journey I shall have more to say. Through these friends we got news of our people in Serbia; and from Paunkovitch, the Commander of the Serbian camp for prisoners of war, we heard what was going on and how many of our fellows had been taken prisoners by Serbia. I thought of going to see them, but circumstances kept me at Geneva. The Serbian Consul provided us all with the necessary passports and visas for France and elsewhere.
As Bulgarian propaganda was pretty strong in Switzerland, keen disputes soon arose between Bulgarians and Serbians, partly on account of the Russian “Cadet” leader, Milyukoff, who sided with Bulgaria where he had lived after his expulsion from pre-Duma Russia. Though I disapproved of Bulgarian policy (since the Bulgarians claimed not only the whole of Macedonia but Old Serbia and the territory of the so-called Bulgarian Morava) I took no part in this dispute; for it should not be forgotten that the Allies had promised those regions to the Bulgars when they wanted to win them over. This Allied policy, directed against a Serbia who was bleeding for the Allied cause, was much discussed by my Southern Slav and English friends.
Disputes arose too among individual Southern Slavs and their organizations, the Serbians holding fast to a Great Serbian centralized programme, most of the Croats and Slovenes to a Federal programme, and not a few Croats to a Great Croatian programme. All alike proclaimed national unity in “Yugoslavia” as their object, but that comprehensive term covered very different and often hazy ideas. There were, besides, some special shades and tendencies of opinion, one of them being pro-Austrian, even in Serbia as well as in Croatia.
M. Svatkovsky, who was already in Switzerland, kept me in constant touch with Russia; and though I maintained relations with the Russian Legation in Berne they were unimportant. I corresponded, however, with the leaders of the Czech colony in Russia; and, at the beginning of February, one of them, M. Koniček, a member of the first Czech deputation to the Tsar, came to me by way of Paris ostensibly for the purpose of offering me the leadership in Russia. I “sized him up” at once. He was one of our many political tyros in Russia, a thoroughgoing partisan of the reactionary “Black Hundreds.” Even in public meetings he began his speeches with the words, “Little Father, the Tsar, sends you his greetings.” That put him out of court at once with all our colonies, in Paris, in Geneva, and afterwards in America. Many took him for a Russian
