Tirana was peaceful in the morning sunlight. Donkeys laden with cedar boughs picked their footing on the uneven cobbles; women with gayly painted cradles on their backs trudged behind the donkeys. Ducks were swimming in the brimming gutters. Rrok Perolli stood in the doorway of the Hotel Europa, enjoying the spring air.
Elez Jusuf, chief of the Dibra, with five hundred men, had fought his way into Tirana, he said. The Albanian government had—well, had gone to Elbassan. Elez Jusuf was intrenched in the quarter beyond the mosque, a maze of houses and walled yards entered by only two streets. For reasons unknown, he had not walked on into Government House.
“Ahmet has gone to Elbassan?” The dismay of my voice surprised me.
No, he was still in Tirana. He was legally, in fact, the government; by law, when a Minister was out of town his duties fell to one of the Ministers remaining. Ahmet was the only one left, except the necessarily idle Minister of Public Works. But what could he do? Elez Jusuf was in the capital, with five hundred fighting men of the Dibra. Ahmet had less than two hundred men, raw recruits from the peasant village of the south. And more information came now from the open door of reticence. Two days before, Byram Gjuri, an Albanian Gheg chief of tribes in Montenegro, who had been supplied with arms from D’Annunzio in Fiume, had marched on Scutari. Scutari had sent him word that it would fight, and had frantically appealed to Tirana for help. That was where the regular troops of Tirana had gone. The telephone line to Scutari was cut. There had been an attack from the Dibra on Elbassan; the fighting men of Elbassan had beaten it off, but they were staying in Elbassan through this trouble.
On the face of it, the thing was organized—organized, and supplied with arms and money from outside Albania. Obviously, the capital was lost. The government had fled. The telephone lines were cut. Albania had been broken into its diverse tribes again, disintegrated into particles held together only by a common spirit which could no longer express itself coherently. After all the years of fighting and blockade, all the desperate triumphs of diplomacy in Versailles and Geneva, here was chaos again, and fresh invaders.
This tragedy was behind the curtain of silence that isolates Albania from the world. It went on in darkness, unknown. It meant another war in the Balkans, the kindler of wars in Europe. All along a thousand miles of new frontier and ancient hatred any outbreak in the Balkans would spread. Italy would cross the Adriatic again; what would Jugo-Slavia say to that? Serbia would come down in force from the north; would Croatia, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Montenegro, not seize the opportunity to strike at Serbia, the hated new master? Could Jugo-Slavia turn her back on Hungary, in safety? All the Balkans and Central Europe are tinder to any spark, to-day. As they were in 1914.
But at that moment I was caring for Albania, for the Albanians who had sheltered me by their fires and divided with me their corn bread and goat’s-milk cheese. It was insupportable to me that war was going again like a flame over those mountain villages, that the last of their men must fight again on the edge of precipices, and the last of their women and children die on the trails. There was desperation in the hope, the irrational faith, which I placed in Ahmet, the Hawk, chief of the Mati. “Ahmet will do something,” I said.
“How can he? The Dibra men are in Tirana, and he has no soldiers.”
“He will do something,” I said, “because he must.”
“‘I think this will be a good year for pears,’ said the bear. ‘Why?’ said the other bear. And the first bear replied, ‘Because I like them.’”