On a mild February afternoon I was waiting for the train at a wayside
station in north-western Banat. So unimportant was that station that
it was connected neither by telegraph nor telephone with any other
station, and thus there was no means of knowing how long I would have
to wait. The movements of the train in those parts could never, so I
gathered, be foretold, and on that afternoon it was uncertain whether
a strike had prevented it from leaving New-Arad, the starting-point.
Occasionally the rather elegant stationmaster, and occasionally the
porter with the round, disarming face, raised their voices in
prophecy, but they were increasingly unable--so far, at least, as I
was concerned--to modify the feelings of dullness that were caused by
the circumstances and by the dreary nature of the surroundings: a
plain with several uninteresting little lakes upon it. There was time
enough for meditation--I was wondering if I would ever understand the
people of the Balkans. One hour and then another slipped away, and the
lakes began to be illuminated by the setting sun. A handful of
prospective travellers and their friends were also waiting, and as one
of them produced a violin we all began to dance the Serbian Kolo,
which is performed by an indefinite number of people who have to be
hand-in-hand, irrespective of sex, forming in this way a straight line
or a circle or a serpent-like series of curves. They go through
certain simple evolutions, into which more or less energy and
sprightliness are introduced. The stationmaster looked on approvingly
and then decided to join us, and after a little time he was followed
by the porter. Our violinist was in excellent form, so that we
continued dancing until some of us were as crimson as the sun, and
presently, while I was resting, what with the beauty of the scene and
the exhilaration of the dance, I found myself thinking that, after
all, I might within a reasonable time understand these people. Then a
new arrival, a middle-aged, benevolent-looking woman with a basket on
her arm, came past me.
"Dobro ve[vc]e," said I. ["Good-evening."]
"[vZ]ivio," said she. ["May you live long."]
Nevertheless, I hope in this book to give a description of how the
Yugoslavs, brothers and neighbours and tragically separated from one
another for so many centuries, made various efforts to unite, at least
in some degree. But for about fifteen centuries the greater number of
Yugoslavs were unable to liberate themselves from their alien rulers;
not until the end of the Great War were these dominations overthrown,
and the kindred peoples, the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, put at last
before the realization of their dreams--the dreams, that is to say, of
some of their poets and statesmen and bishops and philologists, as
well as of certain foreigners. But listen to this, by the censorious
literateur who contributes the "Musings without Method" to _Maga_: "We
do not envy the ingenious gentlemen," says he, "who invented the two
new States Czecho-Slovakia and Jugo-Slavia. Their composite names
prove their composite characters. That they will last long beneath the
fanciful masks which have been put upon them we do not believe." Even
so might some uninstructed person in Yugoslavia or South Slavia
proceed to wash his hands of that ingenious man who invented _Maga's_
home, North Britain. I see that our friend in the following number of
_Maga_ (March 1920) says that foreign affairs are "a province far
beyond his powers or understanding." But he is talking of Mr. Lloyd
George.
Our account of mediaeval times will be brief, only so much in fact as
is needed for a comprehension of the present. In approaching our own
day, the story will become more and more detailed. If it be objected
that the details, in so far as they detract from the conduct of
Yugoslavia's neighbours, might with advantage have been painted with
the hazy, quiet colours that you give to the excursions and alarms of
long ago, one may reply that this book is intended to depict the world
in which the Yugoslavs have, after all these centuries, joined one
another and the frame of mind which consequently glows in them.
One cannot on this earth expect that a new State, however belated and
however inevitable, will be formed without a considerable amount of
friction, both external and internal. Perhaps, owing to the number of
not over-friendly States with which they are encompassed, the
Yugoslavs will manage to waive some of their internal differences, and
to show that they are capable, despite the confident assertions of
some of their neighbours and the croakings of some of themselves, of
establishing a State that will weather for many a year the storms
which even the League of Nations may not be competent to banish from
South-Eastern Europe. A certain number of people, who seem to expect
us to take them seriously, assert that an English writer is
disqualified from passing adverse comment on Italy's imperialistic
aims because the British Empire has received, as a result of the War,
some Turkish provinces and German colonies. It is said that, in view
of these notorious facts, the Italian Nationalists and their friends
cannot bear to be criticized by the pens of British authors and
journalists. The fallacy in logic known as the _argumentum ad hominem_
becomes a pale thing in comparison with this new _argumentum ad
terram_. If a passionless historian of the Eskimos had given his
attention to the Adriatic, I believe he would have come to my
conclusions. But then it might be said of him that as for half the
year his land is swathed in darkness, it would be unseemly for him to
discuss a country which is basking in the sun.
Another consummation--though this will to-day find, especially in
Serbia, a great many opponents, whose attitude, following the
deplorable events of the Great War, can cause us no surprise--is the
adhesion, after certain years, of Bulgaria to the Yugoslav State. I
wrote these words a few months ago; they are already out of date. The
general opinion in Serbia is voiced by a Serbian war-widow, who,
writing in _Politika_, one of the newspapers of Belgrade, replied to
Stambouluesky, the Bulgarian peasant Premier, who was always
uncompromisingly opposed to the fratricidal war with Serbia. He had
been saying that the Serbs and other Yugoslavs prefer to postpone the
reconciliation until "the grass grows over the graves of their women
and children whom our officials destroyed"; and this war-widow
answered that it was not necessary for the grass to grow, but that
they should condemn the culprits by a regular court, as prescribed in
the treaty. "Fulfil the undertaking you have assumed, for only so
shall we know that you will fulfil other undertakings in the future."
If it had not been for the Great Powers, especially Russia and
Austria, the union of Serbia and Bulgaria might have occurred long
ago. Wise persons, such as Prince Michael of Serbia and the British
travellers, Miss Irby (Bosnia's lifelong benefactress) and her
relative, Miss Muir Mackenzie, had this aim in view during the sixties
of last century. So had a number of other excellent folk, who
recognized that the two people were naturally drawn to one another.
"The hatred between the two people is a fact which is as saddening in
the thought for the future as in the record of the past, but it is a
fact to ignore which is simply a mark of incompetence. The two nations
are antipathetic ..." says Mr. A. H. E. Taylor in his _The Future of
the Southern Slavs_, a painstaking if rather clumsy book (London,
1917), in which we are shown that the writer is well acquainted with
general history. But in the opinion of an erudite Serb, to whom I
showed this passage, Mr. Taylor knows nothing of Serb and Bulgar under
the Turks. There is no single document nor anything else that speaks
of hatred between them. On the contrary, they were always on friendly
terms. The antagonisms of the Middle Ages, as Mr. Taylor surely knows,
were the work of rulers who paid no attention to the national will;
there was at that time no national consciousness, and just as a
Serbian would wage war with a Bulgarian prince, so would he do battle
with a Croat or with another Serbian ruler. Mr. Taylor talks of "the
almost constant state of warfare between Serbs and Bulgars...," but he
does not mention that there were many cases during the late war in
which the men showed friendliness to one another. He may argue that if
a soldier calls out "Brother" to his foe and subsequently slays him
there is not much to be said for his friendliness, but surely that is
to draw no distinction between what is the soldier's pleasure and his
business. "Nothing," observes Mr. Taylor very truly, "nothing in the
Balkan Peninsula is so desirable as the laying aside of the feud." He
may take it that this feud has been aroused and maintained among the
_intelligentsia_ and for political reasons, with Macedonia in the
forefront. I think he would not be so severe on those who are
"ignorant apparently that the mutual animosity has its roots deep down
in the history and historical consciousness of Serb and Bulgar" if he
remembered that the Bulgars wanted Michael for their prince, and if he
had been present at the siege of Adrianople, where the Serbian and
Bulgarian soldiers, in their eagerness to fraternize, took to speaking
their respective languages incorrectly, the Serb dropping his cases
and the Bulgar his article, in the hope that they would thus make
themselves more easily understood. It seems to me not only more
advisable but more rational to ponder upon such incidents than upon
the idle controversies as to which army was the most deserving; and I
do not think it is evidence of any widespread Bulgarian animosity
because a certain official decided to charge the Serbian Government a
fee for conveying back to Serbia the corpses of their soldiers.
With regard to the two languages, the differences between them will
matter no more than does the difference between Serbo-Croatian and
Slovene. The Serb-Croat-Slovene State has been astonishingly little
incommoded by the fact that the Slovene language is quite distinct,
the two tongues being only in a moderate degree mutually intelligible.
The Slovenes have never been exposed to the influence either of
Byzantium or of the Turks, so that their language is free from the
orientalisms which abound in the southern dialects. But it is curious
to note[1] that many of the Slovene archaisms of form and structure,
such as the persistence of the "v" for "u" and the final -l of the
past participle, which have disappeared from Serbo-Croat, have been
preserved in the dialects of Macedonia. The Bulgarian language, the
south-eastern Serbian dialects, as well as Roumanian and Albanian,
have certain grammatical peculiarities, through being influenced by
the language of the Romanized Thraco-Illyrian peoples with whom they
merged. Even Montenegro was to some degree influenced by this process,
having lost one or two cases, such as the locative. In Serbia one uses
seven cases, the Montenegrin generally contents himself with about
five, and in some dialects they are all discarded.... The amount of
Turanian, Petcheneg and other undesirable blood in the Bulgars does
not--let the two or three eccentric Bulgars say what they
will--prevent them being far more Yugoslav than anything else.
Professor Cviji['c], the famous Rector of Belgrade University, has
made personal examinations in Bulgaria, and is of the opinion that a
great part of that people, for instance, at Trnovo in the middle of
Bulgaria, is physically and spiritually very near to the Serbs. The
Mongol influence, he thinks, is so scattered that it is very difficult
to see.
Unhappily, however, in the last thirty or forty years an enormous
amount of hatred has been piled up between Serb and Bulgar; things
have happened which we as outsiders can more easily forget than those
and the orphans of those who have suffered. Atrocities have taken
place; international commissions have recorded some of them and
non-Balkan writers have produced a library of lurid and, almost
always, strictly one-sided books about them. I suggest that these
gentlemen would have been better employed in translating the passages
wherein Homer depicts precisely the same atrocities. Whatever may seem
good to Balkan controversialists, let us of the West rather try, for
their sake and for ours, to bring these two people together. We have
good foundations on which to build; every Bulgar will tell you that he
is full of admiration of the Serbian army, and the Serbs will speak in
a similar strain of the Bulgars. Also the Serbs will tell you that, no
matter what else they may be able to do, they are, as compared with
the Bulgars, quite incompetent in the diffusion of propaganda; while
the Bulgars will explain to you that in propaganda the Serbs are
immensely their superiors. (Balkan propaganda does not confine itself
to using, with violence, the sword and the pen. In its higher flights
it will, in a disputed district, bury ancient-looking stones with
suitable inscriptions. It will go beyond the simple changes in the
termination of the surnames of those who come under its dominion; the
name upon a tombstone will be made to end, according to circumstances,
in "off" or "vitch," sometimes in the Roumanian "esco" or the Greek
"opoulos." If this is known to the departed, one would like to learn
how it affects them. A great deal of energy has been brought to bear
in the production of official books which place on record the
repugnant details of all the crimes that have ever been imagined by
men or ghouls, which crimes, so say the books of nation A, have been
committed by the incredible monsters of nation B. At times, from
motives of economy, the same photographs have been used by both
nations--an idea which in 1920 was adopted in Hungary, where an artist
conceived a poster showing a child with uplifted finger saying to its
mother in solemn warning: "Mother, remember me; vote for a Social
Democrat." This poster was forbidden by the censor, and, a few days
afterwards, appeared on all street corners as that of the Christian
Socialist party. People of the Balkans found that Western Europeans
were impressed by figures, so that they issued lists of schools whose
pupils were more numerous than the total population of the villages in
which they were situated. Frequently a village would be stated, on the
sworn testimony of its most respected inmates, to be exclusively
filled with persons say of nation A. Not for a moment would it be
admitted that the population might perhaps be mixed. And very
possibly, on going to investigate, the Western European would discover
that the village was entirely uninhabited and had been so for many
years.... We must also have some understanding of the old Balkan
humour if we are not to resent, for example, that story which they
tell of a Bulgarian Minister who happened to be sojourning last year
in Yugoslavia at a time when a great memorial service was being held
for ninety-nine priests whom the Bulgars had assassinated during their
occupation of Serbia in the European War. This Minister cherishes the
hope that his country and Yugoslavia will bury the hatchet. "How
unfortunate," said he, "are these recriminations. I shall have
pleasure in sending them ninety-nine priests, whom they can kill, and
then we can be good friends.")
Thus we have two points of mutual esteem. The vast majority of people
in Belgrade and Sofia are not chauvinist; let them close their ears to
the wild professors who, in their spare time, busy themselves with
writing books and discoursing on politics, a task for which they are
imperfectly fitted. One must naturally make allowances for these small
countries which have been so sparsely furnished hitherto with men of
education that the Government considered it must mobilize them all.
Thus the professors found themselves enlisted in the service of the
State. Unluckily--to give examples would be painful--it too often
happened that the poor professor damaged irretrievably his reputation
and held up the State to ribald laughter. Those who belong to an old,
cultured nation are not always cognizant of the petty atmosphere, to
say nothing of the petty salaries, which is to-day the common lot of
Balkan professors. (A really eminent man, who, for twenty years has
been a professor, not merely a teacher, at Belgrade University
receives a very much smaller salary than that which the deputies have
voted for themselves.) Occasionally these professors must be moved by
feelings similar to those that were entertained by the Serbs of 1808,
who, having thrown off the Turkish yoke which they were resolved never
to bear again, "earnestly expressed, and more than once," according to
Count Romanzoff,[2] "their own will which induced them to beg the
Emperor Alexander to admit them to the number of his subjects." A
resolute old man, a Balkan savant of my acquaintance--he told me he
was a savant--said one day that before all else he was a patriot,
meaning by this that if in the course of his researches he came across
a fact which to his mind was injurious for the past, present or future
of his native land he would unhesitatingly sweep that fact into
oblivion, and he seemed to be amazed that I should doubt the morality
of such a procedure. Bristling with scorn, he refused to give me a
definition of the word "patriotism," and I am sure that, if he knows
his Thoreau, he does not for a moment believe that he is amongst those
who "love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with
the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot
in their heads." May the people of Serbia and Bulgaria rather listen
to such men as Nicholai Velimirovi['c], Bishop of [vZ]i[vc]a,[3]
who--to speak only of his sermons and lectures in our language--lives
in the memory of so many in Great Britain and the United States on
account of his wonderful eloquence, his sincerity, his profound
patriotism, and the calm heights from which he surveys the future. For
those who think with him, the Serbs, in uniting with the Croats, have
already surmounted a more serious obstacle. They believe that for
three reasons their union with the Bulgars is a more natural one: they
practise the same religion, they use the same Cyrillic alphabet and
their civilization, springing from Byzantium, has been identical. The
two people are bound to each other by the great Serbian, Saint Sava,
who strove to join them and who died at Trnovo in Bulgaria. Vladislav,
the Serbian prince, asked for his body; Assen begged that the Bulgars
might be allowed to keep it, but, when the Serbs insisted, a most
remarkable procession set out from Trnovo, bearing to his homeland the
remains of him whom the Bulgars called "our Saint." ... If, then, the
two people will for a few years demand that the misguided professors
shall confine themselves to their original functions--and, likewise,
those students who sit at the professors' feet--one may hope that in a
few years the miserable past will be buried and all the Yugoslavs
united in one State. The time has vanished when Serbia and Bulgaria
stood, as it were in a ring, face to face with one another, paying far
more attention to the disputes of the moment than to those great
unifying forces which we have mentioned. But now Serbia is a part of
Yugoslavia, which has to deal with a greater Italy, a greater Roumania
and others. And the question as to whether a certain town or district
is to be Serbian or Bulgarian sinks into the background.
Fortunately, in the Balkans--where one is nothing if not personal--you
can express yourself concerning another gentleman with a degree of
liberty that in Western Europe would be thought unpardonable. And so,
if the Serbs and the Bulgars will in the main follow the tracks of
their far-sighted leaders, they need not quite suppress their
criticism of each other. No great animosity is aroused by such a
statement as was made to me with regard to a dispossessed Macedonian
prelate, who had told me that he had appealed to the Archbishop of
Canterbury in the hope that he would assist him to return to his
diocese. I asked a member of another Balkan nationality whether he
knew this ancient cleric of the extremely venerable aspect, and
whether he knew what kind of political and religious propaganda had
brought about his downfall. "I know all about that old ruffian," he
replied. "He stole over fifty pigs and one hundred sheep, and about
twenty-five cows and 200 lb. of fat." Anyhow, if his lordship had
heard that these accusations had been repeated in many places, he
would have been far less indignant than if they had been printed in
some unread newspaper or obscure pamphlet.
Now if the local writers cease from indulging their national
partisanship--and God knows they have no lack of material--then
perhaps the time will come when foreign publicists and politicians,
who keep one eye upon the Balkans, will be able to speak well about
the particular country which they affect without speaking ill about
the neighbouring countries, concerning which, it is possible, they
know less. Of course, there are a number of real Balkan experts in
various countries, judicious writers who will be gratefully mentioned
in this book. And there are people, such as Mr. Harold E. Goad, the
vehement pro-Italian writer, who are quite amusing. This gentleman
said in the _Fortnightly Review_ (May 1922) that once he used to hold
romantic views of Balkan politics, but now has ascertained that they
are "usually plotted, move by move, in the coffee-shops of petty
capitals. Intrigue, bribery and calumny, personal jealousy and racial
prejudice are the ordinary means with which the game is played." How
different from the rest of Europe, where intrigue, etc., are
conspicuously absent; and the explanation seems to be that wine and
beer are unlike coffee, which it may be quite impossible to drink
without remembering the poison which so many furtive fingers have
dropped into it. And it would be rank ingratitude if I omitted the
Italian Admiral Millo, though he was injudicious. After he had been at
his post for four months, with the resounding title of Governor of
Dalmatia and of the Dalmatian Islands and of the islands of Curzola,
he told me that he had found it most fascinating to motor through
Dalmatia's rocky hinterland, where the natives had the dignified air
of ancient Roman senators and even greeted you in Latin. This was
rather a startling statement. "Oh yes," said the Admiral, with his
aristocratic, bearded face wearing an expression of even keener
intelligence than usual, "I can assure you," quoth he, "that the
peasants say 'Ave.' I heard them quite distinctly." It was perhaps
inconsiderate of those worthy Croats not to shout with greater
clearness the word "Zdravo!" ["Good luck!"] in order to prevent the
Admiral from riding off with a confused hearing of the second
syllable. A certain excellent dispatch of his--of which more
anon--makes him a writer on the Balkans. I know not whether he
addressed to his Government a dispatch on the above discovery, thus
intensifying the Italian resolve to cling to Dalmatia. In that case
his knowledge was unfortunate, but otherwise it is surely as
delightful as, up here among the tree-clad mountains, are the
glow-worms that go darting through the night.
BLAGOVE[vS]TENJE MONASTERY, CENTRAL SERBIA.