n Archbishop from sending a
priest to his church, where he held services in Magyar. During one
night, at all events, this church caused the Magyars much annoyance.
It was at the beginning of the Great War--they had accused Raji['c] of
making signals from the tower, which is very high; and in order to
prove their accusation they sent a large body of soldiers, who
surrounded the church, on a boisterous winter's night. Sure enough,
the signals were seen to be flashing up there. The church was locked
and a blast of the bugles had no effect--save that a few Bunjevci
looked out of their windows--for the flashes did not cease. Then the
captain commanded his men to give a mighty shout: "Put out those
lights! Put out those lights!" But not the least notice was taken.
There was nothing to do but to wait until Raji['c], or whoever it was,
should finish his nefarious business and come down. About an hour
later, though, the wind became so piercing that a non-commissioned
officer suggested that the captain should send for the big drum; the
noise of that, said he, would surely reach that devil in the tower.
But the big drum, when it came, had no success. The noise it made,
reinforced by those of the bugles and the men's shouting, was such
that some Bunjevci dressed themselves and ventured out into the cold,
to see what really all the turmoil was about. To one of them the
freezing captain yelled that he knew perfectly the criminal had heard
them, and that he went on with his accursed flashes since he
recognized that this would be the last base act that he would ever do
on earth. For the remainder of that night the captain and his men, not
with the hope that they would be obeyed but merely to warm themselves
a little, kept on shouting now and then, "Put out those lights!" And
in the dawn the non-commissioned officer discovered that the signals
had been moonlight on some broken glass that was being shaken by the
wind.... One sees in the very well-arranged archives of the town of
Sombor that the Bunjevci were accustomed, like the Germans, to ally
themselves with the Magyars and thus give them a majority. Only in the
last ten years at Subotica (and not at all at Sombor) did they ask for
their rights; they had seemed conscious of the religious difference
between themselves and the Serbs, unconscious that they were of the
same race and language. The Magyars attempted to show in Paris that
the Bunjevci are not Slavs, but the remains of the Kum