CHAPTER XXII
THE BALKAN WAR, 1912
“On arrive novice à toutes les guerres,” wrote the French philosopher; or if he did not, he said something like it. I have never known a place where being on the spot made so sharp a difference in one’s point of view as the Near East, and where one’s ignorance, and the ignorance of the great mass of one’s fellow-countrymen, was so keenly brought home to one. The change in the point of view happened with surprising abruptness the moment one crossed the Austrian frontier. There are other changes of a physical nature which happen as well when one crosses the frontier into any kingdom where war is taking place. The whole of the superficial luxuries of civilisation seem to disappear in a twinkling; and so adaptable a creature is man that you feel no surprise; you just accept everything as if things had always been so. The trains crawl; they stop at every station; you no longer complain of the inadequacy of the luxuries of your sleeping-car; you are thankful to have a seat at all. It is no longer a question of criticising the quality of the dinner or the swiftness of the service. It is a question whether you will get a piece of bread or a glass of water during the next twenty-four hours.
Belgrade Station was full of reservists and peasants: men in uniform, men half in uniform, men in the clothes of the mountains—sheepskin coats, putties, and shoes made of twisted straw; dark, swarthy, sunburnt and wind-tanned, hard men, carrying rifles and a quantity of bundles and filling the cattle vans to overflowing. At every station we passed trains, most of them empty, which were coming back to fetch supplies of meat. Every platform and every station were crowded with men in uniforms of every description. A Servian officer got into the carriage in which I was travelling. He was dressed in khaki. He wore a white chrysanthemum in his cap, a bunch of Michaelmas daisies in his belt, and he carried, besides his rifle and a khaki bag which had been taken from the Turks, a small umbrella. He had been wounded in the foot at Kumanovo. He was on his way to Uskub. He was a man of commerce, and had closed his establishment to go to the war; the majority of the officers in his regiment were men of commerce, he said. They had sacrificed everything to go to the war, and that was one reason why they were not going to allow the gains of the war, which they declared were a matter of life and death to their country, to be snatched from them by diplomatists at a green table. “If they want to take from us what we have won by the sword,” he said, “let them take it by the sword.”
I asked him about the fighting at Kumanovo. He said the Turks had fought like heroes, but that they were miserably led. He then began to describe the horrors of the war in the Servian language. As I understood about one word in fifty, I lost the thread of the discourse, and so I lured him back into a more neutral language. He told me that someone had asked a Turkish prisoner how it came about that the Turks, whom all the world knew to be such brave soldiers, were nevertheless always beaten. The Turk, after the habit of his race, answered by an apologue as follows: “A certain man,” he said, “once possessed a number of camels and an ass. He was a hard taskmaster to the camels, and he worked them to the uttermost; and after trading for many years in different lands, he became exceedingly rich. At last one day he himself fell sick; and feeling that his end was drawing nigh, he wished to relieve himself of the burden on his soul, so he bade the camels draw near to him, and he addressed them thus: ‘I am dying, camels, dying, only I have most uncivilly kept death waiting, until I have unburdened my soul to you. Camels, I have done you a grievous wrong. When you were hungry, I stinted you of food, when you were thirsty, I denied you drink, and when you were weary, I urged you on and denied you rest; and ever and always I denied you the full share of your fair and just wage. Now I am dying, and all this lies heavily on my soul, I crave your forgiveness, so that I may die in peace. Can you forgive me, camels, for all the wrong I have done you?’ The camels withdrew to talk it over. After a while the Head Camel returned and spoke to the merchant thus: ‘That you ever overworked us, we forgive you; that you underfed us, we forgive you; that you never remembered to pay us our full wage, we forgive you; but that you always let the ass go first, Allah may forgive you, but we never can!’”
It took over twelve hours to get from Belgrade to the junction of Nish, where there was a prospect of food. When we stopped at one station in the twilight there was a great noise of cheering from another train, and a dense crowd of soldiers and women throwing flowers. Then in the midst of the clamour and the murmur somebody played a tune on a pipe. A little Slav tune written in a scale which has a technical name—let us say the Phrygian mode—a plaintive, piping tune, as melancholy as the cry of a seabird. The very voice of exile. I recognised the tune at once. It is in the first ten pages of Balakirev’s collection of Russian folk-songs under the name “Rekrutskaya”—that is to say, recruits’ song. Plaintive, melancholy, quaint, and piping, it has no heartache in it; it is the luxury of grief, the expression of idle tears, the conventional sorrow of the recruit who is leaving his home.
“You are going far away, far away from poor Jeannette,
And there’s no one left to love me now, and you will soon forget.”
So, in the song of our grandfathers which I have quoted earlier in the book, the maiden sang to the conscript, adding that were she King of France, “or, still better, Pope of Rome,” she would abolish war, and consequently the parting of lovers. But the song of the Slav recruit in its piping notes seems to say: “I am going far away, but I am not really sorry to go. They will be glad to get rid of me at home, and I, in the barracks, shall have meat to eat twice a day, and jolly comrades, and I shall see the big town and find a new love as good as my true love. They will mend my broken heart there; but in the meantime let me make the most of the situation. Let me collect money and get drunk, and let me sing my sad songs, songs of parting and exile, and let me enjoy the melancholy situation to the full.”
That is what the wistful, piping song, played on a wooden flageolet of some kind, seemed to say. It just pierced through the noise and then stopped; a touching interlude, like the shepherd’s piping amidst the weariness, the fever and the fret, the delirious remembrance and the agonised expectation, of the last act of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolda. The train moved on into the gathering darkness.