There is a Serbian proverb, from the time of the Turks, which says that when Serbia is threatened the peasants pick up their guns and sing. Serbia's peasants marched and sang last week. So did the peasants of Bosnia, of Macedonia and of Montenegro. At Kragujevac in Old Serbia they marched round & round the village singing Oi Serbio! At Skoplje in South Serbia they sang Macedonian revolutionary songs. At Berane in Montenegro they sang battle songs from the days of the Turkish-Montenegrin wars. At Banja Luka in Bosnia they sang Be Ready, Komitadjis —and 30,000 of them waited at the railroad station for Branko Chubrilovitch, who resigned as Minister of Agriculture in protest against capitulation to Germany, and carried him through the streets on their shoulders. Everywhere they sang the new song:
Listen, girl I love,
Hitler has come to our frontier,
But the Serbs are ready with their guns
To see how many ribs the Germans have.
Their leaders were made of softer stuff. To them liberty was less precious than that ephemeral thing called unity—the artificial union of diverse Slavic tribes into the post-World War I state called Yugoslavia. Although all the other artificially-created post-war States had disappeared or been dismembered in two short years—Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Rumania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania—Yugoslavia's leaders still hoped somehow to hold their own state together—and to keep their jobs. They were thinking not only of the tough, freedom-loving, German-hating Serbs, Macedonians, Montenegrins and Bosnians, but also of the Croats, the Slovenes and the Slavonians, those northern minorities which found the rule of Yugoslavia as oppressive as that of Austria-Hungary. If Yugoslavia refused to join Adolf Hitler's Axis, those provinces would be quickly lost, perhaps never to be regained.
Hitler in a Hurry. Spring was about to burst upon Europe. Peace must be brought to the Balkans so that Adolf Hitler could devote his best energies to Britain. If Yugoslavia would not join the Axis outright, Hitler would be reasonable. He would settle for partial adherence, with the right to use Yugoslav railways for "supply trains"; then, having cracked the shell of resistance, he could enforce his full demands later on. This sort of reasonableness fooled nobody, least of all Yugoslavia's leaders, but they thought it was better than war against the German machines. Better to be a Sweden than a Poland.
Thursday night Regent Prince Paul called a meeting of his Cabinet, the first in nearly five months, to announce the terms of Germany's virtual ultimatum. Yugoslavia's handsome, youthful Regent is personally friendly toward Great Britain, but he is not made of the same tough stuff as was his late cousin, King Alexander, and unlike Alexander he has tried hard to placate the autonomy-minded Croats. Against the virtual certainty of losing Croatia and its neighbors if the German demands were resisted, Prince Paul advised their acceptance. His Premier, Dragisha Cvetkovitch, and Foreign Minister Aleksandar Cincar-Markovitch agreed. So, naturally, did the Croatian Vice Premier, Vladimir Matchek, and Father Fran Kulovetch, the Slovene leader. The Minister of War, General Petar Pesitch, was doubtful.