. No doubt he had received a strong hint to make himself pleasant to the murderers if he desired his sojourn to be long in the land.
Had Zimri peace ? Peter soon resigned himself to a state of terror. Even in the New Palace sleep forsook him and he was haunted by wild dreams of murder and carnage. The Old Palace, where the crimes had been committed, was razed to the ground. Ten Swiss guards were stationed outside Peter’s bedroom door and two more inside the bed- room itself. A ladder was attached to his window every night, and a launch kept in readiness on the Save in case prudence should dictate an immediate flight. He was little better than a prisoner, seeking consolation in deep potations of slivovits (plum brandy), sighing perhaps for happier days in the taverns of Geneva.
Serbia, however, had now become the chosen vessel for Panslavism, and in 1906 Russian diplomacy contrived to secure British recognition of regicide Serbia. Up to that date, Britain had been the one obstacle to her complete
REGICIDE RULE 107
admission to the comity of civilised nations, thereby hin- dering her financial and political development. France, however, had never severed relations at all. She was anxious to please her Russian ally and she foresaw chances of advancing her imperialist ambitions in the Balkans as well as enriching her powerful financiers.
In 1906, the British Government was engaged in military conversations with France. It was easy to bring pressure upon Sir Edward Grey, who knew nothing of foreign lan- guages or literature and surprisingly little of foreign affairs. As to Serbia, he shared the vague popular idea. The mur- ders had certainly been shocking, but murders were to be expected in the Balkans as they were in South America. Large interests were at stake, and surely it would be enough to stipulate that the regicides should be retired from public positions, so that our representatives should run no risks of being contaminated by their society. Poor Sir Edward Grey was an easy prey to oriental statecraft.
A great display of scene-shifting took place, a fine game of musical chairs. Regicides were nominally retired and trans- ferred, but they remained the autocrats of Serbia; they laughed British policy to scorn, and could afford to laugh now that they had secured their desires. The French gave them a big loan and supplied them with artillery. Serbia became the ieading South Slav State, began to prepare the provocation of the great war, which was to restore her ancient empire.
As long ago as 1773, Montenegro had been held up as the nucleus for the revival of a South Slav (Jugoslav) empire. Her heroism and her geographical position had maintained her independence for a thousand years, including the five centuries when Serbia and Bulgaria were mere serfs, wholly absorbed by the Turkish empire. While the very names of Serb and Bulgar were as completely forgotten as Angles and Saxons and Picts are in Britain to-day, the braves of the Black Mountain continued to inspire fresh heroism, new epics, the wonder of the world.
In 1897, Russia, who had previously proclaimed Montenegro as her only ally, began to doubt herusefulness, cametoregard
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her as an obstacle and proceeded to mark her down for de-
truction. The Serbian regicides started a campaign, relying chiefly on propaganda among the young Montenegrins who
came to Belgrade because there was no higher education at Cettinje. So adroitly were they flattered and feasted that many of them came to believe that their own country was hopelessly antiquated, that the only avenue to progress
and glory lay through the ranks of their Serbian blood- brothers. Surrounded by admirers of political murder, it
was not difficult to persuade them to conspire against their. patriarchal old Sovereign. The Omladina had now been succeeded by a similar society known as the Slovenski Jug,
and the students held regular meetings under its auspices at a beer-house subsequently notorious as the Green
Garland.
Here a plot was engineered in 1907 to blow up King Nicholas of Montenegro and all his family at Cettinje. It has been described as a sort of dress rehearsal for the Sera- jevo crime and seems to have been attempted from the same place on very similar lines. The complicity of the Serbian authorities has been made very clear. Bombs were distributed to the conspiring students from the State arsenal at Kragujevats. This was done by the order of Peter’s elder son George, who has since been put away for insanity despite his zeal, or perhaps on account of his inconvenient zeal for the regicides. Revolutionary proclamations signed “Montenegrin Youth,” (Isrvnogorska Omladina) trading on the name of the half-extinct society, were printed in Belgrade for distribution in Montenegro.
But the plot failed. Some say that Peter’s son, Alexander, who hated his brother George and eventually ousted him from his birthright, sent King Nicholas a warning out of spite ; others that a loyal Montenegrin student heard of the plot and informed his brother, who held an official position at Cettinje. In either case, the conspirators were arrested with bombs in their possession as soon as they reached Montenegrin territory. I was present at their trial in July 1908 and was much impressed by the fairness of the pro- ceedings and the weight of evidence against the prisoners.
MONTENEGRIN BOMB PLOT 109
Lenient sentences were, however, passed upon them, for King Nicholas could never bear to punish anybody.
He did demand the Serbians to extradite other students whose guilt had been revealed, but Pashitch replied that this would be unconstitutional ; also that he was certainly not disposed to stretch a point since ‘‘ a person appeared as a witness at Cettinje and dared throw suspicion upon the Serbian dynasty without being interrupted by the President of the Court.” And at Paris in 1918, I was told by King Nicholas, ‘““Do you know what Monsieur Pashitch said to me when he brought me official thanks for saving his coun- try? Oh! he was very polite. He told me in the most natural way in the world that I must not bear malice over the attempt to blow up my palace with bombs, for assassi- nation had now been recognised as a weapon of practical politics.”
“ And what did your Majesty say to that ?” I enquired.
“Well,” was the laughing answer, “I said he could scarcely expect me to endorse that opinion.”
As Miss Durham states, “the psychology of the whole movement is of extreme interest as a complete example of how an idea can be instilled into a ‘ group mind’ formed by steadily working upon the young in one direction only. None of these young Montenegrins had, in fact, a personal grievance. In most cases their education was paid for by the very Government they wished to upset.”’
After the failure of the Cettinje bomb plot, the regicides concentrated for a while on Macedonian Komitajis, a form of licensed brigandage led by regular officers and spreading terrorism over a large area. The annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 aroused frenzied indignation through Jugoslav lands, though it merely regularised an accom- plished fact and made no difference to conditions in those provinces. The indignation, however, proved useful for propaganda against Austria, and a great State trial at Agram in 1909 threw a lurid light upon the activities of the Slovenski
ug. : ae this time the regicides formed the Narodna Odbrana, or National Defence Society, with but a thin veneer of
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secrecy. Crimes of violence have not been brought home to it convincingly, and it seems to have been considered too mild, for it was superseded in rg1r by the Union of Death (Ujedinjenje ili Smrt) Society, commonly called the Black Hand, for the union of Serb peoples.
The Central was at Belgrade and pronounced sentences of death. Each member had to agree to “ lose his indi- viduality.’”” The seal was a clenched hand grasping a skull and crossbones beside a knife, bomb and poison flask. There was a pagan oath of fidelity and sacrifice “ by the sun which warms me, by the earth which feeds me, by God and by the blood of my forefathers, by my honour and my life.’ The constitution was similar to that of the Omladina, each member enlisting five others. Mysterious initiation took place in a dark room, where a masked man from the Central suddenly appeared and the proceedings were ren- dered more melodramatic by a table with a black cloth displaying one taper, a cross, a dagger andarevolver. There was a regulation that, in case of treacherous acts, ‘“ the group shall at once render the traitor innocuous,” and an execution was to be followed by the insertion of the follow- ing advertisement in the Commercial News of Belgrade: “Communication is sought with a rich man for an important undertaking,” followed by an address and the number of the group, whereupon a representative of the Central arrived to make enquiries.
These and other details are to be found in the official report of the Salonica Court-martial in 1917, when Alexander Karageorgevitch tried to break the power of the Black Hand, The prisoners included nine officers and one civilian, charged with conspiring to murder him and Pashitch and to replace them by a military dictatorship. It is a very remarkable document, reflecting the troubled conditions in Serbia before and during the war. Witnesses of every class tell hideous stories of robbery and murder and es- pionage. The plea of patriotism was held to justify every atrocity ; all were ever ready to sell themselves and betray their most intimate friends. es
A long list of murders committed by members of the Black
THE SERAJEVO CRIME III
Hand between its foundation and the Serajevo crime might be given, but it may suffice to mention that Austria was the main area of operations.
The murder of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sera- jevo was committed by three young men named Prinzip, Nedjelko Tchabrinovitch and Grabezh, all under twenty and sufferers from consumption. Knowing that they could not live long, they resolved to signalise themselves by some desperate deed. They were Bosnian students of the same “immigrant ’”’ class as the young Montenegrins who had plotted against King Nicholas in 1907, frequenters of the same eating-house known as the Green Garland, partly maintained by the Narodna Odbrana Society, and active members of another secret society called Young Bosnia. This society was affected by Bolshevik inspirations and was modelled on the Russian plan of circles unknown to each other. It published subversive newspapers in Austria, spread sedition in the schools and obtained recruits for the Narodna Odbrana as well as desperadoes for the Komitajis and their brigand bands.
As Hermann Wendel wrote in his book, “ Every day, political refugees and schoolboys expelled from beyond the border met in the square at an inn called the Green Garland, dreamers and powder-stained komitajis, all with empty pockets and full brains; a world in themselves, seething with unrest, boiling over with zeal, tinder waiting only for the coming of sacred fire.”
Prinzip was emotional and unbalanced, perhaps diseased in mind as wellas body. Before he left Serajevo, he attended the school of Danilo Ilitch, who encouraged his murderous instincts and eventually planned his crime. At his trial, Prinzip callously informed the Court, “I went to Belgrade to finish my education. There I was very poor and lived on debts. Then I came here and committed the murders.”
Nedjelko Tchabrinovitch was the son of a man who was employed for thirty years as an Austrian spy and eventually committed suicide in consequence of his poverty. Ned- jelko worked as a printer, chiefly for Socialists and Anar- chists, but never contrived to remain long in the same
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employment. He also helped in the organisation of strikes. His talk was often very wild and he used to declare that he was ready to murder anyone who opposed his ideals. It was he who showed Prinzip a newspaper at the Green Gar- land announcing the Archduke’s visit to Serajevo, and they agreed to try to go there and kill him.
Grabezh was the son of a Bosnian pope, or priest of the Orthodox church, but regarded religion as a fairy-tale and was heard to say that such a man as the Archduke ought not to be allowed to live.
Such talk was soon repeated in Belgrade and reached the ears of regicides, who were looking out for fresh opportu- nities of bloodshed for the advancement of their interests and those of Greater Serbia. The chief of these was Dra- gutin Dimitrijevitch, chief of the Intelligence section of the Serbian General Staff, known as Apis in the Councils of the Black Hand. According to the Serbian historian, Professor Stanojevitch, he “ loved adventure, danger, secret meetings and mysterious activity.” His right hand man was Captain Vojislav Tankositch, Number Seven on the foundation roll of the Black Hand, a weakly little man with a mild manner and a wild, unbridled nature. After superintending the murder of Queen Draga’s brothers in 1903, he earned great notoriety by his terrorism as a komitaji leader in Macedonia. Referring to a conflict with Bulgarian propagandists, he described how a gang of thirty Serbians met in a dark room and swore to kill two Bulgarians for every Serbian slain. “Lots were drawn,” he said, ‘‘ to choose those who should go forth and murder. We broke a loaf in two and each ate a piece. It was our sacrament. Our wine was the blood of the Bulgarians.’’ Miss Durham describes him as “a primitive savage,” while Stanojevitch says, ‘‘ Tankositch was undoubtedly an honourable man and a genuine patriot ; the conviction that he was fulfilling a patriotic duty jus- tified many awful deeds in his eyes.”’
In 1911, the year of the foundation of the Black Hand, Dimitrijevitch and Tankositch tried to arrange the murder of the Emperor Francis Joseph or of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand ; they sent Zhivo Jovanovitch, a tuberculous
ASSASSINS ON PILGRIMAGE 1I3
man, to Vienna for that purpose, but he was never heard of again. In February 1914, this patriotic pair concerted with a Bulgarian secret revolutionary society to attempt the murder of King Ferdinand ; and in 1916 they sent men to Corfu to attempt the life of King Constantine of Greece.
When Tankositch reported that Prinzip and his friends had volunteered to kill the Archduke, Dimitrijevitch replied, “That is well. You must teach them the use of weapons.” This was done by Tankositch, who then proceeded to arrange for them to commit the crime according to the plan proposed by Prinzip’s old schoolmaster, Danilo Ilitch. Their actual journey from Belgrade to Serajevo was organised by Milan Tsiganovitch, one of Dimitrijevitch’s former komitajis, who had now been given employment on the Serbian State rail- ways under the supervision of the Belgrade police, to whom he sent regular reports.
At their trial, the three youths were examined separately and all gave the same account of their journey. Their first step was to take the steamer up the Save to Shabats, bearing a letter from Tsiganovitch to Major Popovitch, the head of the frontier post there. He was found playing cards in a beer-house, but he evidently considered their introduction so important that he immediately stopped his game and took them to his office. There he provided them with free passes for the State railway and tickets at half price for the private line, which he could not have done without definite instruc- tions from Government officials at Belgrade. Tchabrinovitch was told to cross the Drina at Zvornik ; the other two were given a letter to Captain Prvanovitch, the officer in charge at Loznitsa. That person at once telegraphed to the cus- toms’ guard, who came and arranged where the travellers could most safely pass the frontier.
They slept the first night at the Serbian custom-house ; then they were taken to an island on the Drina, where they stayed at a peasant’s hut ; then a customs’ man found them a guide named Milovitch, a smuggler, who led them by a roundabout way through woods and swamps until they found an empty hut for the night. Next day they reached the house of one Obren Mioshevitch, thoroughly exhausted
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in their weak state of health by all this unusual exercise and the weight*of their lethal weapons. Mioshevitch lent them bags for greater convenience of carriage, and they went on their way, threatening him with dire vengeance if he be- trayed them.
On reaching the outskirts of Priboj they hid in a wood while their guide went to seek out Veljko Tchubrilovitch, a member of the Narodna Odbrana. The guide was now told to go home, and all the thanks he received was a threat of vengeance for possible betrayal. Tchubrilovitch now super- seded him and escorted them on horseback with the bombs in his saddle-bags.
All sorts of adventures occurred on the way. They came suddenly upon some gendarmery barracks and were nearly caught by the Austrian police, which would have needed lengthy explanations in view of their bags of bombs. How- ever, they crept off and made their way to the house of Mishko Jovanovitch, the owner of a cinema at Tuzla. He was known to them as the agent of the Narodna Odbrana, but belonged to the “ intellectual” side of the movement and scarcely believed in the righteousness of taking life for political purposes. The young conspirators were accordingly far from welcome, and he soon let them see that he was thoroughly frightened. They took advantage of this and tried to bully him, but he absolutely refused to convey the bombs to Serajevo. The utmost he would do was to keep them till called for.
On reaching Serajevo, Prinzip stayed with his old school- master, Danilo Ilitch, who fetched the bombs from Tuzla and hid them under his sofa. Grabezh went to his father’s parsonage. Tchabrinovitch, who had travelled by Zvornik, arrived without incident, and all was ready for the deed. They had only to await the arrival of the Archduke.
It was Vidovdan, the anniversary of the famous battle of Kosovo, which was fought on the 15th of June 1389 and sealed the fate of the transitory Serbian Empire for cen- turies, an anniversary sacred to all Serbs, the theme of all their most doleful ballads, the prime memory of patriotic mourning. It was for Kosovo that Montenegrins wore
RETRIBUTION 115
black bands in their caps as part of their national costume. And here was an Austrian archduke, the heir to the imperial throne, the representative of alien tyranny, coming to parade his pomp in the Bosnian capital on that sacred day. The indecency of it! An outrage that could be wiped out only with blood.
Tlitch made all the preparations, and the crime went off as though by clockwork. He chose the places where the youths were to stand to await the passage of the Archduke and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg. He even provided them with cyanide of potassium to take immediately after they had thrown their bombs, so as to avoid inconvenient admissions at their trial, but the doses were too weak and merely made them sick. The Archduke and his wife were duly murdered. As the murderers were under twenty, the law did not permit them to be executed, but they were all sentenced to twenty years’ penal servitude and died of tuberculosis in prison within three years.
Danilo Ilitch, Mischko Jovanovitch and Veljko Tchubrilo- vitch were also tried as accomplices. Ilitch obviously had no defence. The other two admitted membership of the Narodna Odbrana but pleaded that it was a harmless society, concerned not with crimes but with ideals. If they had harboured Prinzip and his companion, it was through fear of reprisals in the event of their refusing. They had heard terrible tales of Serbian vengeance. For instance, the Vihor newspaper had recently published a poem glori- fying Tankositch and relating how he had made a raid into Old Serbia and massacred a Turkish Beg with his whole family as a punishment for betrayal. Tankositch could easily make a similar raid into Bosnia and punish them. The defence was not accepted, and these three were duly executed, Ilitch as an older and saner man being considered even more guilty than the young fanatics whom he had suborned. pee
The Austrian Government was very patient, contenting itself with enquiring, fifteen days after the murder, what steps the Serbian police had taken or intended to take to follow up traces of the crime. To this the Serbian Foreign
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Office coolly replied that “‘ up till now the police have not occupied tHemselves with the affair.” There was indeed no reason for their making any further enquiries, seeing that all the facts were in their possession from the outset. Even the Austrian ultimatum of July 1914, which is consi- dered to have provoked the great war, was comparatively mild, much milder than the British ultimatum delivered to Egypt within thirty-six hours of the murder of the Sirdar in 1924.
Austria did not then know of the existence of the Black Hand and therefore fathered the crime on the Narodna Odbrana, whose suppression she demanded. Nor did she know of Dimitrijevitch’s or Tankositch’s complicity. But she had obtained information that Tsiganovitch had insti- gated the murderers and taught them the use of their weapons, so the ultimatum required that he should be handed over. He was, however, an instrument of Pashitch, the Serbian Prime Minister, and his surrender might have led to very inconvenient revelations. So Pashitch arranged for his escape, pretended he could not be found, smuggled him away to America, and eventually rewarded him with a house and property at Uskub, where he now flourishes like a green bay tree.
The responsibility of the Serbian Government was long and hotly denied, but facts have gradually leaked out and at last established their guilt beyond the faintest shadow of doubt. The regicides were naturally implicated. They rose to power by murder and battened on bloodshed. They founded the Black Hand for the deliberate purpose of organi- sing fresh crimes in secret. x
They were fully exposed at the strange state trial held at Salonica in 1917, when the war was still in progress, though peace proposals were already in the air. Alexander Karageorgevitch, then Regent, and Pashitch, the perennial Prime Minister, conceived the idea that Serbia would stand in a very ugly light if peace were made and Austria obtained the long delayed opportunity of revealing what she had found out about the murder of the Archduke. Dimitri- jevitch must therefore be removed. Why not on the lines of
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the Serajevo murders? Bosnian “immigrant” students were sought at the Green Garland and paid £800, but they accomplished nothing. An attempt to lure Dimitrijevitch to Macedonia and kill him there proved a failure. So a charge of attempting to murder Alexander Karageorgevitch and Pashitch was trumped up against Dimitrijevitch and other leaders of the Black Hand.
_ The only evidence was that two shots had been fired by unknown persons at a distance of 200 yards from Alex- ander’s carriage while he was motoring in Greece in 1916. There was nothing to prove that the shots were ever intended for Alexander. They had aroused no sort of interest at the time. There was nothing to connect them with Dimitri- jevitch or with the two men accused of firing them. The evidence of a plot against Pashitch amounted only to the vaguest rumours. The sentences, however, had been pre- pared in advance. Eight of the prisoners were condemned to death.
But the trial had been so farcical that the British War Office innocently intervened with a plea for leniency, to which the Serbian Government replied that it was impossible to pardon Dimitrijevitch because he had organised the Sera- _ jevo murder. If so, he was condemned for one crime and - executed for another.
; _ Inhis last willand testament, he declared, ‘ I die innocent of the crime with which I am charged and convinced that
my death is necessary to Serbia for reasons of high state policy.” And apart from any desire to satisfy Austria, Dimitrijevitch had now become a dangerously important person, capable of making himself dictator after a victorious war. The Black Hand had forced the second Balkan war in 1913, as well as the great war in 1914, and the Balkan war had greatly enhanced the prestige of the regicides.
Pashitch’s share in the guilt of Serajevo was revealed only in 1924, when Ljuba Jovanovitch published an article entitled ‘‘ Vidovdan’”’ about the Serajevo crime. He said that, at the end of May or beginning of June 1914, he at- tended a Cabinet Council as Minister of Education, and Pashitch announced that some persons were preparing to go
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to Serajevo for the purpose of killing the Archduke Francis Ferdinand. The Cabinet agreed that they ought to be stopped at the frontier, and Stojan Protitch, Minister of the Interior, promised to send out orders to that effect. But, according to Jovanovitch, “‘ the frontier authorities belonged to the Omladina,’’—by which he meant the Black Hand— “and did not carry out Stojan’s instructions, reporting that the order had come too late.’’ Pashitch had, of course, foreseen this and merely sat down to await events, thus becoming an accomplice in the murderous plot.
According to Dimitrijevitch, the Serajevo crime had also been encouraged by Alexander Karageorgevitch, and it was to protect himself against reprisals from the Black Hand that Alexander organised a rival secret society known as the White Hand, also composed of desperadoes.
I have not been able to confirm this charge completely, but the revelations made at the Salonica trial certainly call for further explanation.
The Russian Government was certainly implicated in the Serajevo murders. Before he let loose the avalanche, Dimitrijevitch consulted Artamanoff, the Russian military attaché at Belgrade, and was told to wait a few days. Artamanoff reported to Hartwig, the Russian Minister, who discussed the matter with Alexander and Pashitch, and telegraphed for instructions to St. Petersburg. Then Artamanoff remained in daily communication with Dimitri- jevitch, gave him 8,000 francs for the Black Hand, and assured him that Russia would support Serbia in case of war. And it is significant that, after the Bolshevik revolu- tion in Russia, Artamanoff lost his salary and property only to be pensioned immediately by the Serbian Govern- ment.
France has also been accused of participation in the plot and there are stories of meetings of the French Grand Orient at the Hotel St. Jerome, Toulouse, in January 1914, to promote the murder of Francis Ferdinand. Masaryk seems also to have been active in Bohemia. But here the accusa- tions are less definite.
Privy conspiracy had, however, been active for many
—— a =P”
A SENSATIONAL TRIAL 119
years in Bohemia for the subversal of the Austrian Empire, the chief instrument being a secret society known as the Omladina, perhaps distinct from the South Slav organisation of the same name. It was constituted on the group system usual among Anarchists. Five members were known as a “hand” and led by a man called a “thumb.” Five thumbs became a superior hand and chose their thumb. Members knew only the members of their own hand, recog- nising others by signs and secret names. The Society was founded in 1891 and soon became strong through criminal action, organising the expressions of Bohemian discontent— workmen’s risings, the spread of false alarms and all sorts of active and passive resistance to authority.
Secrecy was not well maintained and the suspicions of the police led to a sensational State trial at Prague, lasting from the 15th of January to the 21st of February, 1894. Among the accused was Dr. Alois Rascin, aged twenty-five, who was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. Undeterred by this, he persevered with political conspiracies and became one of the founders of the Czechoslovak republic, which owes him most of its financial organisation. He was eventually killed by a student named Soupal.
Seventy-seven prisoners were brought up on a charge of having attempted to change the form of government by force, to the extent of risings and civil war, the immediate cause of the prosecution being disturbances at the Emperor Francis Joseph’s birthday celebrations on the 17th of August, 1893.
After a concert in the principal square, as the military band was about to depart by torchlight, a group of young men surrounded it, singing the song, “‘ Down with tyrants and traitors,’ while from the base of a statue others started booing and howling, and thousands of people followed their lead. The band tried to drown the noise with their brass instruments, but the mob beat them with cvi-cris, a tin toy from Paris, then all the rage. The police formed a cordon between the band and the mob, which went on crying, ““Down with Austria! Down with the dynasty! Down with the nobles !”; broke the windows of the Restaurant Mayer, an
‘
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aristocratic resort ; hooted in front of the Emperor’s hotel, and provoked the troops in the Karolinenthal barracks. The tumults were so violent and continuous that, on the 12th of September, a state of siege had to be proclaimed.
The trial took place nominally behind closed doors, but, as the law permitted each prisoner to introduce three con- fidential friends, the defence consisted of over 200 persons, besides twenty-eight journalists. When the evidence came to an end, the prisoners seized glasses from the tables and threw them at judges and jurymen, broke the panes of the glass doors and tried to escape. The wildest confusion ensued, the alarm bells of the Palacé of Justice pealed with- out ceasing, soldiers with fixed bayonets chased yelling fugitives down the corridors.
Besides the seventy-seven prisoners in Court, there was one who failed to appear—Rudolf Mrva, who had been murdered on Christmas night, as he was lighting the candles for his Christmas tree, by comrades who had recognised him as a provocative agent of the police. For a long time afterwards, the name of Mrva was in common use as an offensive nickname for a traitor or spy.
The dangerous work of the society was fully revealed at the trial and most of the accused—young writers, clerks and artisans—received heavy sentences. Prosecutions, however, rarely succeed in stamping out secret societies, and the Bohemian Omladina did not cease its activities until the establishment of the Czecho-Slovak republic.
Another secret society, named Underground Prague, existed simultaneously and seems to have been connected with the Omladina. It took its name from the fact that it constructed passages under the houses of well-to-do people for purposes of burglary and terrorism.
According to the memoirs of M. Benes, the Czecho-Slovak Foreign Secretary, most of the work seems to have been done by a secret society founded by him and President Masaryk at the beginning of the war. They deliberately named it Mafia, after an avowedly criminal society, and its object was to assist the Austrian province of Bohemia in treacherously supporting the enemies of Austria at every
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tight corner. Benes slipped over to safety in Paris, Masa- ryk to London, and they organised propaganda through Switzerland to the instant risk of their lodges and “ cells ”’ and “huts”? at home. Masaryk’s chief difficulty in dealing with foreign statesmen, especially Sir Edward Grey and Beckendorff, the Russian ambassador in London, was that they could not understand ethnographical maps of Austria, at any rate as presented by the Czechs.
To sum up. Panslavism cannot be absolved of respon- sibility for the great war,—the Serajevo war. The murder of the Archduke was organised by Serbia with the encourage- ment of Russia in order that Austria might be forced to fight. While Austria still hesitated, Russia was the first to mobilise ; and her ally, France, showed her complicity by pretending to England that Russia had been forced into mobilisation by the calling up of men in Austria hours before.
How far has this ungodly conspiracy succeeded ? Russia has been punished by reduction to anarchy in the hands of a gang of criminal lunatics, and may never more raise her head among nations. Serbia was temporarily wiped off the map in 1915, but restored and raised to imperial propor- tions by the complaisance of her allies in 1918. She sur- vives under the name of Jugoslavia, ruled by remnants of secret societies and regicides, distracted by racial rivalries. Montenegro, whose heroism saved Serbia again and again from disaster, has been annexed by force and fraud with the connivance of the French, but will never submit so long as a single patriot survives the savage reign of terror. Croatia continues to struggle against the oppression which passes under the name of emancipation. Jugoslavia is distracted, isolated, stormbound, menaced on every hand. The mills of God still grind. Providence had registered her death- warrant. Cwjus vulturis hoc erit cadaver ?
- AUTHORITIES
Von Kallay : Geschichte der Serben. Budapest, 1877.