"Women? Fighting with the men? That's not allowed, is it?"
"How can you stop it?" asked Steve, with a shrug. "You don't know much about us yet, Dick, my friend. You don't know what it is to have lived with the Turks for centuries. I have read about your American women on the plains, in the times when the Indians went on the war-path. Most of them could handle a rifle, couldn't they? And they were pretty good shots, too!"
"Yes, but that's different—"
"Not so very different. I don't believe your Indians were ever worse than the Bashi-Bazouks. They hated us Servians, you see, because we were infidels and Christians. And so for hundreds of years they harried us, burned our homes, carried off our women, killed our men. That sort of thing gets into the blood after a time. For centuries we Serbs have stood between all Europe and the Turks. They never wiped us out, though they beat us by sheer weight of numbers. But here, and in Bosnia, that the Austrians stole, and in the Black Mountains—Montenegro—a few Serbs have always held out.
"That's why we aren't so civilized as some of the other countries of Europe. We haven't had the time to be civilized. We have had to fight just to keep alive. We have had to fight the Turks for life itself, and when they did not kill, they burned our fields with the standing grain, summer after summer, so that the harvest was lost. Yet once there was a great Serb empire that stretched from the Black Sea to the Aegean—" Stepan's eyes flashed, and there was a look in them that might have been worn by his great ancestor and namesake, the last of the great medieval Servian Tsars.
"There is a day that we still mark every year," he went on. "The day of the battle of Kossovo, when the Turks annihilated us—though that was more than five hundred years ago. But in the last war we had our revenge, on the great day of Kumanovo, when, though the Turks outnumbered us, we drove them before us and crushed them.
"But I spoke of the women, and I am wandering from the point! We do not want the women to fight, but they come from the villages, where whole companies are recruited from relatives, since we still have almost a patriarchal system. The woman wears men's clothes, and she marches with her husband or her brothers. The officers do not know, and—they fight well. They have known what it is, some of those women, to see their homes burned and their mothers slain by Turks. They know that a free Servia means more than a name!"
"I hadn't thought about it just that way," said Dick. "But I see that you are right. It is just the same thing as with our pioneers. The women of those days did fight the Indians, and for just such reasons. I'm going to get you to tell me more about Servian history some time. You know, until the Balkan War Servia and Bulgaria weren't much more than names to us in America or to most of us. We were surprised and mighty pleased, of course, when you smashed the Turks the way you did."
"Everyone was surprised," said Stepan. His face grew dark. "And there is another thing we hold against Austria. We were good friends, we little states of the Balkans. We had fought a great war, and we would have continued to be good friends had it not been for Austria. But she stepped in when peace was to be made, and said what we could have and what we must not touch. She would not give us the window on the sea that we had paid for with our blood. And she tricked Bulgaria into attacking us and so starting the second war."
"How was that?"