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Updated: June 11, 2025
Of Serb politics I knew at that time little beyond the fact that King Alexander was unpopular owing to an unfortunate marriage and the still more unfortunate attempt of Queen Draga to plant a false heir upon the country by pretending pregnancy; that his father's career had been melodramatic and that the history of Serbia for the whole period of her independence had been one long blood-feud between the rival dynasties of Karageorge and Obrenovitch, neither of which seemed popular in Montenegro.
And well it might. The annals of crime scarcely contain a more gross example of perjury. We now enter upon the last act of the sordid drama. For several years Alexander had kept a mistress, Madame Draga Maschin, nee Lungevitza, the widow of a Serbian officer.
He referred to that incident in 1903, current with the assassination of King Alexander and Queen Draga of Servia an incident I don't like to think of, for it landed me on a blank wall looking into twelve ugly Mauser tubes, as you will recall from a previous chapter. I considered that there were only two men in the Balkans who could have placed me from the 1903 incident.
Many of them were educated in Belgrade and these were especially of the opinion that the murder of Alexander and Draga was a splendid thing for Serbia, and when I said it might bring misfortune were not at all pleased. Even persons who at first said the murder was horrible now said since it was done it was well done.
His court was characterised by gross favouritism and arbitrary revisions of the constitution; and his position became finally untenable when he committed the fatal error of marrying Draga Mashin, a woman of no position and notorious private character.
None of the officers had been paid for six months. Draga, it was said, took all the money to buy diamonds. The wretched woman's little collection of jewellery which was sold at Christie's after her death, proved, however, the falsity of this tale. But it doubtless accounted partly for the unbridled ferocity with which the military gang fell upon her.
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