he Great
War seem to show that even there the task of dealing with the population
is a troublous one. They are conservative; one sees, for example, a
woman who has got up very early holding aloft a vessel against the sun.
This is done with the object of preventing the cows of a certain man
from giving any milk. But the man is on the alert. He shoots the vessel
out of her hand and proceeds, with an easy mind, about his business.
Frequently the Austrians disarmed these men, but it is their practice to
have more rifles than shirts, although during the occupation a rifle
cost twenty napoleons. It occurred to the Austrian Governor-General of
Montenegro, Lieut. Field-Marshal von Weber, that these Albanians were
children and, if treated well, would make useful volunteers. A party of
them was thereupon sent to Graz, where they were told that they would be
trained to fight on behalf of the Sultan. Their military education was a
trifle agitated--for instance, on their second day at Graz they thrashed
their officers--but when their training was considered adequate they
were sent to the front, and there they immediately surrendered to the
Italians. This was not the first time that a body of Albanians had gone
to Austria. In 1912, for the Eucharistic Congress at Vienna, some two
dozen of them, in their national costume and conducted by their
priests, had taken part in the procession. It is said that the financier
Rosenberg, of whom one has heard, bore a portion of the pretty large
expenses of the deputation. His title of baron dates from this period.
Austria's work among the school-children was no more successful than
among the adults. Remembering that just outside Zadar lies Arbanasi, or
Borgo Erizzo, a village of 2500 inhabitants, nearly all of whom are
Albanians, it seemed good to the Austrian authorities to procure from
that place a schoolmaster who would make suitable propaganda. There was
at Arbanasi a teachers' institute, as also an Italian "Liga" school
which was closed by the Austrians during the War, and when the
schoolmaster arrived at Plav, where the people speak Serbian, he set
about teaching the children Albanian and also making propaganda for
Italy, as he was from the "Liga" school.... That fidelity of the five
hundred men of Plav who clung, as we have related, to their religion,
had its pendant when the Austrians were engaged in constructing a road.
The custom was for a potentate of that district to procure for the
Au