It will be profitable to compare the Montenegrins with the Serbs,
because in our impatience with those persons who would keep them
separate we may have seemed to imply that we believe them identical. The
Serbs who maintained themselves in those mountains developed certain
characteristics which differentiate them from their brothers. The Serb
of the old kingdom walks, the Serb of the mountain struts. The
magnificent Serbian warrior of the kingdom is so disciplined that
although a Field-Marshal will sit down openly in a cafe and drink wine
with some old comrade who is in the ranks, yet when the soldier is on
duty his obedience is perfect. But if the Montenegrin private thinks
that his officer has rebuked him unjustly, he will not hesitate to kill
him. The Serb has a great respect for the national heroes, while every
Montenegrin (for the sake of brevity we will use this term instead of
"Serb of Montenegro," and imply, when using the word Serb, a Serb of the
old kingdom)--as we have said, a Serb respects the national heroes,
while every Montenegrin has a knowledge of his own ancestors for at
least a hundred years. He is a chivalrous person who wishes to be
treated as at least your equal. It was the Serbs' disregard of this
sentiment which now and then gave umbrage to those Montenegrins who had
expected that their union with the Serbs would cause an immediate return
of the golden age. This was almost as offensive to the Montenegrins as
the request that they would now contribute towards the support of the
army. They had always left this to the Tzar--"We and the Russians," they
used to say, "are 150 millions." Not all the Montenegrins have managed
to emancipate themselves from the thraldom of the clan. An amusing
example of this was a major at Pe['c] who belonged to the great
Vasojevi['c] family. He gave two of us a large lorry, which was the only
car he had, and advised us to start very early and to take no one with
us, except a guard, as the road to Mitrovica was in a soft condition. We
started off with about twenty passengers, but only one of them, a Turk,
had any luggage to speak of; and after we had gone a good part of the
way we were held up at a military post. A Montenegrin captain, also a
member of the Vasojevi['c], had overslept himself and ordered us by
telephone to return for him. The Serbian lieutenant--who had risen from
the ranks--asked at once if that order would come in writing, and when
he received a negative answer he cut off the communication and wished us
a happy journey. The Montenegrins also differ from the Serbs in their
cultivation of the arts. They have no liking for songs of love, but say
that men should only listen to the guslar and to hero-songs. They are
severer and more dignified than the Serbs, and it will be some time
before the average Montenegrin throws back his head in a railway
carriage and rolls out a joyous song, as I once heard a Serb do in the
Banat, whereupon another Serb in the far corner--they obviously had
never met--joined in the song with great heartiness. The Montenegrin
says that the Serb chatters like a gipsy (though we must not forget
that, as Miss Durham remarked,[117] he is hurt if things Serbian are
criticized by an outsider); he has been told that the Englishman is
grave, like himself, and therefore he appreciates him from afar. But not
many Englishmen (or Serbs) would care to indulge, like the Montenegrins,
in the ceaseless recapitulation of time-honoured exploits. The younger
folk are not so faithful to these ancient stories, but it is in
Montenegro that performers on the one-stringed, monotonous guslar can
most easily find an audience. The Serbs of the kingdom have become more
eclectic in musical matters, though even with them the popular taste is
in favour of the man who snores, on the grounds that he is hearty and
robust. In so far as foreign influence is concerned, the Montenegrin has
been to some extent affected by Italian culture, while that of Greece
and Germany has acted on the Serb. But the Great War had an equally
unfortunate influence on both of them. One must, however, mention that
long before the War, and owing partly to Albanian influence, partly to
their own struggle for existence and partly to other causes, the
Montenegrins had shown themselves defective in straightforwardness.
Undoubtedly they had deteriorated under the example of Nikita, but this
unfortunate trait can also be discerned between the lines of the great
poem, the "Gorski Venac," written in the first half of the nineteenth
century. There used to be a certain amount of what we call theft in
Montenegro, but the natives of that country, as of Albania, cherished
rather communistic ideas; it seemed to them that they had a sort of
right to that which another possessed, particularly if he was a near
relative. After the War the Montenegrin was so much impoverished that he
stole more freely, and the Serb, whose hands had hitherto been
remarkably clean, took to the same habits and often in a very amateur
fashion. Thus in a Macedonian village where a British army store had
been rifled, the officers turned to the local priest, who was indignant
with his people and conducted the officers into every house. Nothing was
discovered, and the priest proposed that his own house should be
searched. He was told that this was unnecessary, but he insisted; and
when his careless wife led the way up a ladder into the loft a British
officer perceived at any rate one pair of khaki breeches. The patients
of the Scottish Women's Hospital at Belgrade were so unpractised in the
art of stealing that one of them--a typical case--returned one day to
have her leg attended to, and in raising her skirt revealed on the
petticoat, which had once been a tablecloth, a large "S.W.H." These
felonious ways are in contrast with the usual Serb candour. One
afternoon in Belgrade I was searching for a small street in a district
which I had not visited before. When at last, after many inquiries, I
came to within fifty yards of it I found a policeman--but it is only
fair to say that the majority of the force consisted at this time of
soldiers recently disbanded. When I asked him where the street might be,
the good man thought a while and then, throwing back his open hand and
giving up the problem in despair, said, "My God, I know not."
The wave of crime has manifested itself differently among the Serbs and
the Montenegrins, in that the latter have been more primitive and have
consummated their plundering by assassination--and this in a country
where between 1895 and 1913 only two men were murdered for their money.
In Serbia the people, even in the terrible distress after the War, did
not go to such lengths. During the first half-year, the only two cases
of unnatural death in the whole district of [vC]a[vc]ak, where I spent a
couple of months, were both of them suicides, an old man hanging himself
on account of the death of his last remaining soldier son, and an
officer's wife, who had been too friendly to an Austrian, throwing
herself into a well on her husband's return. A certain village of the
same district is an instance of the frequency of all those minor
peccadilloes, such as drunkenness and rowdiness and so forth, which the
Serbs permit themselves. There is a law which lays it down that the
mayor must be a native and must be a man who never has been lodged in
gaol. But that unhappy village in the [vC]a[vc]ak region is unable to
produce a single adult man with such a record.... If the Serb of the old
kingdom is a more easy-going individual than his brother of the
mountains it is quite erroneous to think that they dislike each other or
have not resolved to come together.