for the big drum; the noise of that, said he, would surely reach that
devil in the tower. But the big drum, when it came, had no success.
The noise it made, reinforced by those of the bugles and the men's
shouting, was such that some Bunjevci dressed themselves and ventured
out into the cold, to see what really all the turmoil was about. To
one of them the freezing captain yelled that he knew perfectly the
criminal had heard them, and that he went on with his accursed flashes
since he recognized that this would be the last base act that he would
ever do on earth. For the remainder of that night the captain and his
men, not with the hope that they would be obeyed but merely to warm
themselves a little, kept on shouting now and then, "Put out those
lights!" And in the dawn the non-commissioned officer discovered that
the signals had been moonlight on some broken glass that was being
shaken by the wind.... One sees in the very well-arranged archives of
the town of Sombor that the Bunjevci were accustomed, like the
Germans, to ally themselves with the Magyars and thus give them a
majority. Only in the last ten years at Subotica (and not at all at
Sombor) did they ask for their rights; they had seemed conscious of
the religious difference between themselves and the Serbs, unconscious
that they were of the same race and language. The Magyars attempted to
show in Paris that the Bunjevci are not Slavs, but the remains of the
Kumani (who died out in those parts about five to six hundred years
ago and were not Magyars). In the census of twenty years ago the
Bunjevci were called Serbo-Croats, in accordance with a monograph,
"Sabotca Varosh Története," in which Professor Ivanji, a Magyar, said
they were simply Catholic Serbs. In the census of 1910 the Bunjevci
are put under the heading "Égyebek," which means "miscellaneous."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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