to scream for war and revenue, and initiated an international crisis from which Europe did not recover till the following year.  Meanwhile, almost unobserved by the peoples of Serbia and Montenegro, Austria had, in order to reconcile the Turks with the loss of their provinces, good-naturedly, but from the Austrian point of view short-sightedly, withdrawn its garrisons from the sandjak of Novi-Pazar, thus evacuating the long-coveted corridor which was the one thing above all else necessary to Serbia and Montenegro for the realization of their plans.

20

Serbia and Montenegro, and the two Balkan Wars, 1908-13 (cf.  Chap, 13)

The winter of 1908-9 marked the lowest ebb of Serbia’s fortunes.  The successive coups and faits accomplis carried out by Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria during 1908 seemed destined to destroy for good the Serbian plans for expansion in any direction whatever, and if these could not be realized then Serbia must die of suffocation.  It was also well understood that for all the martial ardour displayed in Belgrade the army was in no condition to take the field any more than was the treasury to bear the cost of a campaign; Russia had not yet recovered from the Japanese War followed by the revolution, and indeed everything pointed to the certainty that if Serbia indulged in hostilities against Austria-Hungary it would perish ignominiously and alone.  The worst of it was that neither Serbia nor Montenegro had any legal claim to Bosnia and Hercegovina:  they had been deluding themselves with the hope that their ethnical identity with the people of these provinces, supported by the effects of their propaganda, would induce a compassionate and generous Europe at least to insist on their being given a part of the coveted territory, and thus give Serbia access to the coast, when the ambiguous position of these two valuable provinces, still nominally Turkish but already virtually Austrian, came to be finally regularized.  As a matter of fact, ever since Bismarck, Gorchakov, and Beaconsfield had put Austria-Hungary in their possession in 1878, no one had seriously thought that the Dual Monarchy would ever voluntarily retire from one inch of the territory which had been conquered and occupied at such cost, and those who noticed it were astonished at the evacuation by it of the sandjak of Novi-Pazar.  At the same time Baron Achrenthal little foresaw what a hornet’s nest he would bring about his ears by the tactless method in which the annexation was carried out.  The first effect was to provoke a complete boycott of Austro-Hungarian goods and trading vessels throughout the Ottoman Empire, which was so harmful to the Austrian export trade that in January 1909 Count Achrenthal had to indemnify Turkey with the sum of L2,500,000 for his technically stolen property.  Further, the attitude of Russia and Serbia throughout the whole winter remained so provocative and threatening that, although war was generally considered improbable,