The Flaming Sword in Serbia and Elsewhere

by M. A. Stobart

CHAPTER XXXI

We left next morning, at nine, for Prishtina. Progress was very slow, the road being more than ever blocked with columns and refugees. The cold all day was bad enough, and but for straw-covered stirrups and my wonderful rubber canvas boots, worn over three pairs of stockings, I must have had frozen feet, but between 4 and 10 p.m. the cold was intense.

Amongst many memorable days, that day stands conspicuous, for at dusk we began to cross the historic battlefield of Kossovo. Upon this desolate plain, which extends southwards to Skoplye, was fought, in 1389, the Waterloo of Serbia, the battle of Kossovo Polye (the field of blackbirds). Upon this plain, the Serbs had suffered, at the hands of the Turks, a defeat which robbed them of nationhood during nearly 500 years; a defeat which must have been the harder to bear because it came after 200 years of flourishing empire; this empire had begun with the Nemanya dynasty, under Stephen, in 1196, and had reached its zenith under another famous Stephen—Stephen Dushan—who died mysteriously in 1355.

It was only in 1878, and, strangely enough, through the Treaty of Berlin, that the Serbs regained their independence.

This Kossovo battle, more than any other in Balkan history, seems to have gripped the imagination of both Turks and Serbians, conquerors and defeated. Poets relate that the Turkish Amurath the First, though a Sultan, and presumably accustomed to such pastimes, was enjoying a honeymoon when he received news that the Serbs and Albanians had routed his legions, in the fastnesses of the Black Mountain; he, therefore, bade a hurried farewell to his bride, and, as there were no cars or aeroplanes in those days, he galloped to Kossovo, accompanied, it is said, by so many men "that a horseman could not ride from one wing of his army to the other in a fortnight. The plain of Kossovo was one mass of steel; horse stood against horse, man against man; the spears formed a thick forest; the banners obscured the sun; there was no space for a drop of water to fall between them."

But also on King Lazar's side, many Serbs, Bosnians, and Albanians were banded together. They must have made a formidable array, for legends record that at the last moment, Amurath hesitated to attack the allied hosts, and that his doubts were only allayed by a dream which came to one of his counsellors, bidding him to "conquer the infidels." Lazar, also, seems to have been in touch with the heavenly powers. They, metaphorically, rang him up just before the battle should have begun, and asked him if he would rather have a heavenly, or an earthly kingdom. If he chose the latter, he would be victorious over the Sultan, but he could not have both, and if he wanted a heavenly kingdom, he must submit to being defeated by the Sultan. Lazar appears to have asked the exchange to hold the line whilst he made up his mind; he finally decided upon the Kingdom of Heaven. The poets seem universally to have approved his choice, but though it may have been wisdom for himself, it was bad luck for his army, his dukes, and his nine brothers-in-law, who perished with him. He should either not have fought, or he should have fought meaning to win.

And now, when we set foot upon that steppe, it seemed that those 500 years that had passed since the first Kossovo day, had been expunged. For the Serbian Army, now defeated by the allies of those same Turks, was still, like a ghost from the past, fleeing across the silent plain. The panoplies had fallen from their horses, the armour from their men: it was now a skeleton army, in skeleton clothes, but it was carrying the same soul, of the same nation, to guard as a holy treasure, till the day of the Lord shall come. In the darkness, the physical wonders of the place would have been hidden, but for the white snow which outlined the low hills, and transformed their rolling ridges into the foamy waves of a tempestuous sea, which seemed, on both sides of the narrow road, to be advancing in tidal waves to engulf us, as we moved slowly onwards, co-partners in that spectral flight.

At every few yards, corpses of oxen and of horses, and bodies of oxen and of horses not yet dead, but unable to rise, kept the image of Death foremost in the mind; and then, as though to give her cold, green-blooded sanction to the scene, the moon rose over the hillocks, sailed defiantly across the sky, revealed dead horrors of the present, and recalled to the eye of the imagination, horrors which had lain hidden during 500 years.

The moon revealed, also, one picture of dumb and hopeless misery never to be forgotten. Apart from our funeral procession, nothing living, not even the famous blackbirds, had been visible during mile after mile, mile after mile, in all the wide expanse till, at a turn in the road, I saw, a hundred yards to our left, standing up to his fetlocks in the snow, abandoned, because it could no longer pull, a lean bay horse. It was too weak to move, and it knew that if it lay down it would never rise, but must succumb to a lingering death from cold and hunger; so it stood, staring into nothingness, knowing that no help would come. It was the dumbness of the misery that appealed, and I realised that the misery of many of us who are suffering in this war, is almost as dumb as the misery of that poor beast. And we shall remain dumb until we have the courage to wrest the flaming sword from the hands of the cherubim who guard the Tree of Life. The dictionaries tell us that cherubim are second-class angels, so there ought to be no difficulty, if the attack were only determined enough.