threatened to do if he were ever elected
to the Royal Academy. And yet, after the character of the scoundrel King
was fully exposed, his advocates, so far as I know, had not the grace to
own their error. Of course there was in Montenegro a certain amount of
uninstigated unrest; the wine of politics, which they were now for the
first time freely quaffing, had gone to their heads--it was youth
against age, the students were enthusiastic Democrats, the peasants were
sturdy Radicals and they did not always restrict themselves to
dialectical arguments. A certain number of people had gone to live "u
shumi"--"in the woods." But the reasons that impelled them were not so
much their devotion to the ex-King, as their own criminal past or their
poverty. Others again had taken to this life for what may be called
reasons of "honour."[42] Among the brigands was a man who was captured
on the borders of Herzegovina, and before his execution--he had murdered
seven people--he declared that he was a patriot and had done all this
for the sake of King Nicholas, his victims being members of the
domineering party. But when reminded that one of them was a baby, he
hung his head and said no more.... There was discontent produced by the
high cost of living--as the Italians not only held Antivari but even
fired on French boats that were taking supplies up the river Bojana, it
was necessary to revictual all except the new parts of Montenegro from
Kotor. The lack of petrol, from which even the American Red Cross units
were suffering, compelled the authorities to fall back on ox-waggons,
which at any rate are not expeditious. By the way, it was the staff of
another mission, calling itself the International Red Cross, which was
to blame for adding to the country's troubles; after they had been
installed for a month or two at Cetinje the people themselves, and not
the authorities, turned them out, on the ground that they had used the
Red Cross to conceal their machinations in Nikita's interest. The
Yugoslav Government was held up to reprobation in the British Parliament
and press for having hampered more than one British mission in the work
of relieving the Montenegrins. The resources of these missions appeared
to be moderate--the head of one of them had a meeting with Colonels
Fairclough and Anderson of the American Red Cross and suggested that
they should provide him with the wherewithal for carrying on. But even
if their resources had been scantier t