Part 2

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.

BLAGOVETENJE MONASTERY, CENTRAL SERBIA.

FOOTNOTES:

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I

PAGE PREFACE 9

INTRODUCTION: THE TRAGEDY OF A FRONTIER 23

I. GLORY AND DISASTER (EARLIEST DAYS TO THE BATTLE OF KOSSOVO) 26

II. FIGHTING THE DARKNESS (BATTLE OF KOSSOVO TO THE APPEARANCE OF KARA GEORGE) 50

III. BUILDING THE FOUNDATIONS: NAPOLEON AND STROSSMAYER 90

IV. THE SHIFTING SANDS OF MACEDONIA (1876-1914) 165

V. THE EUROPEAN WAR (1914-1918) 225

INDEX 301

THE BIRTH OF YUGOSLAVIA

INTRODUCTION

THE TRAGEDY OF A FRONTIER

Kiepert, the famous geographer, was able, as the result of his diligent researches and explorations, to correct many errors in former ethnological maps; but in the map of the Balkan Peninsula, which he published in 1870, the country between Kustendil, Trn and Vranja is represented by a white space. And if the people who dwell in these wild, narrow valleys had been overlooked as thoroughly by subsequent Congresses and Frontier Commissions they would have been most grateful. They only asked--this well-built, stubborn race--that one should leave them to their own devices in their homes among the mountains where the lilac grows. They asked that one should leave them with their ancient superstitions, such as that of St. Petka, who inhabited a cavern high above the present road from Trn, while St. Therapon, so they say, lived by himself upon a neighbouring rock. Inside the cavern now the water drips continuously and is collected in large bowls; these are St. Petka's tears, which are particularly beneficial, say the natives, for afflicted eyes. But though this region is so poor that, towards the end of the Turkish regime and during the war of Bulgarian liberation and also in the winter of 1879-80, the people were compelled, through lack of flour, to use a sort of "white earth," bela zemja, yet this land was coveted, and now the maps no longer show an empty space but a variety of names and a frontier line. From the nomenclature we perceive that the region was visited of old by people who were not Slavs--such were those who gave to a mountain the name of Ruj, to a village the name of Erul, and to a river the name of Jerma, which has been explained as being derived from the Lydian Hermos, the river of St. Therapon's birthplace. The names of Latin colouring may either be memorials of the Romanized Thracians or else may refer to the mediaeval Catholics, whether Saxon miners or travelling merchants. But there does not seem in the veins of the present population to be much trace of these other settlers or wayfarers; at any rate, the Slavs do not differ appreciably among themselves, and the drawing of a frontier line has been a peculiar hardship.

One of the greatest misfortunes of the nineteenth century was the creation of separate Serbian and Bulgarian kingdoms, wherein there was so small an ethnological difference between these two branches of the Yugoslavs; and in those districts where a frontier runs one sees especially how criminal it was to make this separation. Balkan philologists to-day will tell you--and even those who are in other respects the most rabid Serbs or Bulgars--that there is really no such thing as a Serbian and a Bulgarian language, but only groups of Yugoslav dialects. And yet it pleased the Great Powers to prevent the union of the two Balkan brothers. In that region with which we are dealing the Berlin Congress attempted to draw, with very inadequate maps, a frontier line along the watershed; and the Commissioners who were sent to mark out this line, observing that many of the indicated points did not coincide with the watershed, thought it would be preferable to trace the frontier along the saddle, between the tributaries of the Morava on one side and of the Struma and the river of Trn on the other. As the region was, however, not uninhabited the farmers were frequently cut off, as at Topli Dol and Preseka, from the meadows and the forests which they had regarded always as their own. Bismarck, speaking with indifference of "the fragments of nations that inhabit the Balkan Peninsula," could see in the national yearning of the Yugoslavs only a yearning for lawlessness and tumult. So he laboured at his plan of dominating Europe with the mighty structure of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian conservative empires; and if he built it over a stream of democracy, with results that are to-day apparent, who knows whether the statesmen of our day are not somewhere constructing a house which to our descendants will appear equally ridiculous? And anyhow, as we shall see, he was far from being the only offender at the Berlin Congress. If that particular strip of frontier had been drawn in the most unimpeachable fashion it would still have been iniquitous.

One may object that even if the people were divided by rough-and-ready methods, that was no reason why they should oppose each other, and indeed a number of frontier incidents which occurred between the time of the Congress and 1885 were not regarded, either by Serbs or by Bulgars, as being serious obstacles to a union. But Russia and Austria, revelling in the intrigues, continued to pull the two States now this way and now that, and all too frequently against each other. It can thus not be a matter of surprise if the rather inexperienced statesmen of those little countries fell into line with the two Great Powers and spent a good deal of their energies in assailing each other. So blind, alas! were these statesmen that all the tears of St. Petka would not have cured them, and now the two kindred people, so progressive in many ways, are--to speak of each people as a whole--further apart than when their shaggy forefathers came over the Carpathians. It has been the fate of the Yugoslavs--Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bulgars--to live for centuries beside each other and be kept always, by foreign masters, isolated from each other. At rare intervals, as we shall see in following their history, a person has arisen who has tried, with altruistic or with selfish motives, to make some sort of union of the Yugoslavs. And now we will go back to the time when Slavs first wandered westward to the Balkans.

GLORY AND DISASTER

ARRIVAL OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS--THEIR UNFORTUNATE DEMOCRATIC WAYS--TWO EARLY STATES--ECCLESIASTICAL ROCKS--THE SLAVS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS--SIMEON THE BULGAR--WHAT ARE THE BULGARS?--STEPHEN NEMANIA--THE SLOVENES ARE SUBMERGED--THE FATE OF THE CROATS--THE GLORY OF DUBROVNIK--A GALLANT REPUBLIC--THE GLORIOUS DUAN--EVIL DAYS AND THE PEOPLE'S HERO--THE "GOOD CHRISTIANS" OF BOSNIA--KOSSOVO--GATHERING DARKNESS.

ARRIVAL OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVS

The Slavs who in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries came down from the Carpathian Mountains were known, until the ninth century, as Slovenes (Sloventzi); and if, as is natural, the Serbs and Croats wish to preserve their time-honoured names, they will perhaps agree to call their whole country by the still more ancient name of Slovenia, instead of the merely geographical and not wholly popular term Yugoslavia. Considering that this name (Slovenija) found favour in the eyes of their great Emperor Stephen Duan, one would imagine that the Serbs might adopt it in preference to the cumbrous "Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes," with its unlovely abbreviation into three letters of the alphabet. The Croats would be glad of this solution, and thus the Yugoslavs would, unlike their relatives the Russians, the Poles and the Czechs, have the satisfaction of living in a country called Slovenia, the land of the Slavs.... But, although this would be a happy solution, it seems much more probable that eventually the name Yugoslavia will be adopted. Everyone is agreed that one inclusive word, answering to Britain and British, is necessary. "Evo naih!" ["Here are our men!"] were the words used by the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as their troops marched past them in Paris during the Allied celebration of July 1919. The Serbian Colonel of the Heiduk Velko regiment, which was stationed at Split in 1920, and of which the other officers were chiefly Croats, the men Moslem and Catholic, used in his public addresses to speak of "Our kingdom." There are various objections to the word Yugoslavia; in the first place, it was introduced by the Austrians, who did not wish to call their subjects Serbs and Croats; in the second place, the term is a literal translation from the German and is against the laws of the Serbo-Croatian language. Another, and more important objection, is that the Bulgars, though Yugoslavs, are not included in Yugoslavia; and perhaps the name will be officially adopted when the Bulgars join the other Southern Slavs.

THEIR UNFORTUNATE DEMOCRATIC WAYS

These Southern Slavs did not display the same genius for organization as the Germanic peoples or the Magyars at the period of their respective migrations. In communities of brethren (or bratsva, from the word brat, a brother) they had not raised up a king; but as a compensation they possessed a lofty moral code, a religion inspired by the worship of nature and by the principle of the immortality of the soul. Occupying themselves with agriculture and the rearing of cattle, it was not until they came into contact, that is to say hostile contact, with their more organized neighbours that they were compelled to join together under the authority of a prince, a knez. The bad result of this profoundly democratic spirit was that the Slavs, not knowing how to keep united, fell under the yoke of other nations. From the interesting series of documents, Latin, Arabic, Byzantine and others, which have been collected in Monimenta Sclavenica by Miroslav Premrou, notary public at Caporetto, and published in 1919 at Ljubljana (Laibach), we can see that the Slovenes occupied a much greater extent of territory than do their descendants of our day--"ab ortu Vistulae ... per immensa spatia ..." (cf. Jordanis de orig. Goth. c. 5)--to beyond the Tagliamento, and from the Piave (cf. Ibrahim Ibn-Jakub) to the Adriatic, the AEgean and the Black Sea.

One of the earliest of the above-named Slovene princes was Samo, a Slovene by adoption, who struggled in Pannonia against the Avars in the first half of the seventh century; it happened also in the year 626 that other Slovenes, as well as the Avars, attacked Constantinople. Both of them withdrew, the former being defeated at sea and the latter failing under the city walls. The Avars, having thus shown that they were vulnerable, had to bear an attack on a grand scale made upon them by the Slovenes, this attack being more shrewdly organized than any other transaction in which the Slovenes had as yet engaged. And they still appeared to be reluctant to form even a loosely knit State; they roamed about the Balkans and the adjacent countries to the north-west, seeking for lands that were adapted to their patriarchal organization. Not until the ninth century did they set up what might be called Governments on the Adriatic littoral, where they had no hostility to fear from the last remaining Romans, who were refugees in certain towns and islands.

TWO EARLY STATES

The two most important of these Slav States were, firstly, that one, the predecessor of our modern Croatia, which extended from the mouth of the Raa (Ara) in Istria to the mouth of the Cetina in central Dalmatia, and, secondly, to the south-east a principality, afterwards called Raka, in what is now western Serbia. In a little time the Slavs began to have relations with the towns of the Dalmatian coast and with the islands which were nominally under the sway of Byzantium, but in consequence of their remoteness and their exposed position had succeeded in becoming almost independent republics.