THE SLOVENES AND THE SERBS
Those who, for some reason or other, do not love the Yugoslavs will have said to themselves, before taking up this book, that they would certainly supply that searching criticism of this people which the author would omit. They knew it was unlikely that a man would write at such excessive length about the Southern Slavs if he had not a weakness for them, and if he predicted for their State the virtue of cohesion or more than very moderate tranquillity, his prejudice would have to be discounted. "The Yugoslavs," said an Italian lady to me in London, and her beautiful lips looked as if they could scarcely bring themselves to pronounce the name, "the Yugoslavs," she said, "are very wild and black." If I have given the impression in this book that they are white, my fault will be much greater than the lady's, since I am not quite a stranger to them. Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bulgars—they have good and evil qualities so different that one must take them separately, and perhaps it will be more instructive to compare them with each other. The Slovenes need not detain us; they are a small people occupying a surprisingly large area; if they were less well organized they would have been long ago swallowed up. They shine as workers in the field and mine and forest much more than as military men. They have never been hereditary soldiers, like so many of the Croats, and it is perhaps this want of confidence in their own military prowess which has caused them to take measures that are sometimes too severe against the Austrians who are under them. The Bosnian Moslems assert that, as all their links with Turkey are now broken, they are the best Yugoslavs. But the Slovenes are also the best Yugoslavs, because they recognize that in Yugoslavia is their sole salvation. Some of us may regret that their tenacity so far outstrips their idealism. They are a careful people, as may be seen from Order No. 17024 which was issued, on December 4, 1920, by the Prefecture of Ljutomir. Referring to sequestered property, it enjoined that the Austrian owner should be allowed so much that he could live on it, but not so much as to enable him to be extravagant. They are also a relatively well-educated people; according to official statistics of 1910, 85·34 per cent. of the Slovene population know how to read and write, while their neighbours to the east, the Magyars, can only reckon 62 per cent. and the Italians of pre-war Italy, 62·4 per cent. The most backward part of the Slovene race, those of Istria, have 46·6 per cent. of illiterates, while there are Italian provinces where the illiterates amount even to 85 per cent. Rome itself counts 65 per cent.[116]
THE MONTENEGRINS AND THE SERBS
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 café 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 Peć who belonged to the great Vasojević 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 Vasojević, 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 Čačak, 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 Čačak 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.
THE CROATS AND THE SERBS
Some of Yugoslavia's neighbours were anxious, during the months which followed the War, that we should learn how Serb and Croat were continually at each other's throat. The dissensions between the two branches of the Yugoslav family would have been much more serious and more prolonged if their neighbours had paid less attention to them. It is true that "our Serbian customs," in the words of Jaša Tomić, "come from the village, while those of the Croats come from the nobles." The humbler Croat, one may say, was an employee in a big store, while the Serb was a small trader. The Croat would naturally like to introduce the big-store system into Yugoslavia, but this the Serb does not understand. He has a greater sense of responsibility and is more careful with regard to the expenses. To the Croat, in the old Empire, it was immaterial whether the officials were more or less costly. The bill was paid by Austria, who was the foe. For some time the Croat found himself forgetting that he was in Yugoslavia. When Cardinal Bourne came to Zagreb in the spring of 1919 and the town-hall was decorated with the British, Croatian, Serbian, Slovene and the town flag, some one asked the mayor why the State flag had been omitted. He was horrified. "The State flag!" he cried. Then it dawned upon him.... Numbers of Croats have belonged to the governing class and—impelled by the Catholic religion—have displayed more devotion to the arts than to the freedom of their country. On the other hand the Serbs, a race of practical peasants, have a highly developed national consciousness. This they owe partly to their inborn political gifts and largely to their Church, for the Orthodox religion—one may say, I think, without injustice—has more frequently shown itself, so closely is it connected with the idea of the State, to be rather of this world than of another. One should say the Orthodox religion as it flourishes in the Balkans, for when the Russian General Bobrikoff, who was attached to the person of King Milan, came back with him to Belgrade after the Peace of San Stefano, he was scandalized to see that religion had no greater share in the national rejoicings. "Accustomed as I was in my own country," he said, "to see nothing done without prayers and the blessing of the Church, I was indeed astounded to observe that the priests played the part of officials even in the cathedral, and often were altogether absent." This reminds one of von Baernreiter, who wished to learn the Serbian language, so that he would be more eligible for the governorship of Bosnia. He asked his teacher at Vienna when one could hear sermons in the Serbian church, and was informed that these occurred but twice a year and that on those occasions everybody left the church. The Serb and the Bulgar have come to neglect our distinctions between that which is spiritual and that which is temporal; their religion is, in consequence of their history, so inherent a part of the nation's life that in losing it one would almost cease to be a Serb or a Bulgar. Their Church is as national as that of the Armenians.[118] This may not be an ideal state of things, but it prevailed in Spain under the Moorish oppression and in the France of Jeanne d'Arc. During the crisis of the Great War the churches in the West were everywhere national; and in Serbia it was calculated that 60 per cent. of the sermons had a pronounced national colouring....
Now with these differences between the Croat and the Serb, does it not seem strange that the vast majority of them are for union, with a part of this majority in favour of a reasonable decentralization? But if we investigate the motives of the Serbs and Croats who would thwart this union, we will see that they have nothing of that faith which, after all these centuries, has moved the Yugoslav multitude. Some of the Serbs wish to keep aloof on the ground that Serbia in the last hundred years has borne the brunt of the battle—and this, whether they were or were not faced with a more difficult situation, is acknowledged by most of the Croats, who for that reason would never dream of wishing the more modern Zagreb to supplant Belgrade. Those few Croats who are not for Yugoslavia are moved by ecclesiastical prejudice or by their longing for the privileges which the Habsburgs granted them. But those who, for various reasons, criticize the central Government are by no means necessarily in favour of setting up a separate one. Whatever the impetuous Radić may have said, he is out for Yugoslavia. Still one cannot be astonished that he was sometimes misunderstood. The Zagreb students who, towards the end of 1918, came to Svetozar Pribičević with the request that he would let them kill the demagogue, were for expressing in this way what Dr. Dušan Popović, the well-known deputy, expressed in another. It was at the Zagreb Provincial Parliament that he exclaimed, in the summer of 1918, that "This idea will be victorious and therefore I say publicly, in the presence of the whole people, that I am a Croat, a Serb and a Slovene, or, if you prefer it, none of them but merely a Yugoslav." In 1914 when Stamboulüsky, the future Prime Minister of Bulgaria, was arrested and accused of Serbophilism, he declared: "I am neither Bulgar or Serb; I am a Yugoslav!" ... For at least a generation Zagreb will remain particularist, zealously preserving the differences—personal, social and religious—which distinguish her people from the dominant Serbs. The Croat officers who burned with shame at the Archduke's murder on Bosnian soil, the Croat regiments that in 1915 marched into Belgrade with bands playing and their colours flying, the Croat officials whose bread and salt came from the Habsburgs in administering Yugoslav countries during the War—all these will not forget a long, deep-rooted and honourable tradition. But Zagreb is now even as Munich was in 1866; after having been the Rome of the Yugoslav movement, the seat of its philosophy and the centre of its politics, the Croat capital has now an atmosphere of sad futility, for Belgrade is the beacon of the Yugoslav world. While comparing Zagreb with Rome one must add that she had also the misfortune to resemble Rome of the decadence—a good deal of outer polish was imparted by the Austrians, at the expense of their victims' backbone. The five centuries of Turkish domination had no such demoralizing influence upon the Serbs, especially not in the country places. In the opinion of a very close observer,[119] whom I quote, there is nothing that so thoroughly displays the dominance of Belgrade as the agrarian problem. The projected reforms, which have been based on the principle that no one should own more land than he can cultivate with the aid of his family, would dispossess large numbers of big landowners in Croatia and still larger numbers of men with moderate holdings, whose compensation would be "determined hereafter." The application of these reforms has been delayed for various reasons, but nowhere at any time has it been suggested that Croatia might reject them. In the old kingdom of Serbia, with much the greater part of the land in peasant possession, it may be said that there is no agrarian problem.... Those enemies of Yugoslavia, by the way, who have hoped that the particularism of Croatia would be something altogether different from what it is, should have mingled with the crowd at Zagreb on the evening of Prince Alexander's arrival in July 1920. The Prince interrupted his dinner, came out on to the balcony and made a speech. "Draga moja bratjo Hrvati," he said—"Croatians, my dear brothers." Not for a thousand years had a ruler of Croatia addressed his people in their own tongue. One immense roar of delight broke, as the Morning Post's special correspondent tells us, from the assembled multitude; men fell on each other's necks, laughed, wept and kissed each other.... Such manifestations must not lead us to believe that all the internal problems of the young State are settled. Croatia (as also Slovenia) is jealous of her separate identity, suspicious to some extent of Serbia, her prestige and projects; she has no intention of allowing herself, after the hard fight against Magyarization, to be "Balkanized." But one thing was made clear by the Prince's visit: there can be no word or thought of separation.
We have spoken of the disaffection prevalent among the Croats, and on this the world has fixed its eyes, because of the large number of Croat deputies who have hitherto declined to come to Belgrade. Nevertheless there is a more general and more grievous discontent in Yugoslavia, since, after all, the Croats' attitude is of a temporary character—for it is probable that after the next general election their peculiar upbringing will not be so potent in determining their sentiments towards the State. More and more will they be ready to make common cause with Serbs and Slovenes; and their criticisms, which are now so negative, will be of a more useful kind. (They will recognize, for example, that if it costs 3000 dinars to open an inn in Serbia they were not justified in protesting when the fee in Croatia was raised from 5 crowns to 5 dinars.) That Yugoslavia gives ground for criticism no one, least of all her well-wishers, deny. And those who pray that she will prosper do so for the reason that the scattered Southern Slavs have for the first time now been able—most of them at any rate—to link their arms together; and we hope that with high qualities outweighing their defects the Southern Slavs will permanently take their place among the nations. But this will not be brought about unless those ailments which they suffer from are now confronted. Serbs themselves are often saying that their little Serbia was better than this fine new country which is thrice as large. She had fewer problems, she had fewer parties, and if people were corrupt they were so on a smaller scale. Traditions which are deprecatingly called Balkan, but which were at that time suited to a Balkan country, should not be allowed to spread across a country which is so much more than Balkan. Merit does not everywhere in this imperfect world advance you automatically, but an effort is required in Yugoslavia to resist the calls of friendship in appointing men to offices. The army of officials is too numerous; yet many of them are so badly paid that even if a great reformer could reduce by half their numbers he would be inclined to lay no hand upon the total sum they now enjoy. But this necessity of cleansing the public services is not peculiar to Yugoslavia. The politicians must have courage to lay heavier taxes on the peasants: the strange phenomenon is seen of peasants who assert that they are quite prepared for this, and on the other hand of politicians who are frightened lest it lose them many votes. The peasants generally are so prosperous that some, for instance, whom I know of near Kragujevac, men occupied in growing cereals, find that the fowls which they keep rather as a hobby do not have to lay them golden eggs in order to pay all the taxes. In that region it is usual nowadays for peasants not to count their bank-notes, but to weigh them; recently a man disposed of certain fields for his own weight in notes of ten dinars. The peasants are not only dissatisfied with the two chief parties, the Radicals and the Democrats, for not taxing them sufficiently—so that at the next general election they may give a good deal more support than hitherto to their own Peasants' party—but they complain that their interests are neglected although, as we have seen, the lawyers and other townsfolk of the Radical and Democrat parties are so anxious with respect to peasants' votes.
The difficult position of the Yugoslavs—observe how in the last year their exchange has fallen—is due in part to the deplorable activities of other peoples (vast amounts have had to be imported for reconstruction purposes, Rieka has been practically unavailable as a port, and conditions have been such that the Yugoslavs have had to keep a large army mobilized), partly their position is due to measures ill-advised but which they were compelled to take (such as their system of Agrarian Reform), partly to political inexperience and partly to their lack of organizing powers. Let us hope that from now onwards Yugoslavia will have to arm herself less heavily against the slings and arrows of the world, and that she will be able therefore to become a more proficient swimmer in this sea of troubles.