V. FROM BELGRADE (I)
A personal friendship with Bishop Nicholas of Zicca brought the gift of his rooms in the Patriarchia, opposite the Cathedral. Nicholas, better known during the war years as Father Nicholas Velimirovic, being on a mission to the United States, his simple white-walled rooms hung with bright-coloured ikons were free, and could be a home for a wanderer in an over-crowded city. Kostya Lukovic, who during the war graduated at Cambridge, treated me as if I were the England to whom he could repay the gratitude he owed for our hospitality to him. Dr. Yannic, also known to us in England, then a priest, now temporarily secretary to the Constituent Assembly, was also very kind. A recommendation from Balugdic, the Minister at Athens, opened many doors and obtained a separate carriage for me at night on some wild trains. Archimandrites and Abbots entertained me lavishly at the shrines of the Frushta Gora. It can therefore be said that the Serbs know how to treat an Englishman well when he passes through their country. Salutations therefore, and thanks! They fought like lions, and they suffered as none others suffered in Europe's terrible ordeal. A Serbian spark at Sarajevo fired the arsenal of European militarism, and a common ungenerous thought sometimes blames the spark instead of blaming the recklessness of those who allowed Europe to be enkindled. And there used to be some who could not forget Serbia's dynastic history. But that has been forgiven, and Serbia has purchased a good name by a shedding of blood and a national unhappiness unparalleled in the war. People said, "Serbia is no more, Serbia can never be again." Yet after complete loss of country to the most malevolent of foes, and after the agony of Corfu, behold still Serbia fighting. And was it not the vigour of Serbia's reconstituted army in 1918 which, under Misió and a French Marshal, struck the critical blow at the Bulgar which ruined the whole German confederation—brought about the surrender of Bulgaria and Austria, and led infallibly to the Armistice! Whatever happens in the new political turmoil, Serbia has won our admiration and gratitude in the West.
The impression which one obtains in passing through the towns and villages of Macedonia is very painful. Ghevgeli, on the Greek frontier, and such places, remind one of the shattered areas of Western Europe. You realize, if you did not do so before, that the deadly disease of war ravaged this empty country as greedily as it did the fullness of Flanders and France. Ruin stares from thousands of lost homes, and from many you realize the inhabitants have been destroyed also. There is recovery. Like convalescent maimed creatures, Skoplye and Nish creep into the sunlight and show signs of animation. Not nearly so many fields are ploughed as in Bulgaria. Why? Because the labouring hands are lost. You see many jolly, laughing Turks in Skoplye. They can laugh. Their manhood survives plentifully, but death has gleaned in every Serbian family down there. The trains go at a snail's pace through Serbia. One day we went all day and part of the night at an average of five kilometres the hour. In Bulgaria and Greece the trains go slowly, but they are express compared with the trains from Ghevgeli to Skoplye. The reason is because the permanent way has been almost ruined and will need years of work upon it, and all bridges have been blown up. The train halts now and then, and then most fearfully budges forward, scarcely moves, budges, budges upon temporary wooden structures of bridges, and the workmen down below seem veritably holding the bridges up whilst the trains go over them.
You stop hours at little villages, the exhausted and damaged engines surrendered to Serbia by her ex-enemies being hopelessly out of repair and always in trouble. And in these villages you see the bare-footed war-waifs, skulking about in bits of old ruins, children who have lost father and mother and kith and kin, the kind care at best of American relief societies. There is said to be no actual want anywhere in Serbia now, but no nation ever had so many orphans.
At Belgrade, despite many foreign elements, the most constant impression is one of a multiplied body politic. Belgrade is said to have more cripples than any other capital of Europe. And Berlin comes second. It is a one-eyed city, a city of one-legged men, a city of men with beetling brows and contracted eyes, a city of unrelenting cobble-stones and broken houses.
You go into the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and the door-keeper cannot write; you go to the Foreign Office and are shown about laboriously by a one-legged man. In fact, the one-legged man might be taken as the type and symbol of the new Serbia. In commerce it is as in politics. Shop windows are one-third full of goods, the most ill-assorted goods, mostly coming through the old channels from Austria and Germany. There has not been enough energy left in the nation to find the means of making new trade connexions—as for instance, with England. A curious anomaly, surely, that there should be a glut of our own products on the home market whilst in Serbia, even taking our exchange into account, prices range much higher. Thus politics and trade. You see the new recruits of the conscripted army struggling along in sixes and sevens, men of all shapes and sizes apparently in one shape and size of war boot, causing such sufferings to young men. There are no feather-bed soldiers here. In the schools and universities, however, you see the rare earnestness of the Slav.
Such is Serbia. And if Germany had won it would have been impossible to have seen her even in as fair terms as that. But some one outside of the machine has intervened and the dead has come to life. Serbia still lives.
One has to show a difference between Serbia and Jugo-Slavia, or the Kingdom of Serbs, Hrvats,[1] and Slovenes, "S.H.S." as it is commonly called. The new country is three times as large as the old one, and the two new parts of Croatia and Slovenia are well-built, fruitful, prosperous, with all the glamour of Austrian civilization resting on them. On the one side of the old frontier the wild homelessness of the mountains, on the other side park-like country, model towns, and broad, fruitful plains. Hard-bitten, bookless Serbs, and softened bookish Croats. As a responsibility of the peace Serbia has taken over large tracts of smitten Austria. Looking at the new territory, one might reckon it a rich spoil of war. But comparing Serbia as she is with this ex-Austria, one cannot but be struck with the disparity between them.
Croats and Slovenes are Slav by race, but strongly Austrian by education. They were glad to come into the new confederation and escape some of the penalties of defeated Austria. But once they were definitely absorbed into the new State they did not feel so comfortable. The vanity and quarrelsomeness of the Slav soon began to speak. They hated Austria. But modern Austrian civilization was a comfortable and well-oiled machine. The Slavs derived enormous material benefits from their citizenship of the Austrian empire. Here despite all the feuds was a well-kept home of nations.
Left to themselves the Croats would not have made a better State than the Slavs usually make. But it is easy for them to imagine that the good schools, good trains and railway service, and good municipal administration, and the rest, were due to their own genius and not to that of the German.