It was a challenge and on Serbia's national day at that. The
Austrians were elated having been handed the excuse to educate
Serbia and cut it to size. They issued an ultimatum and the rest is
the history of the first truly global conflict, the First World War.
In 1917, in a surprising turn of events, Alexander, the Commander in
Chief of the Expatriate Serbian Army in collusion with the Serb
premier, Nikola Pasic, arrested Apis and 200 of his collaborators,
thus shattering the Black Hand irreversibly. It is always surprising
how really brittle and vulnerable these apparently invincible
organizations of terror are. The IMRO, after having terrorized
Bulgaria for decades and decimated its political elite, was reduced
to rubble, bloodlessly, in a matter of a few weeks in 1934.
The same happened with the omnipotent and all-pervasive Black Hand.
It vanished in a whimper. In May 1917, Dragutin Dimitrijevic (Apis)
was executed together with 2 or 6 of his Black Hand colleagues.
Finally it was death, not union that caught up with them. The trial
was closed to the public, opaque and hurried. The King apparently
believed - or claimed he did - that the prisoners conspired on his
life. West testifies in her great opus "Black Lamb Grey Falcon" that
transcripts of the trial were banned and that it was forbidden to
mention the mere historic fact either in speech or in print.
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