Further down the Danube, though, there would be a janissary watching a
frontiersman, a Grani[vc]ar, on the opposite bank, waiting to kill
him--both of them Serbs, both standing on Serbian land.... The
military frontier regiments were not only organized to defend, in a
long line, Croatia, Slavonia, Ba[vc]ka and the Banat from Turkish
inroads, they had also to fight for the Habsburgs wherever a war was
toward. Two centuries ago, at the time when the Serbian regiments were
in a privileged position--the entire regiment, officers and men,
consisting of Serbs, and their own arms being on the flag--it was
their destiny to go to France, Italy and Spain, as afterwards to the
battle of Leipzig and to Schleswig-Holstein. They may have grumbled a
good deal on the way to all these battles, but once the fighting had
begun they grumbled no more, thus resembling in two respects the
French soldier. And this practice of going abroad on behalf of the
Empire was continued till the frontier regiments, about fifty years
ago, were broken up. Thus Joseph Eberle and George Huber were killed
during the Italian campaign of 1848-1849. These men were German
colonists, whose introduction had been so much encouraged in the
eighteenth century. But, in order to separate Protestant Hungary from
the Turks, so that the two should not unite against the Catholic
Habsburgs, it was laid down by Prince Eugene that all the German
colonists had to be Catholics. Some Protestants managed to settle in
Lescovac, where they held secret services during the night; but in
1726 this was reported to the Prefect of Bela Crkva, whereupon he sent
word that if they would not be converted they would each receive
twenty-five strokes with a birch.... Of course, those who lived on the
frontier lands were subject to the same conditions as their
neighbours. German frontier regiments existed side by side with
Serbian regiments, and the life of all those people can be studied in
a book[34] written by the German frontier village of Franzfeld and
published in 1893, a few months after Franzfeld had celebrated its
centenary. There would, no doubt, be variations enough in the domestic
arrangements of Franzfeld and those of Zrepaja, the neighbouring
Serbian village, some miles away; but, as the inhabitants of Franzfeld
have now been gathered into Yugoslavia, it is not without interest if
we see what sort of a life they have led. The tale of how these
Lutherans from Wuertemberg laid out and constructed and painted their
village, with all the tremendously broad, tremendously straight roads
running parallel and at right angles to each other, with the
church--whose decorations are a few stars on the ceiling--the pastor's
house and the lawyer's and the town hall and other important houses
standing round a square of mulberry trees in the middle of the
place--the tale of all this is told in as deliciously matter-of-fact a
manner as _Robinson Crusoe_. The picturesque, as in that book,
startles us now and then, with a vivid scene--until 1848, we are told,
at the arrival of a staff-officer or of a general, every bell in the
place had to be set ringing and gunpowder had to be fired off. One
finds oneself revelling in the minuteness of the descriptions, one
follows happily or sadly the fortunes of Ruppenthal and Kopp and
Morgenstern. Everything is true, for the compilers of the book have
felt, like Defoe, that "this supplying a story by invention is
certainly a most scandalous crime." We are given all the names of
those who at the beginning occupied the ninety-nine houses--the
hundredth being used as an inn--with their place of origin, the
numbers of their male and female dependants, and by what means they
had hitherto earned their bread. Many houses have been added since
that time. Among all the Germans, house No. 79 was occupied by George
Siraky, a Hungarian who had been a peasant. Ten years afterwards
another list is made and Siraky still disposes of the same twenty-four
"yoke"[35] of plough-land, ten of meadow and one of garden, which he
had originally been given, whereas some of the others had increased or
diminished their holdings. Then we lose sight of him, and his name
does not become one of those which reappears in succeeding
generations. Of course, the colony was established on a military
basis; an officer, usually a lieutenant, with one or more
non-commissioned officers, was stationed there, as the representative
of a commandant who presided over several villages. The resident
officer was supposed to maintain law and order, to see to it that the
people sowed their land at the right season, and to inform the
commandant of any delinquency, for the lieutenant was not allowed to
punish anyone. As one or more of the able-bodied men belonging to a
house might be absent for a long time on military service or in
captivity, or else through sickness or wounds be unfit to work, and
through lack of means the householder not be in a position to hire
day-labourers, in that case his fellow-villagers, one after another,
were obliged to assist him without payment. In order that all possible
respect should be attached to the chief man and woman of a house--the
house-father and house-mother--these were not liable to punishment for
small offences, and if a considerable offence made it necessary to
punish them, then they were first of all deposed from their position.
Various public posts were filled by the house-fathers or other men,
and for refusing to accept such a post a man was commonly arrested;
but this punishment, as well as that of so many strokes with a cane
(which seems to have been the most usual penalty), was abolished by
1850. The military frontier system came to an end in 1872, at which
time the communal life, which had been found to be very irksome, was
also gradually done away with. Franzfeld is now a prosperous and
peaceful place; their horses are well known, they breed excellent
cattle and pigs and sheep, and they say of themselves that out of one
Franzfeld man you can make a couple of Jews and there will still
remain a Franzfeld man. They tell how once or twice a Hungarian Jew
has opened a shop in the village, selling his goods very cheaply for
two or three months, at a lower price, in fact, than he paid for them,
and then putting up the prices; but as soon as he does that he is
boycotted. The aliens who have settled in Franzfeld--Hungarians,
Slovaks and Roumanians--have come as servants, have married Franzfeld
girls and are looked upon as Germans. The same German dialect is
spoken as in Wuertemberg; troops from that country marched through
Franzfeld during the War. But Serbian, the villagers told me, is the
international language of at any rate western Banat, in spite of the
Magyars who, as in other parts, made for the last few years of their
domination extreme efforts on behalf of their unlovely language. They
supplied Franzfeld with schoolmasters and mistresses who could speak
no German and no Serbian, so that it was very difficult for both
sides. And the authorities told the pastor that the chief truths of
religion, they considered, should be taught in Hungarian. But the
pastor did not agree with them and they let the matter drop. Franzfeld
has seen wild days, particularly in 1848, and her one monument records
a calamity of two of her sons who vanished down a well which they were
sinking. Of itself the land is not very fertile, but the people have
been so successful that they have founded a colony, Franzjosephsfeld,
in Bosnia--they multiplied too greatly for their own soil to support
them. They speak, many of them, five languages, and they will not be
the least worthy of Yugoslav subjects. [Their interests are much more
agricultural than political.] With regard to their multiplication, by
the way, it is related in this centenary book, among much curious
information, that when another Franzfelder comes into the world it is
usual to present certain largesse to the midwife, namely, one gulden
(this was written in Austrian times), a loaf of bread, a little jar of
lard and a few kilograms of white flour. In the old military period
this personage was also, like the doctor and the schoolmaster, "on the
strength." The last of those who bore the rank of Company-Midwife was
Gertrude Metz; she was pensioned after thirty-eight years, and
continued for a few years in private practice.