PARIS 1919 (19 page)

By 1914, Ante Trumbi
was becoming convinced that the future for his people lay outside Austria-Hungary. In 1915, in company with a journalist and a young sculptor, he set up the Yugoslav National Committee in London to work for a federation of South Slavs, this time including Serbia. It seemed like yet another of the strange self-appointed committees pursuing lost causes that dotted the capitals of Europe. None of the powers contemplated the disintegration of Austria-Hungary (and they were not going to do so until 1918). Serbians had no interest in a federation, only a greater Serbia. If the South Slav lands of Austria-Hungary entered into Allied thinking at all, it was for use in bargaining. In 1915, in the secret Treaty of London, Britain, France and Russia promised Italy a large chunk of Slovenia and the northern part of the Dalmatian coast. Serbia, it was hinted, would get the rest of Dalmatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, perhaps even part of Croatia.
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Ante Trumbi
, now backed financially by the prosperous Croatian and Slovenian communities in North America, complained bitterly.
Nikola Pa
i
and the Serbs refused to commit themselves to an alliance of equals. Ante Trumbi
was so discouraged that he talked of giving it all up and becoming a taxi driver in Buenos Aires. In London, however, his cause had attracted a small but powerful body of supporters, including Robert Seton-Watson, an independently wealthy scholar and linguist, and Wickham Steed, who had been
The Times
's correspondent in Vienna before the war. Both men viewed Austria-Hungary with irritation; it was a corrupt and incompetent anomaly and they made it their self-appointed task to put it out of its misery. Wickham Steed had a particular enthusiasm for the Yugoslav cause. According to the British ambassador in Rome, this was because he had lived for years, “filially I believe rather than maritally,” with a very clever South Slav woman.
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Croatia and Slovenia, and Bosnia as well, remained part of Austria-Hungary during the war, and many of their soldiers fought loyally for the old empire until the very end. There were Croats, Slovenes and Bosnians, even Serbs, in the Austrian armies which bombarded Serbia's capital, Belgrade, into ruins, which defeated the Serbian army and sent the Serbian government into exile, which occupied Serbia and which raped and brutalized the civilian population. Whatever their complicity in the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the Serbians paid a very heavy price. More than 120,000 died in the war, out of a population of 4.5 million. By the war's end, no matter how much Ante Trumbi
and his committee in London talked of South Slav unity, it was not easy for such recent enemies to see each other as brothers and sisters. On the other hand, it was not clear what alternative they had.

As Austria-Hungary stumbled from one military disaster to the next, its South Slavs turned, many with reluctance, toward independence. The Serbians, temporarily chastened by defeat and by the collapse of their great protector, Russia, were more receptive to the idea of a Yugoslav state. In exile in Corfu,
Nikola Pa
i
met with Ante Trumbi
and, in July 1918, the two men agreed that Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, including those in Bosnia, whether Muslim or not, would be united into Yugoslavia, with the king of Serbia as ruler. Union with Serbia, whatever its drawbacks, seemed less frightening than independence as, at best, a country cobbled together from Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and, at worst, two or three weak little states. Unwisely, the two sides put off discussing a constitution; the issue of federation (which the Croats and Slovenes wanted) or a unitary state (which of course
Nikola Pa
i
wanted) was never settled. Ante Trumbi
can have had few illusions about how the Serbians saw the process of bringing together the different peoples. As one Serbian government official told him cheerfully, there would be no difficulty in managing the Bosnian Muslims. The Serbian army would give them twenty-four hours—no, perhaps even forty-eight—to return to the Orthodox faith. “Those who won't, will be killed, as we have done in our time in Serbia.” Ante Trumbi
gasped. “You can't be serious.” “Quite serious.”
¹⁴