THE THIRTEENTH REGIMENT
The World War has shown clearly that all peoples are not alike, that they do not think alike, that they do not feel in the same way about the great things of life and death, and that they do not live alike. England felt very differently from Germany about invading a state whose neutrality both nations had guaranteed.
The difference is largely due to education in the home, the church, and the school; but it is also the result of heredity. Races seem to differ naturally in regard to these things. The Germans have always been cruel, hard, and unmerciful, while the French are tender and inclined to be too easy, even with wrongdoers. The Slav is dreamy, musical, and poetic, while the Bulgarians seek to gain their ends by deceit and brute force. In thinking of the nations and the peoples of the Balkan peninsula, we must be sure to distinguish clearly between them, for they are not at all alike.
Only at the beginning and at the end of the World War have we heard much of Serbia. At the beginning, two Serbians, who were, however, Austrian subjects, assassinated the Crown Prince of Austria, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, on June 28, 1914, at Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, an Austrian province. Whether the war had been already planned or not, this assassination was used as a reason for Austria's attack upon Serbia.
General Putnik, a great commander, was put in charge of the Serbian troops. As General Joffre did in France, he retired before the greatly superior numbers of the enemy, until he was in a position to counterattack and win a victory. Joffre was thus able to save his country from being entirely devastated and defeated, but General Putnik was not. Instead the Serbian army disappeared as a determining force, until near the end of the war when it helped to bring Bulgaria to her knees.
The Serbians sing as they go into battle, for, as has been said, they are an imaginative and a musical people. The heroes of today are blended in their visions with the Serbian heroes of ancient days, and their battle songs are of them both, or first of one and then of the other.
As they went into their last victorious battles in 1918 against the brutal and lying Bulgarians, they sang a sad but spirited song, the words of which may be translated into English as follows:—
"Colonel Batsicht, the Austrians are a thousand to one, but what does it matter? You are only one, yourself, but you are Colonel Batsicht! Were the Austrians as many as the leaves in the forests and their rush to attack more violent than the flood of the Vardar in the spring time, you would even then be their equal, Colonel Batsicht!"
And the marvelous thing about the words of this wonderful battle song is that they are true, and that one man fighting for the right with the spirit and devotion of Colonel Batsicht is always the equal of thousands seeking to establish the wrong. In all the history of the world, nothing has proved this so fully and so clearly as the story of Belgium in the World War. Standing like one man against thousands, she saved the world and herself.
Colonel Batsicht was in command of the Thirteenth Regiment of Infantry in the Serbian army at the opening of the war in 1914. When the Austrians attacked in force, General Putnik decided upon a general retirement to save his armies.