Shall I remind you of the results? I suppose the surprising fact is fresh in your memories even now that only two months after the Balkan war had been declared the delegates of the belligerents for peace stayed in Hyde Park Hotel in London. Turkey lost and the Christians won.
The Serbian troops crossed the frontier and fighting proceeded in three different directions, towards Skoplje and Prilep, towards Adrianople
and towards Scutari. A foreigner never can realise what a Serbian soldier thought and felt at that time. Skoplje had been the centre of our mediaeval kingdom; in Prilep lived and ruled king Marko, our national hero; under the walls of. Adrianople King Vukashin, Marko's father, was killed resisting the Turkish invasion; Scutari was the last free dominion of the Serbian kings Balshic before universal darkness covered the whole of the Balkans, except Montenegro. In every direction the Serbian soldiers faced their own history. Their past glory has been revived; their heroes of old excited their imagination; many saw them in visions or in dreams, all imitated them in heroic deeds and in sufferings.
Here succumbed the Saint King Lazare! exclaimed our soldier in the field of Kossovo. Here fell the Duke Milosh after he killed the Turkish Sultan Murad! Here lived Marko of Prilep! From this fortress he protected the remnants of the Serbian people and their past glory after the fatal battle of Kossovo! Here on the stones the hoofs of Shiraz, Marko's cherished horse, are to be seen. There are churches built by King Urosh, or Stephen, or Milutin, or Dushan, or Lazare! Here on the Mariza River fell Vukashin with sixty thousand of the most splendid Serbian warriors defending the freedom of the
Balkans. There on Scutari stand lofty walls constructed by the same King Vukashin. This is the way by which the Byzantine princesses had come to be the wives of our kings or dukes. There is the town where King Dushan, in allegiance with Kantakusen and the Greeks, fought against the first Turkish invaders. On this lake of Ochrida was a beautiful church with a Serbian archbishopric. That is the mountain where the villas (fairies) lived and from which they flew down to help our heroes or to preserve the Serbian down-trodden rights. In this town King Nemanja met the Crusaders from the West proceeding to the East and gave them hospitality. In that town our greatest king proclaimed the famous codex of laws, Zakonik, which is comparable with the best codexes of that kind. Here are the tombs of our patriarchs, who led and protected the nation during centuries of oppression and slavery. There are the towers built from the skeletons of the Serbian leaders, who were slaughtered for their ideals of freedom; and there again is the spot where were hanged several voivodas and bishops. Bones upon bones, blood upon blood, sin upon sin, heroism upon heroism! Kossovo, Scutari, Kumanovo, Skoplje, Prilep, Bitolj, Adrianople—all these names were well known by every Serbian soldier. In their childhood and boyhood they sang these very
names, they sang them and knew the historical events and heroes connected with them. And so they came now not as guests and strangers, but they returned home after a long absence. It seems to every one of them like a dream: the land which has been for generations and generations the topic of poetry now stood before the Serbian warriors as a reality. The Serbian brothers from Austria-Hungary came to Macedonia, kissed the sacred soil, and each one took a handful of the sacred dust from the tombs of our kings and heroes of old. Two months after the outbreak of war King Peter returned to Topola and prayed gratefully in his white church to God and to Saint George. This democratic king, who has been elected by the Serbian Parliament (Skupshtina), thanked God that he with his people had finished the work of liberation from the Turkish yoke, which work was started by Karageorge, his grandfather, who also was elected by the people to be their leader.
IN SUMMER 1913.
The war with the Turks was a short one. Yet the war with the Bulgars was still shorter. The Bulgars attacked us in a dark night. Austria suggested such an attack, and this quite suited the Bulgarian spirit. It is a slavish spirit, full of slavish ambitions and slavish abject methods.
When I tell you that, believe me, I tell it neither as a chauvinist nor even as a Serbian patriot, but as a man who has studied very carefully the history and psychology of the Balkan peoples.