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On the 3rd Lemberg was evacuated, and the retreat, which was for a time protected by the entrenched camp at Grodek, gradually became more disorderly. Over 70,000 prisoners were taken, mostly, no doubt, Czecho-Slovaks and Jugo-Slavs who had more sympathy with the Russians than with their Teutonic masters, and masses of machine guns and artillery.
The idea, which was industriously circulated throughout Italy, that Fiume was an Italian city, aroused the feelings of the people more than any political or economic argument could have done. The fact that the suburbs, which were really as much a part of the municipality as the area within the city proper, were inhabited largely by Jugo-Slavs was ignored, ridiculed, or denied.
The four hundred years beginning with the fifteenth and ending with the eighteenth century will be remembered by the Jugo-Slavs as the age of humiliation. While the Turkish and the Venetian empires decayed, the Austrian and the Russian gained courage.
A general uprising of Jugo-Slavs in favour of union under the Serbian crown more than doubled the size of that kingdom which Austria had begun the war to crush. Nor did this exhaust the effects of Bulgaria's capitulation.
The Jugo-Slavs, like the Czecho-Slovaks, appeared in modern times as a nation which had lost its native nobility and had been reduced to a disarmed, untutored, and enserfed peasantry. In the absence of these leaders, the nation turned to its clergy who in order to retain their hold on the peasantry must needs ever remain national.
The moment had come to forestall the Jugo-Slavs and deliver a blow which might overthrow the Hapsburg Empire before it collapsed of itself.
The history of the evolution of the Jugo-Slavs from the sixteenth to the twentieth century has been an effort to find the means of melting down these differences until finally one nationalism accomplished the purpose. Unity came first in the imagination and the mind, next in literature and speech, and finally in political action.
The Italian policy in relation to Flume was wrecked on the rock of President Wilson's firm determination that the Jugo-Slavs should have a seaport on the Adriatic sufficient for their needs and that Italy should not control the approaches to that port.
Along with this future foreign interference in the affairs of the Balkans came the Germanizing and centralizing "reforms" of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, whose result was to cripple still further the few constitutional and historical rights which remained to the Jugo-Slavs. But these "reforms" had nevertheless salutary effects upon the nation of peasants.
For concessions at the expense of the Jugo-Slavs would not be recognized by the Entente if it won the war; and if the Central Empires were successful, they were not likely to regard these promises extracted from them in their hour of need as more binding than other scraps of paper.
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