THE DUPES OF NIKITA IN MONTENEGRO Meanwhile at intervals during this year there had been troubles in Montenegro. On three occasions the Italians at Antivari had endeavoured to extend their sphere of influence, but the armed civilian population had been equal to these emergencies and had each time thrust them back to the coast. At Gaeta, between Rome and Naples, a very well-paid corps was stationed--almost every man was either a commissioned or a non-commissioned officer. The Italian Government was asked by Signor Lazari, the Socialist deputy, for what purpose it allocated 300,000 lire a month to support these peculiar troops. They were mostly Montenegrins--relatives of Nikita, members of the five favoured families, persons who were stranded and so forth; likewise at Gaeta were a number of other Yugoslavs who had been liberated from their Italian internment camps, but many of them, when they discovered what was expected of them, revolted. Thirty or forty of them managed to escape to France, and others to Montenegro, as for example the man who for twelve years had been Nikita's porter. He and three others reached Cetinje one day in August 1920 when I was there. They had with them a picture-card of the sixty-nine officers of the Gaeta army. Every one knows every one else in Montenegro and only two of these officers had held a previous commission. According to Nikita's Premier, Jovan Plamenac, the Italian Government considered this as the Montenegrin army and regarded (rather optimistically) as a loan the money it contributed to keep it up. In driblets the non-revolting part of this Gaeta army was taken to the eastern shores of the Adriatic, for the purpose of making "incidents" in Montenegro. There was a regular scale--so much in cash for the murder of a prefect, so much for a deputy. One day the father of Andrija Radović, a man of over seventy, was cut down; they waited until everyone had left the village to go to some fête in a neighbouring village, and the old man defended himself to the last.