incomparably less brutal than the Prussian, so that some readers
will be disinclined to believe a conversation which Count
Pavlovi['c], particularly as he is a Yugoslav, once had at Donja Tusla
in Bosnia with a certain Captain Waldstein, who between 9 a.m. and 1
p.m. had sentenced nineteen people to be hanged. These people, by the
way, were all over twenty years of age, so that each case had to be
tried; persons under that age could, as we have seen, also be hanged,
but not as the result of a trial. Pavlovi['c] approached the
captain--his rank, to be accurate, was captain-auditor--and asked him
how he had lunched after such a morning's work. "I felt," was the
reply, "as if I had drunk nineteen glasses of beer." An Austrian army
surgeon, Dr. Wallisch, who during the occupation travelled
professionally in Serbia and wrote a good deal about it in Viennese
papers and Austrian papers in Belgrade, said that "everywhere in this
Balkan and patriarchal environment you see educational mansions and
spacious barracks.[80] Does not this, better than anything else, show
the criminal, premeditated hostility of the Serbs against our
Monarchy? They have the longing to learn, which devours the ambitious,
and likewise the wish to realise by force of arms this fantastic ideal
of an over-excited national sentiment." Yes indeed, this was the ideal
of King Peter, in accordance with the device of the poet, Aksentie
Teodosijevi['c]: "Towards liberty, in the first place through learning
and culture, then with arms." Very few people would be inclined to
believe that the invading Austrians could be so petty as to burn all
the schoolbooks they came across, and still fewer would credit the
fact that Yugoslav patients with gold-filled teeth ran any special
risk in Austrian army hospitals. Ivo Stani[vs]i['c] of the Bocche di
Cattaro had fought with the Montenegrins and, in consequence of
Nikita's capitulation, had fallen into the Austrians' hands. He was
warned by his friends not to go into hospital, where his twelve gold
teeth, which he had acquired in the United States, might prove his
undoing. He did, as a matter of fact, die there, and the overdose of
morphia--witnessed by the well-known architect, Matejorski of
Prague--may have been accidental, and the Austrians who took his teeth
out may have thought it foolish to leave so much gold in a corpse.
Another Bocchesi who underwent the same treatment was one Risto
Lije[vs]evi['c]. Perhaps the Austrians