do not deny these incidents,
and considering the trouble which they gave themselves to have a long
series of open-air brutalities officially photographed and made the
subject of picture postcards, one presumes that the dental operations
were omitted on account of the bother of indoor photography. The
postcards, of which I have a large collection, place on record the
procedure used in the wholesale hanging and shooting of Bosnian and
Serbian civilians, young and old, men and women. More trouble was
taken over the photographs, which are sometimes minute and sometimes
artistic in depicting a row of gallows on an eminence with gloomy
clouds behind them, than was taken with the manufacture of these
gallows, for in many cases they were no more than a seven-foot stake,
to the top of which the victim's throat was firmly fastened, holding
his or her feet a short distance from the ground. We have in the
London Press and in the House of Lords a number of reactionary persons
who do not cease regretting the disappearance of Austria-Hungary. The
new States, such as Yugoslavia and Czecho-Slovakia, they argue, are
very unsatisfactory, if only for the reason that they substitute a
lower civilization for a higher. Austrian culture, in their opinion,
is so different from that of the new States that you cannot compare
them. And when they talk of the Habsburg dynasty it is after the
fashion of old Francis Joseph who, in 1891, when the four hundredth
anniversary of the great Czech teacher Comenius was being officially
celebrated in all the schools of Prussia, commanded that nothing of
the sort was to be done in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, because his
attention had been drawn by Archbishop Schwarzenberg of Prague to a
Latin letter in which the great man uttered some sharp words
concerning the dynasty. One is prepared to overlook a great many
things which happened in the stress of war, but the postcards which
portray fashionably dressed women and girls strolling between the
gallows as if at a garden party and merely using their parasols
against the sun, do not appear to leave any attributes for a
civilization lower than that which they exhibit. The Bosniaks and
Serbs who were thus done away with were frequently even less to blame
than those ignorant peasants who, being told by their priests that
Peter was their King, shouted "Long live King Peter!" as the Austrian
troops marched through their villages, and were forthwith hanged for
high tr