ed the traitor
king. As it was, they occupied Antivari, from which place they smuggled
arms and munitions into the country. They conspired with the adherents
of the old regime, a very small body of men who were enormously alarmed
at the loss of their privileged position. The chief of them was Jovan
Plamenac, a former Minister whom the people at Podgorica had refused to
hear, a few weeks previously, when he attempted to address them. He was
hated on account of the most ruthless fashion in which, as Minister, he
had executed certain of his master's critics at Kola[vs]in. There was a
time, during the first Balkan War, when he advocated union with Serbia
and on April 6, 1916, he wrote in the _Bosnische Post_ of Sarajevo that
Nikita, owing to his flight, "may be regarded as no longer existing."
But his unpopularity remained and, with vengeance burning in his heart,
he went from Podgorica to the Italians. They concocted a nice plan--he
was to raise an army of his countrymen and the Italians would bring
their garrison from Scutari. On January 1 Plamenac and his partisans
tried to seize Virpazar, on the Lake of Scutari--the Commandant of the
Italian troops at Scutari, one Molinaro, had asked the chief of the
Allied troops, three days before this attempt, whether he might dispatch
two companies to that place for the purpose of suppressing the disorders
which had not yet come to pass. Another rising was engineered at
Cetinje, where twenty or thirty of the poor peasants who had let
themselves be talked over by Plamenac were killed; the rest of the
misguided fellows were sent home, only their leaders being detained.
Plamenac himself escaped to Albania.[26] On the side of the Montenegrin
Provisional Government no regular troops were available, as the Yugoslav
soldiers who had lately arrived were engaged in policing other parts of
the country. Volunteers were needed and a body of young men, mostly
students, enrolled themselves. They were so busy that they omitted to
inform Mr. Ronald M'Neill, M.P., that they really were Montenegrin
students. That indignant gentleman insists that they were Serbs, armed
with French and British rifles, against which, he tells us (in the
_Nineteenth Century_, January 1921) the insurgents could not do much.
Eleven of these volunteers were killed and they were buried underneath
the tree where Nikita used to administer his brand of justice. All kinds
of incriminating documents were found upon the dead and cap