Montenegrin Question

Signer Mussolini toyed last week with the supposedly defunct Montenegrin question, permitted Fascist editors to slap into bold type a manifesto blazoned at Rome by the Royalist Montenegrin Committee for National Defense. The Committee, a dwindling palace clique, called upon Montenegrins to rise against Jugoslavia* and restore King (Pretender) Michael of Montenegro. The Jugoslav press, just now hypersensitive to Italian war scares, grew promptly flurried lest Il Duce follow up his Albanian treaty thrust into the Balkans (TIME, Dec. 13) by trying to restore the independence and throne of Montenegro.

Mountain Queen. Earnest, healthy, invincibly domestic, Queen Elena of Italy must have followed the Montenegrin developments of last week with an eager heart. She is the daughter of the late King Nicholas of Montenegro; the aunt of the present Montenegrin pretender, Michael; and, should Michael renounce his rights, her son, Crown Prince Umberto of Italy, might succeed to the suppositious Montenegrin throne.

Bitter, perhaps, to Queen Elena is the thought that if her kin ever reign again, in Montenegro, it will be through the doing of a one-time hod-carrier, Benito Mussolini, and not due to any potency of her consort, King Vittorio Emanuele of Italy. Still less has Queen Elena herself been able to exert any real pressure on events in the kingdom of her father. In a word, she is respected but not admired, adored or heeded by Italians. She came, serious-minded, from her dark Balkan mountains, and the grandeur that was or is Rome has not quickened or enlivened her. Had she possessed the taste for pearls, for magnificence, for pageantry of her late mother-in-law (TIME, Jan. 11, 1926), the Dowager Queen Margherita, splendor-loving Italians might have enthroned Elena in their fickle hearts. But she is practical. Many an Italian soldier, wounded during the World War, knows that it was due to Queen Elena's good sense in supervising the Italian Red Cross that he was attended by old, uncomely nurses

*Which annexed Montenegro (1918) after the Montenegrin National Assembly had deposed the Petrovic dynasty.