22 The Great War see and the consequences of which might change the map of three continents. On the eve of hostilities between Austria and Servia, there was plain reason to recall the famous prophecy of Krueger, so soon realized, that the British conquest of the two Boer republics would be at a cost " which would stagger humanity." There was, too, in the Austro-Servian clash a plain parallel, for the mighty resources of the Haps- burg Empire were also directed against two little States, Servia and Montenegro, who were bound to stand or fall together, whose resistance was certain to be desperate and whose condition warranted the conjecture that they would prove a difficult problem for Austrian military forces. For since the Prussian army demobilized after its conquest of France, no European nation had pos- sessed an army whose uninterrupted triumphs could compare with those of Servia in the two great wars of the Balkans. The 300,000 troops Servia and Montenegro possessed had served in two terrible campaigns. They had been victorious in two great battles, one unequalled in number of combatants in any European conflict since Gravelotte, and from the Turk and the Bulgar they had captured enormous amounts of military material, of rifles, of cannon, of ammunition. It was the misfortune of the Serbs that the press of the world fixed upon Turk and Bulgarian as the chief combatants of the first Balkan war. Yet while