d been the spoilt child
and who had been given posts for which he was unfitted, now discovered
in himself, during the autumn of 1918, a great desire to obtain a
certain Madame Violette Brunet, the legal wife of Monsieur Brunet, who
was in Nikita's service. The ardent lover, regardless of the ancient
Montenegrin custom which inflicted stoning on the guilty married
woman, while the husband sometimes cut her nose off, wrote to his
parents, asking them to arrange the matter, and when the ex-King
raised objections, Peter blackmailed him by threatening to divulge to
the world at large all the unsavoury details connected with Lov['c]en.
"My dear son," wrote Nikita in November 1918,[101] "You write again
asking me to send an emissary to represent myself and your mother in
suing for the hand of the woman of your choice, failing this, you say
you will make a scandal whereby the honour of both of us and of the
whole family will suffer; to obviate this unpleasant possibility we
may see our way to agree to your wish, but under the following
conditions...."

THE BROKEN SERBS AT CORFU

Meanwhile the Serbs had, ever since the early days of 1916 when they
began arriving in Corfu, been hard at work upon their army. Thousands
landed at Corfu in such a state that only with continual care, with
warmth and nourishing food could they be rescued. But on the little
island of Vido where they were deposited the tents were few, the beds
were fewer, wood was lacking, so that fires could not be made, and
thousands died where they sank down, amid the olive groves and orange
trees. The doctors nursed as many as they could in that one empty
building; but for very long about a hundred corpses were each day
piled in a little boat and taken out to sea. Usually they had died of
pure exhaustion. Out of the 16,000 boys who had scrambled along with
the army as far as Durazzo, about 2000 died on the sea and another
7000 on the Isle of Vido.

At Corfu the Serbs, with the other Yugoslavs, had also to set about
securing the foundations of their State that was to be. The Russians,
at the time of the negotiations which ended in the Treaty of London,
had been looking forward to an Orthodox State, a Greater Serbia,
bounded by the river Narenta. This, if it had been carried out, would
have jettisoned, and probably for ever, the Croats and Slovenes. That
was the incredibly stupid old Russian policy of identifying Slav
patriotism with the Orthodox Church, a policy