l Maister had been till then a Major,
employed--as he was a political suspect--on depot work. And when the
eight or nine Austrian colonels appeared on November 1 before
Lajn[vs]i['c], the genial official, and Maister, they were informed by
the latter that he was a General--he looks like a swarthy Viking--and
they were asked to surrender their swords. As they did not know how
many men the General had behind him--as a matter of fact he had
nine--they acted on his suggestion; one of them wept as he did so. At
11 a.m. Lajn[vs]i['c] deposed all the chief civil officials in that
part of Styria, and the General persuaded the 47th Regiment to leave
by train. They were influenced by a notice in the papers which said
that 100,000 Frenchmen (invented by the General and Lajn[vs]i['c]) had
just arrived at Ljubljana. After this the two companions carried on at
Maribor; very little was known of them for a month at Ljubljana,
Zagreb or Belgrade. But then they were confirmed in the posts they had
assumed and Maister became a regular General. They were not
intolerant; they expelled less than ten people, although so many of
the German-Austrians had come, under the auspices of the Suedmark
Verein (a colonization society) or the Deutsche Schulverein (an
educational body), to propagate Germanism. One of these colonists, a
doctor, who had lived a dozen years in Maribor, could only say "Good
morning" in Slovene; and German women in the market-place (themselves
unable to speak proper German) used to insist on the Slovene peasants
speaking a language of which they knew scarcely a word. Lajn[vs]i['c]
and Maister took no steps against the Bishop of Maribor who, three
months after the Austrian collapse, celebrated a Mass in honour of the
ex-Emperor. This Bishop, the son of Slovene peasants, had been
educated near Vienna, had been a confessor of the House of Habsburg,
and he found it difficult to regard himself as a Slovene. Gradually
the voice of his own people spoke in him and then, after very long and
honourable mental conflict, he developed into an excellent Yugoslav.
He and Maister are, both of them, poets. Most of the General's
pieces--which are all in Slovene--treat of love and nature. But he
wrote at least one set of other verses, which the Austrians suppressed
during the War. This is the nearest translation I can make of them:

Have pity, Christ, on Thy poor folk,
For now the fields are desolate
And misery and famine wait