Chapter 40

[Footnote 80: But this is less rigorously upheld in the towns if it is a question of their honour or of cash. When, to give an example, Scutari was occupied by the Montenegrins at the beginning of the Great War, a Catholic Albanian merchant came to a Montenegrin lawyer and asked him to institute proceedings against another merchant who had gravely and publicly insulted him. The lawyer drew up the complaint, for which he charged the small sum of 20 perpers (= francs), but although his client was a wealthy man this fee appalled him; he resolved to take no further steps. In general, the Scutarenes prefer to suffer imprisonment rather than part with any money. And the willingness of the Albanians not to look a gift-horse in the mouth could often be observed at Podgorica between the years 1909 and 1912, when Nicholas of Montenegro would occasionally appear in the market-place with a supply of caps and other articles for the Albanians. These he would distribute, having first exclaimed: "Ka[vc]ak Karadak Kralj Nikola barabar!" (that is to say, "The Albanian and the Montenegrin are equal in the eyes of King Nicholas!"). Ka[vc]ak is a word meaning a brigand, an outlaw; the Montenegrins apply it to their neighbours, and these latter, throwing their new caps in the air and cheering for Nikita, did not mind what he called them.]

[Footnote 81: _Turkey in Europe._ London, 1900.]

[Footnote 82: _Ein Vorstoss in die Nordalbanischen Alpen._ Vienna, 1905.]

[Footnote 83: _Italy in the Balkans at this Hour._ Naples, 1913.]

[Footnote 84: _L'Albanie Independente_, by Dukagjin-Zadeh Basri Bey. Paris, 1920.]

[Footnote 85: Cf. the _New Statesman_, February 5, 1921.]

[Footnote 86: When the Serbian troops arrived at Pri[vs]tina in the Balkan War they discovered among the inhabitants of that place a man who had not left his house for some fourteen years. We are told (in _The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland_, etc., vol. v. London, 1921) of my Lord Eyre of Eyrescourt in County Galway "that not one of the windows of his castle was made to open, but luckily he had no liking for fresh air." Yet probably his lordship's countenance had not the pallor of the man of Pri[vs]tina, because "from an early dinner to the hour of rest he never left his chair, nor did the claret ever quit the table."]

[Footnote 87: When this account of the incident was published in my small book, _A Difficult Frontier_, it caused a reviewer, one I. M., in _The Near East_ to observe, that I "can be jubilant when a Montenegrin in Yugoslav pay insults a British officer, Captain Brodie." Since the Editor permits such hopeless nonsense to appear in his columns one may be excused, I think, for not taking _The Near East_ very seriously. It is not worth while informing them how General Phillips of Scutari dealt with Captain Brodie.]

[Footnote 88: Referring in the _Nation and Athenæum_ to Sir Charles's latest work, _Hinduism and Buddhism_ (3 vols.), Mr. Edwyn Bevan says that "for a lonely student, who had done nothing in his life but study, the book would have been a sufficiently remarkable achievement. That a man who has been an active public servant and held high and responsible offices should have found time for the studies which this book presupposes is marvellous. It is a masterly survey.... There can be few men who have Sir Charles's gift of linguistic accomplishments, who can not only read Sanskrit and Pali, but know enough of the Dravidian languages of Southern India to check statements by reference to the original writings, and add to this a knowledge of Chinese and Tibetan."]

[Footnote 89: Cf. pp. 72-73, Vol. I.]

[Footnote 90: Cf. _Manchester Guardian_, February 28, 1919.]

[Footnote 91: Cf. _A Political Escapade: The Story of Fiume and D'Annunzio_, by J. N. Macdonald, O.S.B. London, 1921.]

[Footnote 92: Cf. _Tribune de Genève_, October 13, 1921.]

[Footnote 93: Those who are curious as to the gentleman's antecedents may like to refer to my book, _Under the Acroceraunian Mountains_.]

[Footnote 94: Cf. _La Suisse_ (of Geneva), October 13, 1921.]

[Footnote 95: Cf. _Journal des Débats_, October 15, 1921.]

[Footnote 96: This would be about 18,000 lb. avoirdupois.]

[Footnote 97: Cf. p. 283, Vol. II.]

[Footnote 98: Cf. _Morning Post_ of December 14, 1921.]

[Footnote 99: Cf. _Le Temps_, November 11, 1921.]

[Footnote 100: "Who is this anonymous idiot?... He really ought to have known better than that," says a reviewer in _The Near East_. I quite agree. It is pleasant now and then to be able to agree with a paper which is so one-sided as to admit pro-Nikita and anti-Serbian diatribes by Mr. Devine, but which refuses to insert a letter on the other side. "Let us not mix ourselves up in their domestic affairs," said the Editor to me after an hour's conversation. And though it is a matter of no importance, I may mention that he employs a reviewer who, referring to the map in my book, _A Difficult Frontier_ (Yugoslavs and Albanians)--a map which is most conspicuously printed opposite the title-page--observes that it "is hidden in one unostentatious page, which at first sight escapes the reader's attention altogether."]

[Footnote 101: In the _Samouprava_ of November 12 the whole case was discussed with his usual lucidity by Dr. Lazar Markovi['c], one of the ablest and most philosophic men in Yugoslavia. This ex-Professor of Law is now the Minister of Justice, and it is to be hoped that he will eventually succeed in the place of Pa[vs]i['c].]

[Footnote 102: Those who like to hold the Serbs up to contumely have not a very strong case when they denounce them for now being on friendly terms with the Christian Mirditi, whereas they used to be the friends of Essad Pasha; this personage was at that time the man whose national Albanian policy had the greatest chance of success. He was the one man who then appeared capable of establishing a State in which Christians and Moslems would be fairly represented. But now too many of the Moslem--and not only they--have adopted an Italophil attitude which is sadly anti-national.]

[Footnote 103: A later phase was for the Government to recognize that what Albania must have is the friendship of Yugoslavia, so that the eyes of the most powerful Ministers were turned from Rome to Belgrade. Thereupon the Italians, loth to lose their footing in the country, gave their patronage to the anti-Governmental parties. It was pleasant to hear in the summer of 1922 that when the boundary commissioners had left a lamentable neutral zone between the two countries the Albanian Government suggested to the very willing Government of Yugoslavia that they should co-operate in cleansing that zone of its brigand population.]

[Footnote 104: December 16, 1921.]

[Footnote 105: According to the Geographical-Statistical Atlas recently published by the German Professor Hickmann the average loss among the belligerent countries, in killed, wounded and through diminution of the birth-rate, was 6·5 per cent. At one end of the list of suffering nations is the United States with a percentage of 0·4, Great Britain with 3·7, and Belgium with 4·7. Roumania, Italy, Bulgaria and Turkey are all between 6 and 6·5 per cent. France has a percentage of 8·5, Russia has 9, Germany 9·3 and Austria 11. Above them all comes Serbia with the appalling percentage of 23.]

[Footnote 106: November 24, 1921.]

[Footnote 107: Cf. "Géographie Humaine de la France" in the _Histoire de la Nation Française_. Paris, 1920.]

[Footnote 108: Cf. _L'histoire illustrée de la guerre de 1914_.]

[Footnote 109: _L'Albanie en 1921._ Paris, 1922.]

[Footnote 110: _Under the Acroceraunian Mountains._]

[Footnote 111: M. Gabriel Louis Jaray. Cf. his _Les Albanais_ (Paris, 1920) and his other writings on the Albanians.]

[Footnote 112: Cf. _A History of the Peace Conference of Paris_. Edited by H. W. V. Temperley, vols. iv. and v. London, 1921.]

[Footnote 113: Elias Regnault, _Histoire politique et sociale des Principautés Danubiennes_. Paris, 1885.]

[Footnote 114: The more advanced Roumanians of the plain also apply this term to their countrymen who live among the Roumanian mountains or, in Serbia, amid the heights of Po[vz]arevac and Kraina. It signifies a stupid fellow, one from the wilderness.]

[Footnote 115: February 13, 1919.]

IX

CONCLUSION: A FEW NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS

THE SLOVENES AND THE SERBS--THE MONTENEGRINS AND THE SERBS--THE CROATS AND THE SERBS--SERB AND BULGAR.

THE SLOVENES AND THE SERBS

Those who, for some reason or other, do not love the Yugoslavs will have said to themselves, before taking up this book, that they would certainly supply that searching criticism of this people which the author would omit. They knew it was unlikely that a man would write at such excessive length about the Southern Slavs if he had not a weakness for them, and if he predicted for their State the virtue of cohesion or more than very moderate tranquillity, his prejudice would have to be discounted. "The Yugoslavs," said an Italian lady to me in London, and her beautiful lips looked as if they could scarcely bring themselves to pronounce the name, "the Yugoslavs," she said, "are very wild and black." If I have given the impression in this book that they are white, my fault will be much greater than the lady's, since I am not quite a stranger to them. Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bulgars--they have good and evil qualities so different that one must take them separately, and perhaps it will be more instructive to compare them with each other. The Slovenes need not detain us; they are a small people occupying a surprisingly large area; if they were less well organized they would have been long ago swallowed up. They shine as workers in the field and mine and forest much more than as military men. They have never been hereditary soldiers, like so many of the Croats, and it is perhaps this want of confidence in their own military prowess which has caused them to take measures that are sometimes too severe against the Austrians who are under them. The Bosnian Moslems assert that, as all their links with Turkey are now broken, they are the best Yugoslavs. But the Slovenes are also the best Yugoslavs, because they recognize that in Yugoslavia is their sole salvation. Some of us may regret that their tenacity so far outstrips their idealism. They are a careful people, as may be seen from Order No. 17024 which was issued, on December 4, 1920, by the Prefecture of Ljutomir. Referring to sequestered property, it enjoined that the Austrian owner should be allowed so much that he could live on it, but not so much as to enable him to be extravagant. They are also a relatively well-educated people; according to official statistics of 1910, 85·34 per cent. of the Slovene population know how to read and write, while their neighbours to the east, the Magyars, can only reckon 62 per cent. and the Italians of pre-war Italy, 62·4 per cent. The most backward part of the Slovene race, those of Istria, have 46·6 per cent. of illiterates, while there are Italian provinces where the illiterates amount even to 85 per cent. Rome itself counts 65 per cent.[116]

THE MONTENEGRINS AND THE SERBS

It will be profitable to compare the Montenegrins with the Serbs, because in our impatience with those persons who would keep them separate we may have seemed to imply that we believe them identical. The Serbs who maintained themselves in those mountains developed certain characteristics which differentiate them from their brothers. The Serb of the old kingdom walks, the Serb of the mountain struts. The magnificent Serbian warrior of the kingdom is so disciplined that although a Field-Marshal will sit down openly in a café and drink wine with some old comrade who is in the ranks, yet when the soldier is on duty his obedience is perfect. But if the Montenegrin private thinks that his officer has rebuked him unjustly, he will not hesitate to kill him. The Serb has a great respect for the national heroes, while every Montenegrin (for the sake of brevity we will use this term instead of "Serb of Montenegro," and imply, when using the word Serb, a Serb of the old kingdom)--as we have said, a Serb respects the national heroes, while every Montenegrin has a knowledge of his own ancestors for at least a hundred years. He is a chivalrous person who wishes to be treated as at least your equal. It was the Serbs' disregard of this sentiment which now and then gave umbrage to those Montenegrins who had expected that their union with the Serbs would cause an immediate return of the golden age. This was almost as offensive to the Montenegrins as the request that they would now contribute towards the support of the army. They had always left this to the Tzar--"We and the Russians," they used to say, "are 150 millions." Not all the Montenegrins have managed to emancipate themselves from the thraldom of the clan. An amusing example of this was a major at Pe['c] who belonged to the great Vasojevi['c] family. He gave two of us a large lorry, which was the only car he had, and advised us to start very early and to take no one with us, except a guard, as the road to Mitrovica was in a soft condition. We started off with about twenty passengers, but only one of them, a Turk, had any luggage to speak of; and after we had gone a good part of the way we were held up at a military post. A Montenegrin captain, also a member of the Vasojevi['c], had overslept himself and ordered us by telephone to return for him. The Serbian lieutenant--who had risen from the ranks--asked at once if that order would come in writing, and when he received a negative answer he cut off the communication and wished us a happy journey. The Montenegrins also differ from the Serbs in their cultivation of the arts. They have no liking for songs of love, but say that men should only listen to the guslar and to hero-songs. They are severer and more dignified than the Serbs, and it will be some time before the average Montenegrin throws back his head in a railway carriage and rolls out a joyous song, as I once heard a Serb do in the Banat, whereupon another Serb in the far corner--they obviously had never met--joined in the song with great heartiness. The Montenegrin says that the Serb chatters like a gipsy (though we must not forget that, as Miss Durham remarked,[117] he is hurt if things Serbian are criticized by an outsider); he has been told that the Englishman is grave, like himself, and therefore he appreciates him from afar. But not many Englishmen (or Serbs) would care to indulge, like the Montenegrins, in the ceaseless recapitulation of time-honoured exploits. The younger folk are not so faithful to these ancient stories, but it is in Montenegro that performers on the one-stringed, monotonous guslar can most easily find an audience. The Serbs of the kingdom have become more eclectic in musical matters, though even with them the popular taste is in favour of the man who snores, on the grounds that he is hearty and robust. In so far as foreign influence is concerned, the Montenegrin has been to some extent affected by Italian culture, while that of Greece and Germany has acted on the Serb. But the Great War had an equally unfortunate influence on both of them. One must, however, mention that long before the War, and owing partly to Albanian influence, partly to their own struggle for existence and partly to other causes, the Montenegrins had shown themselves defective in straightforwardness. Undoubtedly they had deteriorated under the example of Nikita, but this unfortunate trait can also be discerned between the lines of the great poem, the "Gorski Venac," written in the first half of the nineteenth century. There used to be a certain amount of what we call theft in Montenegro, but the natives of that country, as of Albania, cherished rather communistic ideas; it seemed to them that they had a sort of right to that which another possessed, particularly if he was a near relative. After the War the Montenegrin was so much impoverished that he stole more freely, and the Serb, whose hands had hitherto been remarkably clean, took to the same habits and often in a very amateur fashion. Thus in a Macedonian village where a British army store had been rifled, the officers turned to the local priest, who was indignant with his people and conducted the officers into every house. Nothing was discovered, and the priest proposed that his own house should be searched. He was told that this was unnecessary, but he insisted; and when his careless wife led the way up a ladder into the loft a British officer perceived at any rate one pair of khaki breeches. The patients of the Scottish Women's Hospital at Belgrade were so unpractised in the art of stealing that one of them--a typical case--returned one day to have her leg attended to, and in raising her skirt revealed on the petticoat, which had once been a tablecloth, a large "S.W.H." These felonious ways are in contrast with the usual Serb candour. One afternoon in Belgrade I was searching for a small street in a district which I had not visited before. When at last, after many inquiries, I came to within fifty yards of it I found a policeman--but it is only fair to say that the majority of the force consisted at this time of soldiers recently disbanded. When I asked him where the street might be, the good man thought a while and then, throwing back his open hand and giving up the problem in despair, said, "My God, I know not."

The wave of crime has manifested itself differently among the Serbs and the Montenegrins, in that the latter have been more primitive and have consummated their plundering by assassination--and this in a country where between 1895 and 1913 only two men were murdered for their money. In Serbia the people, even in the terrible distress after the War, did not go to such lengths. During the first half-year, the only two cases of unnatural death in the whole district of [vC]a[vc]ak, where I spent a couple of months, were both of them suicides, an old man hanging himself on account of the death of his last remaining soldier son, and an officer's wife, who had been too friendly to an Austrian, throwing herself into a well on her husband's return. A certain village of the same district is an instance of the frequency of all those minor peccadilloes, such as drunkenness and rowdiness and so forth, which the Serbs permit themselves. There is a law which lays it down that the mayor must be a native and must be a man who never has been lodged in gaol. But that unhappy village in the [vC]a[vc]ak region is unable to produce a single adult man with such a record.... If the Serb of the old kingdom is a more easy-going individual than his brother of the mountains it is quite erroneous to think that they dislike each other or have not resolved to come together.

THE CROATS AND THE SERBS

Some of Yugoslavia's neighbours were anxious, during the months which followed the War, that we should learn how Serb and Croat were continually at each other's throat. The dissensions between the two branches of the Yugoslav family would have been much more serious and more prolonged if their neighbours had paid less attention to them. It is true that "our Serbian customs," in the words of Ja[vs]a Tomi['c], "come from the village, while those of the Croats come from the nobles." The humbler Croat, one may say, was an employee in a big store, while the Serb was a small trader. The Croat would naturally like to introduce the big-store system into Yugoslavia, but this the Serb does not understand. He has a greater sense of responsibility and is more careful with regard to the expenses. To the Croat, in the old Empire, it was immaterial whether the officials were more or less costly. The bill was paid by Austria, who was the foe. For some time the Croat found himself forgetting that he was in Yugoslavia. When Cardinal Bourne came to Zagreb in the spring of 1919 and the town-hall was decorated with the British, Croatian, Serbian, Slovene and the town flag, some one asked the mayor why the State flag had been omitted. He was horrified. "The State flag!" he cried. Then it dawned upon him.... Numbers of Croats have belonged to the governing class and--impelled by the Catholic religion--have displayed more devotion to the arts than to the freedom of their country. On the other hand the Serbs, a race of practical peasants, have a highly developed national consciousness. This they owe partly to their inborn political gifts and largely to their Church, for the Orthodox religion--one may say, I think, without injustice--has more frequently shown itself, so closely is it connected with the idea of the State, to be rather of this world than of another. One should say the Orthodox religion as it flourishes in the Balkans, for when the Russian General Bobrikoff, who was attached to the person of King Milan, came back with him to Belgrade after the Peace of San Stefano, he was scandalized to see that religion had no greater share in the national rejoicings. "Accustomed as I was in my own country," he said, "to see nothing done without prayers and the blessing of the Church, I was indeed astounded to observe that the priests played the part of officials even in the cathedral, and often were altogether absent." This reminds one of von Baernreiter, who wished to learn the Serbian language, so that he would be more eligible for the governorship of Bosnia. He asked his teacher at Vienna when one could hear sermons in the Serbian church, and was informed that these occurred but twice a year and that on those occasions everybody left the church. The Serb and the Bulgar have come to neglect our distinctions between that which is spiritual and that which is temporal; their religion is, in consequence of their history, so inherent a part of the nation's life that in losing it one would almost cease to be a Serb or a Bulgar. Their Church is as national as that of the Armenians.[118] This may not be an ideal state of things, but it prevailed in Spain under the Moorish oppression and in the France of Jeanne d'Arc. During the crisis of the Great War the churches in the West were everywhere national; and in Serbia it was calculated that 60 per cent. of the sermons had a pronounced national colouring....