NEWS OF THE WEEK.
TERRIBLE news was received on Thursday from the Balkans.. Early on the morning of that day—i.e., between 12 and 2—the King and Queen of Servia and the Queen's two brothers were murdered in their Palace at Belgrade, and at the same time several of the Ministers were assassi- nated, and guards and officers loyal to the King also perished. The details of this wholesale butchery, which reads like a Palace tragedy of the Italian Renaissance, are even now not fully known, but it appears that the King and his wife fell victims to a military plot which was carefully prepared among the officers in the Army, supported by powerful political influ- ences, including those favourable to the Servian Pretender, Prince Karageorgevitch, and sympathised with by a large part of the nation, in whom hatred of the Queen, as the author of the King's and the nation's degradation, had become a passion. The conspirators appear to have entered the Palace about 'midnight when all was quiet, and to have demanded entrance at the door of the room where the King and Queen were sleeping. When they were refused admittance one of the officers blew in the door with a dynamite cartridge. The King at once called for help, but when he found that was in vain, he put his arms round the Queen in order to protect her. " In this attitude they awaited the attack of the conspirators, who closed in'on their victims revolver in hand and shot them .down. They fell locked in each other's arms." The bodies, according to one account, were either thrown down or let down into the park below. As it was in Jezreel three thousand years ago, so it was at Belgrade on Thursday. Thus almost exactly does the history of Palace coups d'etat repeat itself among Eastern peoples. But Queen Draga's corpse is not to he treated as that of a King's daughter, which she was not. The King's body is to be buried in the Royal place of sepulture. The Queen and her brothers are to lie in the common cemetery of the town.
