at particular
plebiscite it must be noted that the Allies were very imprudent in
confiding the maintenance of order to the rebaptized German Security
Police, a body which was entirely in the hands of the reactionary
clique. Yet the military precautions of zone "A" in Carinthia were not
what they should have been, for when the Yugoslavs had lost the
plebiscite an unrestrained horde of Austrian sympathizers, some of them
from that zone and some from outside it, some of them civilians and some
of them soldiers in mufti who made for certain places where supplies of
weapons had been hidden, swarmed across the land and terrorized the
Yugoslavs in such a fashion that a Yugoslav military force had to come
in to protect them. "But how barbaric are these Yugoslavs," sneered
their enemies, "for they refuse to recognize the result of the
plebiscite." More than one diplomat in Belgrade was ordered to present
himself at the Foreign Office and demand an answer why, etc. But the
Yugoslavs had no intention of imitating d'Annunzio.

Those who were not in the zone at the time of the voting might well be
astounded at the result, which was an Austrian victory by 22,025 votes
against 15,278 for Yugoslavia. In view of the undoubted Yugoslav
majority, it was felt that something more than active propaganda, before
and during the election, had been brought to bear. For example, in the
commune of Grab[vs]tajn (Grafenstein) the Germans are said to have
inscribed on the electoral list 180 persons from Celovec and Styria who
had no right to vote; they also asked that seventy strangers should be
inscribed. On submitting these claims to the judgment of the district
council the German leaders, even as the Yugoslavs, were required to
initial each request; it is alleged that these initialled papers, which
were attached to the claims, were left overnight in a room the key of
which was in the keeping of the German secretary, Schwarz. He is charged
with having removed the initialled papers from the Slovene claims and
affixed them to the German claims. There was a large amount of more
usual corruption. Thus it is known that twenty-eight Slovene servants at
an important landowner's were unable to resist the material arguments
and voted for the Germans. And if it is true that a number of people
voted twice and even three times the Inter-Allied Commission fell short
of its duties. It is said that the voting was so lax that if a stranger
had been inscribed and d