The Balkan Trail

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

Men of position are proud and prejudiced. In humble Sofia, where there is little pretence, the judge of a supreme court, whose salary was 72l. a year, declined an offer of double that wage to serve me as interpreter. An officer in the army, and other Government officials to whom I made approaches, displayed similar pride and lack of enterprise. I was bound for the border, and the only individuals willing to accompany me were two fallen stars of feeble age, in circumstances of despair; and at last I was obliged to choose between these luckless linguists. One was an anarchist, light of head and heavy of heart, the other a bankrupt viscount with a bad eye. I selected the nobleman, but a word for the anarchist; he is dead.

He was a very dirty anarchist, with long, shaggy, unkempt mane, and a hungry, haunted look. He wore a silk-lined frock coat of ample capacity, a pair of trousers of doubtful suspension, shoes in which his feet flapped, a silk hat of bygone glory, no collar, no cuffs. He was of small stature, but his outfit had been created for no little man. A wonderful ‘gift of gab’ had he; in a few moments I knew his whole history. He had acquired his knowledge of English in the States, where in the ’sixties he had served (probably soup) with the Stars and Stripes when the Stars and Bars were in the field. But—and the veteran is unique in this regard—he could not procure a pension from the United States Government. Nevertheless he loved my country. He had never gone hungry there, while he had often felt the pangs in Bulgaria. What had Bulgaria done for him? Even the clothes he was wearing had been given him by an Englishman. For his country’s neglect of her travelled son, he had acquired the Irish complaint, he was ‘agin’ the government.’ He was for sending Prince Ferdinand to the hereafter, and favoured the fashionable dynamite bomb. He was a simple soul; before he could execute his plot he was sent to eternity himself—though not quite hoist by his own petard. He was shot, one bright summer evening, in the public park in front of the palace. Old Barnacle had not known David Harum’s precept, ‘Do unto the other feller what he would do unto you—but do it furst.’

Barnacle was an honest man, and he would have been faithful; all he needed to make him generous was a little success. I knew him well before he died. But in selecting my interpreter I felt compelled to act on the principle that a clever crook is sometimes a safer companion than an honest simpleton.

The man with the bad eye proved to be a character with a most romantic past, a Continental count who had fallen from his high estate, but still a man of good taste—particularly for food. He, too, had been a soldier; he had commanded a company of cavalry in the Russo-Turkish war, and could still, in his age, ride me out of my saddle. But he was a Jew, and wisely, as time has proved, did not return after the war to the land of his birth. He was not a dragoman by profession, there was nothing servile about him. An English correspondent would not have tolerated his patronage. But in America, a man and his master, and a master and his man, equal pretty much the same thing; and we have heard that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. No serious class prejudices hampered me, and I was content to permit my man to be my companion in a land where I could communicate direct with so few.

The Count had Bulgarian, Turkish, and Russian history, as well as all the languages of Europe, at his fingers’ ends. In view of his many accomplishments I agreed to pay him six francs a day and his living and travelling expenses. But this was not all my man got from me.

The price of a good lunch in London will keep two men for a day in Balkan country, but I did not know this when I commissioned the Count to provide a hamper of food for the first days of our journey. Three loaves of bread, a hunk of Bulgarian cheese, some dried lamb, and two bottles of native wine cost him more of my money than twice the quantity would have come to in London. After the investment he dined at the ‘Pannachoff.’ I sat behind him unnoticed and watched him consume three times as much food as an ordinary man.

His string of names did justice to his characteristics, Isaac Swindelbaum von Stuffsky. He was a real count: Isaac Swindelbaum was all his card bore; an impostor in his predicament would have flaunted the title. He was called ‘count’ to his face and a ‘Russian spy’ behind his back. But he was not the latter, he was too poor. Until the correspondents came, he had lived on the meals and the drinks which tales of his exploits in the war that created Bulgaria won him from her officers.

When a man has no visible means of support in either Bulgaria or Turkey he is always labelled Spy. In Bulgaria the term is one of reproach, but in Turkey spies are looked up to and envied as among the only regularly paid servants of the Sultan. But the officers of Sofia knew that my man was not a spy. They said he was an emissary of Russia simply because he insisted that the great Slav country and Austria, allies for reform, were sincere in their desire to bring about peace in Macedonia, which none of the officers believed.

It was a run of only forty kilometres from Sofia to Radomir, but it took our train half the day to cover the distance. Radomir is the terminus of the railway to the south, and about half-way to the frontier. Only one mixed goods and passenger train makes the trip to and from Sofia each day, and the line is not very profitable. If the Turkish Government would allow a junction railway to be constructed from Uskub or Koumanova up to Egri-Palanka, this road would then be continued to meet it, and all Bulgaria as well as Macedonia would reap a benefit. But the Turkish rulers like not civilising institutions.

Our train stopped now and again to pick up some peasant’s pig or waited ten minutes for a late passenger, and we had opportunity to see something of the villages at which it stopped. At one little town there was a striking scene. It was early in March; the snow on the Balkans had not yet begun to melt, and the peasants were still clad in their sheepskin coats. Before a low khan (a caravansary) were two cavalry officers and several private soldiers; and all about surged to and fro white-clad, furry peasants leading horses of all breeds and in all conditions—nags which had never eaten other feed than grass, and well-groomed, blooded beasts, bred from the special stables maintained by the Government for the purpose of improving the native stock. The officers were counting animals available for military service in case of war, and the peasants had come from miles around, eager to have their horses tried and graded.