While Bulgaria came from the San Stefano peace dazzled with jewels
that she was not to clasp, the Serbs continued walking in the shadows
which had, from the time of Michael's death, been gradually falling
round them. No practical result was obtained from a letter which the
Serbian Government ordered their representative to read to the Greek
Patriarch, pointing out that only such parishes should be held as
unquestionably Bulgarian which had formerly been subject to the
Patriarchate of Trnovo, even as those of the Pe['c] Patriarchate were
undoubtedly Serbian, while those of Ochrida were disputable, since
that region had belonged in turn to both of them. Small advantage
accrued to the Serbs from their fidelity to the Greek Patriarch: in
Macedonia they came to be regarded by many Slavs as foes to the new
national Church, while the only desire of the Greeks was to use them
for their own purposes. "There are no Serbs in this parish," wrote a
Bishop when the Patriarch commanded him to permit the Serbian priests
now and then to celebrate a Slav service, "there are no Serbs but
merely Greeks" (in which official terminology the Serbs were included)
"and hellenized Vlachs." ... The Serbs about this time were most
unfortunate in warfare. Prince Milan tried to secure, without coming
to blows, from the Sultan what he expected that his victorious armies
would give him, namely, the administration of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
After the failure of the 1874 crops the peasants of Herzegovina and
then of Bosnia were driven to desperation by the demands of the
tax-gatherers. Miss Irby's eloquent description[56] tells us of the
terrible state of these provinces during the years that preceded the
outbreak. Taxes of one-eighth were demanded by the Governor, one-third
or one-half by the Beg, taxes for exemption from military service,
taxes for pigs, cattle and everything "you have or have not." One
informant said, "I have seen men driven into pigsties and shut up
there in cold and hunger till they paid; hung from the rafters with
their heads downwards in the smoke, until they disclosed where their
little stores were hidden. I have known them hung from trees and water
poured down them in the freezing cold; I have known them chained
barefoot and forced to run behind the Beg's carriage...." The
provinces revolted and vengeance was wrecked upon them. More than a
third of the population fled the country. Sir Arthur Evans[57]
describes the refugees as a "squalid, half-naked swarm of women and
children and old men, with faces literally eaten away with hunger and
disease.... After seeing every moral mutilation," he goes on to say,
"that centuries of tyranny could inflict ... who can go away without a
feeling of despair for the present generation of refugee Bosnia?" The
people of Montenegro and Serbia were profoundly stirred by the
miseries of their brothers. But Milan vacillated, and when finally he
took up arms it was without success, and five weeks after the peace
signature Russia began the Turkish War, one of whose necessary
antecedents was the recognition by Russia that the Austrians were not
to be hampered in Bosnia-Herzegovina. (After the Treaty of Berlin had
placed the two provinces under Austria's administration it is said
that Andrassy, on his return from Berlin, remarked to Francis Joseph
that the door of the Balkans was now open to His Majesty. But the
Russian delegate, Prince Gortchakoff, had prophesied to Andrassy that
Bosnia-Herzegovina would prove the Empire's grave.) One effect
produced by this incursion of the Austrian eagles was a serious
divergence between the Croats and the Serbs. By historic and by ethnic
rights the provinces, so the Serbs argued, should be theirs when once
the Turk had ceased to rule. The Croats, laying special emphasis on
the religious question, were for justifying Austria's occupation. The
Catholic Slav clergy, unlike the Orthodox, ranged themselves with the
great Catholic Power; while Croat politicians of the school of
Star[vc]evi['c] invoked other historic and ethnic sanctions in their
endeavour to found, under the name of "Great Croatia," a State uniting
all the Yugoslav lands of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Thus the
Serbs and their Croatian brothers were acutely in conflict. Never,
said the Serbs, would that "Trialism" come to pass, for the Magyars
would veto the formation of a Yugoslav State within the Empire, having
a population roughly equal in numbers to its own. We Yugoslavs have
nothing to hope for, said the Serbs, except from ourselves, and, being
divided, we are ruining our common interests.... From yet another
quarter was a storm-wind blowing on the Serbs. The Russian volunteers
and officers had taken back with them highly unfavourable impressions
as to the capabilities of the Serbian army, which they accompanied in
the luckless campaign of 1876; also, in the opinion of the
Pan-Slavists the Serbs had been contaminated by European civilization,
whereas the Bulgars seemed, in the words of Professor Miliukoff,[58]
to be the sons of an untouched, virgin soil, free from politics and
ready to work, with all possible zeal for the "inner truth" of
Pan-Slavism, while begging its protector to concern herself with the
"outer truth." The Bulgars were, for these reasons, to have the
preference in the allotment of the spoils of the Turkish War; and,
owing to the conflicting demands of Russia and Prince Milan, Serbia
did not declare war against Turkey until several days after the fall
of Plevna, so that she could not hope that the Russians would show any
special tenderness towards her national aspirations. It is difficult
to see what Serbia could have hoped to gain from the elder brother,
if she had been less dilatory; she gained from this intervention no
vast gratitude from the younger brother. Men may still be found in
Bulgarian frontier villages who were prominent there during the
Serbian army's regime. Some of the officers seem to have told the
people that they ought no longer to call themselves Bulgars, since
they were Serbs; but the propaganda was very mild. Serbian schools
were opened here and there, but if no pupils wished to attend them,
the schoolmasters had a holiday; and the occupying troops limited
themselves to collecting signatures on addresses of loyalty to Prince
Milan. No one, probably, thought that the addresses and petitions were
very serious--no one, that is to say, except a Dalmatian publicist
called Spiridon Gop[vc]evi['c], who printed a large number of them in
his handsome, illustrated book, _Makedonien und Alt-Serbien_ (Vienna,
1889). With regard to Gop[vc]evi['c] as a savant--he says that all the
Macedonian Slavs are Serbs--and there are equally uncompromising
Bulgarian authors--the celebrated Slavist Jagi['c] says that he is
sorry for the good paper which was used for Gop[vc]evi['c]'s book.
Another of his wonderful discoveries was that the Macedonian Slavs are
Croats. And one of his severest judges is a Croat, S. Jurini['c]. He
gives, as if they were most valuable, these fatuous lists of
signatures and informs us that some Bulgarian priests and agitators
tried to prevent them being collected. A Turkish official did, it is
true, show in too Oriental a fashion that he disapproved of these
collectors--on July 16, 1878, he quartered one Cvetkovi['c]-Bo[vz]in[vc]e
on the road between Skoplje and Kumanovo for having obtained 5000
signatures; and after quartering him, the Turk nailed the four parts
of his body, each with a quarter of the petition tied to it, on to
four posts at a place where four roads met. But many of the more
reasonable Bulgars appear to have recognized that these activities of
some Serbian officers and others need certainly not embroil the two
people; while some other manifestations of joy, such as when they
pulled out the beard of the priest of Pirot, and after nightfall, in
celebration of this triumph, illuminated the town, those and similar
transactions were treated as the folly of exuberant subalterns; and
Tako Peyeff of Trn, the spokesman of the little, far-away town and
its representative at San Stefano, told me that although he refused to
sign petitions, yet he said that if Prince Milan should visit Trn it
was the duty of all men to salute him. Up to this time, then, there
was no veritable friction--there was only the cloud gathering over
Macedonia; and even when the Berlin Congress of 1879 adjudged certain
towns to Serbia, as a recompense for the abandonment of any claims on
Bosnia, this was rightly taken by most Bulgars as being far less the
fault of Serbia than of Austria and the other Powers. It is strange,
in fact, that this difficult passage in Serbia's history was marked by
greater animus between Serb and Croat than between Serb and
Bulgar--and the Serbs were standing in Bulgaria. Milan had not yet
made his ill-omened remark that the road to Sarajevo went _via_ Sofia.