sing her skirt revealed on the
petticoat, which had once been a tablecloth, a large "S.W.H." These
felonious ways are in contrast with the usual Serb candour. One
afternoon in Belgrade I was searching for a small street in a district
which I had not visited before. When at last, after many inquiries, I
came to within fifty yards of it I found a policeman--but it is only
fair to say that the majority of the force consisted at this time of
soldiers recently disbanded. When I asked him where the street might be,
the good man thought a while and then, throwing back his open hand and
giving up the problem in despair, said, "My God, I know not."

The wave of crime has manifested itself differently among the Serbs and
the Montenegrins, in that the latter have been more primitive and have
consummated their plundering by assassination--and this in a country
where between 1895 and 1913 only two men were murdered for their money.
In Serbia the people, even in the terrible distress after the War, did
not go to such lengths. During the first half-year, the only two cases
of unnatural death in the whole district of [vC]a[vc]ak, where I spent a
couple of months, were both of them suicides, an old man hanging himself
on account of the death of his last remaining soldier son, and an
officer's wife, who had been too friendly to an Austrian, throwing
herself into a well on her husband's return. A certain village of the
same district is an instance of the frequency of all those minor
peccadilloes, such as drunkenness and rowdiness and so forth, which the
Serbs permit themselves. There is a law which lays it down that the
mayor must be a native and must be a man who never has been lodged in
gaol. But that unhappy village in the [vC]a[vc]ak region is unable to
produce a single adult man with such a record.... If the Serb of the old
kingdom is a more easy-going individual than his brother of the
mountains it is quite erroneous to think that they dislike each other or
have not resolved to come together.

THE CROATS AND THE SERBS

Some of Yugoslavia's neighbours were anxious, during the months which
followed the War, that we should learn how Serb and Croat were
continually at each other's throat. The dissensions between the two
branches of the Yugoslav family would have been much more serious and
more prolonged if their neighbours had paid less attention to them. It
is true that "our Serbian customs," in the words of Ja[vs]a Tomi['c],
"com