"At the post-mortem in the palace kitchen at Belgrade, the surgeons counted in the body of Alexander six revolver wounds, each deadly, and forty-two sword wounds. Draga received two pistol balls and sixty-two sword cuts and slashes. She had been cut to pieces, but they left her face unmutilated. And—still more frightful—her corpse bore black and blue marks that testified to a merciless pounding with strong fists. The regicides gave so many conflicting accounts of their adventure that one did not know what to believe. It is now certain that the King and Queen were defenceless, that they at once on being aroused by the dynamite took refuge in her wardrobe room, and that they never sought to escape by the roof, and did not run through a long suite of rooms, slamming the doors after them. They had not a moment’s time to utter a prayer. "Draga’s brothers received a five minutes’ respite to make their souls. Nicodemus, the eldest, for whom Mademoiselle Pach mourns in Brussels, asked for cigars and for leave to embrace his brother. He and Nicholas faced unflinchingly a firing party, casting away the cigar ends as they stood before a wall. … "Colonel Maschine, who figures as the ringleader in the conspiracy, had been in the inner circle of King Milan, who thought him a valuable officer. Milan, a man with considerable ability and without his match in playing an intricate and difficult diplomatic game, had been educated in his mother’s fast set in Vienna, and at a Paris lycée. … Military force as a means of government recommended itself to his barbarous mind. It may be that he saw in Maschine a man suitable for _coup d’état_ work. An ostensible reason for taking him into favour was Maschine’s bravery in the campaign against Bulgaria and his personal fidelity to Milan, as twice evinced in saving his life. The partiality of the King buoyed up Maschine’s hopes of a brilliant military career. Death overtook Milan, who so often had escaped poison and assassin’s bullets, on his way to Belgrade, where he was to have set Alexander aside and remounted the throne. His unexpected decease blighted the colonel’s prospects, inasmuch as Draga gained thereby uncontrolled influence over the King. She and the Maschines had long kept up a bitter feud. Barbarians like to brood over their grievances, real or imaginary. Colonel Maschine could not forget or forgive, and his pride prevented him from trying to propitiate her when she let him know that he thought her more intractable than she really was. He had set about the slander that she poisoned her first husband, and then made believe he committed suicide. This story had been told by the Colonel to Milan. Alexander, when his father repeated it to him, called it a ‘machination,’ the name he ever after gave to slanders and libels that came to his knowledge about Draga.