fought for the common cause."

Poor Battisti--when his regiment was captured he feigned to be dead.
His men, however, told the Austrians that it was he, and this they did
because they said that he and his Irredentist party were to blame for
the War. These facts are now fairly well known, thanks to the Czech
doctor who was on the spot and tried to save him by assuring the
Austrians that it was not Battisti. The soldiers insisted, and in the
end the Austrians executed him.

SOUTHERN SLAVS IN THE AUSTRIAN NAVY

The several transactions or attempted transactions which took place at
various periods of the War between the Yugoslav members of the
Austro-Hungarian navy, associated with other Yugoslavs, on the one
hand and the Italian authorities on the other, were frustrated time
and again by the astounding conduct of the Italians. Had they made
anything like a proper use of the invaluable information that was
showered upon them or if they had requested the other Allied navies in
the Mediterranean to act on their behalf many Allied ships in the
Mediterranean would not have been torpedoed--since the submarine
activity centred at Kotor, one of the stations which could have been
seized--the Austrian front in Albania must have collapsed and the
entire war would have ended sooner.

In October 1917 the Austrian torpedo boat No. 11 was seized by the
Slav members of her crew and brought into Ancona, but their offers of
service were refused. The ringleaders showed, by refusing to accept
large sums of money, that their purpose was purely patriotic. The
Italians, however, simply interned them.

A much more serious affair was that of February 1, 1918, on which day
it had been arranged that the Slav sailors at Pola and Kotor should
mutiny. At the former place it did not succeed, at Kotor it was so far
successful that the mutineers, after imprisoning Admiral Njegovan and
many other officers whom they suspected of not being in sympathy with
them, took command of the ships and left unanswered an ultimatum
addressed to them by the High Naval Command. There was a prospect of
the whole fleet shaking off the Austro-Hungarian authority. The chief
revolutionary leader was Ante Sesan, a Croat ensign, twenty-six years
of age, from near Dubrovnik and the son of a well-known sea captain on
the coast. "We drew up," he says, "a proclamation representing our
case to the Yugoslavs, Czechs and Poles from the national point of
view, and to the Germans