the Great War and in Switzerland during the War received
the close attention of the French authorities.[71] These financial
methods of Danilo's did less material harm, at any rate to his own
people than the system he employed as a motorist; it was necessary
that he should obtain the latest models, and it suited him that the
Government, not haggling over the price, should take over his
discarded vehicles. Similar hostages to gossip were given by Mirko,
his younger brother; one remembers the smiles of the diplomatic corps
at Cetinje when this young man dispatched, at the cost of the
Government, a telegram of about 500 words to Austria, concerning a
horse which he wanted to buy. Mirko, who died during the Great War in
an Austrian sanatorium, was not one of those rugged and valiant
Montenegrin mountaineers whom Gladstone and Tennyson celebrated; once
when his father ordered him to come back from Paris, where he was
copiously spending his country's substance on an actress with whom he
had decamped, leaving his wife and several young children at Naples,
he dutifully returned and settled down in his palace, a large,
comfortable house outside Podgorica. Since it was less amusing than in
Paris he remained in bed for most of the twenty-four hours; he would
often spend an hour before dinner in superintending the removal of
pictures from one wall to another, and having dined he would immerse
himself in State affairs, which took the form of speculating as to
when he and his heirs--Danilo being childless--would be called to rule
over the great Serbian kingdom of Serbia combined with Montenegro. As
to the fate of the Karageorgevi['c] dynasty, this was wont to vary
from night to night, in proportion to the amount of wine that Mirko
had drunk.

These events occurred in 1913, and in the same year the Montenegrins
entered Scutari. It was not brought about by force of arms, but by
some arrangement with Essad Pasha, the illiterate and clever Albanian
who succeeded to the command of the town after Hussein Riza Bey, the
Turkish leader, had been assassinated on the threshold of Essad's
house, where he had been dining, by a couple of the Pasha's men,
disguised as women. Scutari was not to stay for long in Montenegrin
hands; an International Force arrived, under Admiral Sir Cecil Burney,
and took it over. One need scarcely add that the national sentiment of
the Albanians moved the Powers at this juncture as little as it moved
the Albanians.