power; affiliated Hapsburgian societies plot the return of the little Prince Otto, realizing the enormous advantage this would give them in recalling the allegiance of certain elements in the Succession States.

No one who has traveled recently in Central Europe will fail to have found evidence of this. On both sides of the Danube frontier guards are in a state of tension; in Transylvania there is a sort of sporadic guerrilla-warfare in progress. Hungary cannot lie down under the dictates of the Peace Treaty, because they threaten not only her national pride but her economic exist

ence.

But Hungary is surrounded by the Little Entente, - Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia, whose very existence, on the other hand, depends on the maintenance of the terms of the Peace Treaty. If Hungarian insurgents were to cross the Danube at Esztergom or Komárom, or advance on Pressburg, Rumania would advance from Transylvania, the Yugoslavs invade South Hungary. The Magyar might be able to tackle one of his neighbors alone; he dare not take them all on at once. Meanwhile, he grits his teeth; he spreads propaganda among the Great Powers; he bides his time.

It is upon this deadlock, this diplomatic cantilevering, that the structure of the present peace of Europe rests; and a fairly rickety structure it is. One of its most obvious weaknesses, one which the Hungarians recognize and endeavor to foment, lies in the internal dissensions of the Yugoslav State. That kingdom, conglomerated of the old kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro, of Bosnia and Herzegovina, of the old Hungarian Bánát, of CroatiaSlavonia, and the Austrian Duchy of Slovenia, has not had the expert and tactful guidance during the first few years of its life that it obviously needed.

Consequently the component nations who, a few years ago, were flying into the arms of their long-lost brothers, are now ready to jump at each other's throats.

For this situation one cannot but feel that the Serbs, with their leaders, M. Pashitch and M. Prebipovitch, are chiefly to blame. They agreed to receive their new brothers into a federation, and then promptly occupied their countries with Serbian troops and imposed on them a constitution that practically amounts to a Serbian Empire.

Take the case of Croatia, the leader of the malcontents. Under Hungary she had, at any rate, an appearance of self-government, a Parliament of her own, a national and yet a Western culture of her own. Her people, at least in the North, are highly civilized; she has immense natural resources. Her 'liberators' have abolished her Parliament; tax her resources to an unbearable and even a ludicrous extent in order to increase the Serbian revenue; endeavor to render her culturally and politically dependent on Belgrade; give all the posts in the Civil Service to Serbs; occupy her capital, Agram, with Serbian troops who terrorize the countryside; and treat her national leader, M. Raditch, whose courage and patriotism in his lifelong struggle against Hungarian absorption have rendered him famous everywhere, as a rebel, almost an outlaw! Meanwhile Government newspapers try to poison the minds of the surrounding populations against him by the most preposterous lies.

It is small wonder that a Croatian revolt, the establishment or attempt at the establishment of a Republic at Agram, seems imminent. But it is obvious that any revolt must be a bloody business; there is probably no form of warfare so savage as the rising

of an exasperated countryside against an army of occupation. And the result of the consequent paralysis of Yugoslavia to Europe may be easily imagined.

But M. Raditch is too sound a thinker to provoke violence in wantonness; he withdraws his deputies, seventy strong, from the Belgrade Parliament; he uses the cry of a republic as a political weapon. But his real aim is the only sensible one: the acquisition of a constitution which shall give a decent measure of autonomy to the component States, which shall abolish the quite unfair hegemony of Serbia and replace it by a federation somewhat on the American principle, which will allow Croatia to develop her natural riches unmolested. Moreover he is farsighted enough to see that the only hope for Central Europe lies in a system of free trade, for it is the ridiculous tariffs now in force everywhere which are responsible almost entirely for the present state of distress. Free trade and pacific relations with all the States of the Danube basin are an absolutely essential part of his programme.

So much for M. Raditch. But many of his followers, especially among the younger generation, are not so longsighted. They have been exasperated to breaking-point; they are as passionately opposed to national absorption, especially in this tactless manner, by

the Serbs as they are to oppression by the Hungarians. At every village one hears the same story; they say they will wait for a few months in the hope of obtaining redress by peaceful means, but no more. If the problem is not speedily settled, a Croatian revolt and all that will entail may well be imminent.

The recent General Election has brought things to a head. M. Raditch has not only maintained his position, he has improved it. The Government has obtained barely a third of the seats in the House. The new Government and the new Opposition must inevitably both consist of coalitions: and it is in this preliminary juggling for places that the fate of the country will probably be decided.

Can M. Pashitch angle enough votes to continue his present policy? Can M. Raditch win the allegiance of enough of the other Moderates to compel a revision of the constitution? If he does, we shall probably find the present Serbian Empire converted into a loosely knit peasant-republic, in which Serbia's bitterest enemy, Bulgaria, may possibly in time be included. Such a State, with the fine fighting elements of the Serbs and the Slovene borderers, combined with the high æsthetic culture and economic wealth of the Croats, may well have a rosy future; and its people will prove, moreover, excellent citizens of Europe.

In the month of August, 1921, I was stationed at the garrison of Fort Guebdani, which was defended by various parts of a mixed regiment of field and mountain artillery and some contingents of the Melilla regiment, a total of about 700 men in all, under the command of Colonel Araujo. I was captured on the twenty-fifth of August, 1921. Here is exactly what happened.

For a number of days we had been completely surrounded. A messenger had told us that the occupied territory had revolted, after the desertion of the native troops, and that Anual, where General Sylvestre was, had fallen into the hands of the Moors. Our position was terrible. The water supply was running low. The Colonel ordered the last drops of it to be given only to people who were dying. In the evening of the decisive day, a company sent on 'water fatigue' had been attacked, and I can still hear the last cries of 'Viva l'Españal' rising from the little waterhole where our poor soldiers perished.

In short, the situation seemed to have arrived at a deadlock. We could not even consider making a sortie because, loaded down with our wounded men, we were quite unable to fight a long battle on an interminable road against an enemy who outnumbered us

ten to one. Resistance in the fort itself would be too feeble because of the lack of water. We had not a shadow of hope for speedy assistance from without and we saw no chance of help from any direction.

In the morning of the twenty-fifth of August, the Colonel summoned his officers together. He wanted to take a vote to decide our course of action; and we were in the midst of a mournful discussion when suddenly at about ten o'clock a furious assault was launched against us. Sheltered by the rolling country, five thousand Moorish footsoldiers had sneaked up to our wire entanglements and were throwing themselves upon us, uttering their war-cries.

In a few seconds we were in arms, and the machine-guns went into action. It was an indescribable spectacle. At first the fight seemed undecided. White cloaks covered the countryside and the waves of assailants poured in unceasingly from the neighboring valleys. Our men were parched with thirst and exhausted. In a furious rush, the Moors took our first defenses.

Then I witnessed a scene the horror of which I can scarcely describe. Dead bodies piled around me so high that I had finally to cease firing my rifle. All about me men were slaughtering each

other with incredible brutality. As soon as one of our men fell, the Moors leaped upon him to rob him and then mutilate him horribly, often while he was still alive. Mad with exaltation and fanaticism, they pillaged with such fury that I saw many of them only a few paces from me kill each other for a pitiful piece of booty, a pair of shoes, a gun, or a belt.

Some of my comrades and I rallied about a cannon with a number of our artillerymen. Suddenly one of them whipped out his revolver and blew his brains out. Others followed his example. Some of them would first make the sign of the cross, others called out an adieu or cheered the King of Spain or shot some bullets in the general direction of the Moors and then killed themselves and fell. For an instant this terrible idea occurred to me, but I dismissed it. And when I had no more cartridges I sat quietly down at the base of my cannon and folded my arms and waited.

Why was I spared? I do not know. I shall never understand. A body of Moors threw themselves upon me. Some of my companions who had done the same thing I had were put to death at once. Their heads were cut off or they were pierced by Lebel bayonets, with which all our adversaries were armed, or they were torn limb from limb. I was captured. I grasped the fact that they were discussing my fate. I waited for them to decide what suffering I should be put to. And I was overcome with astonishment when I went to rejoin another group of prisoners with the Colonel among them. The looting continued before my eyes. When the massacres were over, the Moors hurled themselves upon the little cemetery in the fort and dug out the corpses. I cannot speak of the abominations that I saw.

Needless to say, we were far from

cheerful as to our fate. For the first few days, however, we were not badly treated. The soldiers would come and talk to us. Most of them knew a few words of Spanish, others, from the French zones, spoke our language with more or less ease. We finally understood that if, contrary to Moorish custom, we had been left alive, it was because they wanted to make our deliverance the basis of negotiations. They held out some hope to us. In a general way, it seemed that we were respected and that we could hope for passable treatment. Unfortunately our illusions were soon to disappear.

After several days, we were joined to other groups of prisoners, among them General Navarro, whose proud and courageous bearing never failed him. Then we were set marching off for Axdir, the place that was going to be our prison for eighteen months, where a little house belonging to Abd-el-Krim was reserved for us. Our path led us by Anual, the very place where General Sylvestre had died, and there again we beheld a horrible sight. We recognized the bodies of our slain companions and we could even make out a great many of the officers on our chief's staff. What a gruesome spectacle! Most of the bodies were impaled on wooden staves. Many of them had their heads cut off. Some of them were torn to bits.

We sought for the corpse of General Sylvestre in vain: perhaps it was so frightfully mutilated that we could not recognize it, or perhaps it had been taken too far away for us to find it; at any rate we could not discover a trace of it. This is unquestionably the source of the legends you have heard, but alas there is no hope at all. This great commander, too audacious perhaps, but intrepid, authoritative, esteemed, and obeyed, who would have saved the army from such a great catastrophe if he had not been one of the first victims,

this man is surely dead, beyond all doubt. Only one point in his tragic end is obscure. Some think that he was killed by Moroccan bullets, others suspect that he preferred to kill himself when on the point of being captured. Who will ever clear up the mystery, since the only immediate witnesses of his death are the defiled corpses on the field of Anual?

After a long, hard march through this unshaded, untracked country, we arrived at Axdir, which is about ninety kilometres west of Melilla and three kilometres to one side of it. They put the officers in a little Arab house surrounded with high walls, which is the personal property of Abd-el-Krim. The guards lay in their tents on the watch; the soldiers were stationed at a distance. For one and all that horrible captivity of eighteen months had begun.

As I have already said, the first weeks were the least difficult. Although material existence was rude enough for forty-seven of us in a single room with a little straw in it, we were treated with evident consideration. Abd-el-Krim often came to see us. He visited us on his little donkey like the most modest of his followers, invariably sheltered by a huge umbrella that protected him from both sun and rain.

Sometimes he was accompanied by his brother, a singular personage very much Europeanized from having studied engineering at Madrid, whose complex mentality, with its mixture of civilization and barbarianism, of true culture and ignorance, entirely defied analysis. Both of us talked about life in Spain - he read all the Spanish newspapers, though we could never see how he got them

and

of the great dreams of Moroccan independence. He prophesied the complete expulsion of the Spaniards and then of the French, whom they hated

even more, the reëstablishment of a solid warlike empire, the conquest of the 'Arab provinces' in Spain and of ancient and gay Granada. To tel the truth, we were at first astonished at the prestige of a commander without real intelligence or personal charm. Later we understood how much his authority depended on his luck in knowing the Christian enemy. Besides, he very soon stopped visiting us except to deliver insults and threats.

We established hardly any contact with our guards, who were chosen from the most cruel tribes. We were, however, approached on several occasions by groups of nomads or neighboring people whose curiosity led them to contemplate us. The women were a remarkably violent lot. Contrary to Arab custom, the Riffian women do not wear veils. We could therefore easily see what they looked like. Most of them were a fine savage type of real purity, but the ones who belonged to the tribes from the interior were repulsive because of their dirty, squalid appearance, while the ones from the seacoast were quite attractive-looking. We were not a little surprised to see rouge on their lips and great black circles under their eyes. Our enchantment ceased in the face of the insults and the rocks that they hurled at us.

As the hatred about us increased, they thought it better to isolate us completely after several months. Then existence became terrible. Our only nourishment was a scant daily ration of dried peas, which came to us without even being cooked in a little water. Soon disease spread among us: typhus, grippe, and an unknown infection that inflamed the glands in our necks. The mortality was high among the soldiers, and four officers died. If the Moors spared the officers their brutalities, they cut loose among the enlisted men. For no reason whatever, these un