Chapter 41

Now with these differences between the Croat and the Serb, does it not seem strange that the vast majority of them are for union, with a part of this majority in favour of a reasonable decentralization? But if we investigate the motives of the Serbs and Croats who would thwart this union, we will see that they have nothing of that faith which, after all these centuries, has moved the Yugoslav multitude. Some of the Serbs wish to keep aloof on the ground that Serbia in the last hundred years has borne the brunt of the battle--and this, whether they were or were not faced with a more difficult situation, is acknowledged by most of the Croats, who for that reason would never dream of wishing the more modern Zagreb to supplant Belgrade. Those few Croats who are not for Yugoslavia are moved by ecclesiastical prejudice or by their longing for the privileges which the Habsburgs granted them. But those who, for various reasons, criticize the central Government are by no means necessarily in favour of setting up a separate one. Whatever the impetuous Radi['c] may have said, he is out for Yugoslavia. Still one cannot be astonished that he was sometimes misunderstood. The Zagreb students who, towards the end of 1918, came to Svetozar Pribi[vc]evi['c] with the request that he would let them kill the demagogue, were for expressing in this way what Dr. Du[vs]an Popovi['c], the well-known deputy, expressed in another. It was at the Zagreb Provincial Parliament that he exclaimed, in the summer of 1918, that "This idea will be victorious and therefore I say publicly, in the presence of the whole people, that I am a Croat, a Serb and a Slovene, or, if you prefer it, none of them but merely a Yugoslav." In 1914 when Stamboulüsky, the future Prime Minister of Bulgaria, was arrested and accused of Serbophilism, he declared: "I am neither Bulgar or Serb; I am a Yugoslav!" ... For at least a generation Zagreb will remain particularist, zealously preserving the differences--personal, social and religious--which distinguish her people from the dominant Serbs. The Croat officers who burned with shame at the Archduke's murder on Bosnian soil, the Croat regiments that in 1915 marched into Belgrade with bands playing and their colours flying, the Croat officials whose bread and salt came from the Habsburgs in administering Yugoslav countries during the War--all these will not forget a long, deep-rooted and honourable tradition. But Zagreb is now even as Munich was in 1866; after having been the Rome of the Yugoslav movement, the seat of its philosophy and the centre of its politics, the Croat capital has now an atmosphere of sad futility, for Belgrade is the beacon of the Yugoslav world. While comparing Zagreb with Rome one must add that she had also the misfortune to resemble Rome of the decadence--a good deal of outer polish was imparted by the Austrians, at the expense of their victims' backbone. The five centuries of Turkish domination had no such demoralizing influence upon the Serbs, especially not in the country places. In the opinion of a very close observer,[119] whom I quote, there is nothing that so thoroughly displays the dominance of Belgrade as the agrarian problem. The projected reforms, which have been based on the principle that no one should own more land than he can cultivate with the aid of his family, would dispossess large numbers of big landowners in Croatia and still larger numbers of men with moderate holdings, whose compensation would be "determined hereafter." The application of these reforms has been delayed for various reasons, but nowhere at any time has it been suggested that Croatia might reject them. In the old kingdom of Serbia, with much the greater part of the land in peasant possession, it may be said that there is no agrarian problem.... Those enemies of Yugoslavia, by the way, who have hoped that the particularism of Croatia would be something altogether different from what it is, should have mingled with the crowd at Zagreb on the evening of Prince Alexander's arrival in July 1920. The Prince interrupted his dinner, came out on to the balcony and made a speech. "Draga moja bratjo Hrvati," he said--"Croatians, my dear brothers." Not for a thousand years had a ruler of Croatia addressed his people in their own tongue. One immense roar of delight broke, as the _Morning Post's_ special correspondent tells us, from the assembled multitude; men fell on each other's necks, laughed, wept and kissed each other.... Such manifestations must not lead us to believe that all the internal problems of the young State are settled. Croatia (as also Slovenia) is jealous of her separate identity, suspicious to some extent of Serbia, her prestige and projects; she has no intention of allowing herself, after the hard fight against Magyarization, to be "Balkanized." But one thing was made clear by the Prince's visit: there can be no word or thought of separation.

* * * * *

We have spoken of the disaffection prevalent among the Croats, and on this the world has fixed its eyes, because of the large number of Croat deputies who have hitherto declined to come to Belgrade. Nevertheless there is a more general and more grievous discontent in Yugoslavia, since, after all, the Croats' attitude is of a temporary character--for it is probable that after the next general election their peculiar upbringing will not be so potent in determining their sentiments towards the State. More and more will they be ready to make common cause with Serbs and Slovenes; and their criticisms, which are now so negative, will be of a more useful kind. (They will recognize, for example, that if it costs 3000 dinars to open an inn in Serbia they were not justified in protesting when the fee in Croatia was raised from 5 crowns to 5 dinars.) That Yugoslavia gives ground for criticism no one, least of all her well-wishers, deny. And those who pray that she will prosper do so for the reason that the scattered Southern Slavs have for the first time now been able--most of them at any rate--to link their arms together; and we hope that with high qualities outweighing their defects the Southern Slavs will permanently take their place among the nations. But this will not be brought about unless those ailments which they suffer from are now confronted. Serbs themselves are often saying that their little Serbia was better than this fine new country which is thrice as large. She had fewer problems, she had fewer parties, and if people were corrupt they were so on a smaller scale. Traditions which are deprecatingly called Balkan, but which were at that time suited to a Balkan country, should not be allowed to spread across a country which is so much more than Balkan. Merit does not everywhere in this imperfect world advance you automatically, but an effort is required in Yugoslavia to resist the calls of friendship in appointing men to offices. The army of officials is too numerous; yet many of them are so badly paid that even if a great reformer could reduce by half their numbers he would be inclined to lay no hand upon the total sum they now enjoy. But this necessity of cleansing the public services is not peculiar to Yugoslavia. The politicians must have courage to lay heavier taxes on the peasants: the strange phenomenon is seen of peasants who assert that they are quite prepared for this, and on the other hand of politicians who are frightened lest it lose them many votes. The peasants generally are so prosperous that some, for instance, whom I know of near Kragujevac, men occupied in growing cereals, find that the fowls which they keep rather as a hobby do not have to lay them golden eggs in order to pay all the taxes. In that region it is usual nowadays for peasants not to count their bank-notes, but to weigh them; recently a man disposed of certain fields for his own weight in notes of ten dinars. The peasants are not only dissatisfied with the two chief parties, the Radicals and the Democrats, for not taxing them sufficiently--so that at the next general election they may give a good deal more support than hitherto to their own Peasants' party--but they complain that their interests are neglected although, as we have seen, the lawyers and other townsfolk of the Radical and Democrat parties are so anxious with respect to peasants' votes.

The difficult position of the Yugoslavs--observe how in the last year their exchange has fallen--is due in part to the deplorable activities of other peoples (vast amounts have had to be imported for reconstruction purposes, Rieka has been practically unavailable as a port, and conditions have been such that the Yugoslavs have had to keep a large army mobilized), partly their position is due to measures ill-advised but which they were compelled to take (such as their system of Agrarian Reform), partly to political inexperience and partly to their lack of organizing powers. Let us hope that from now onwards Yugoslavia will have to arm herself less heavily against the slings and arrows of the world, and that she will be able therefore to become a more proficient swimmer in this sea of troubles.

SERB AND BULGAR

A map of the Balkan migrations, with its curved lines leading almost everywhere, is a bewildering spectacle; but if we study the main clusters of lines we shall see that the people whose movements they chronicle have frequently preserved, in a remarkable fashion, certain common characteristics: thus a stream flowed from the south-west towards Valjevo in Serbia, and it is interesting to notice how the prominent men of that region, whose ancestors came from somewhere between Montenegro and the old frontiers of Serbia, have all of them certain characteristics--a talent for foreign languages, a subtlety of reasoning, originality but insufficient observation, and clever but fallacious minds. Similarly in the Bulgar there are qualities which even now can be ascribed to the Mongol blood. The Bulgar is more stolid than the Serb; he is less given to sympathy and on that account can be cruel. The Bulgar is benevolent because he is urged by kindliness, whereas the more impressionable Serb is under the influence both of sentiment, sentimentality and sympathy. These differences of temperament--and there are others, more or less distinguishable--do not seem to Balkan thinkers any reason why the two should keep apart. And a couple of months after the Great War, during which the Bulgars, as their best friends must acknowledge, were far from irreproachable in occupied Serbia--partly this was due to the vast number of new posts for which they had no suitable men--a few months afterwards a Bulgarian engineer was placidly working among the Serbs at [vC]a[vc]ak railway station, wearing his own uniform. And a Serbian butcher who emigrated to Bulgaria settled down at Ferdinand just before the War and has lived there unmolested up to this day, and that in spite of his not being very highly esteemed--for, as the police president told me, he had married a woman with more wealth than good fame; the president had been among her lovers.... One would not suppose that the contrasting public morality of the two countries will keep them apart. It is easy enough for us to argue that this morality is on a pretty low level, because a Bulgarian War Minister saw fit to sue, under a _nom de guerre_, a French armament firm which omitted to send him the stipulated commission; because another Minister, incarcerated on account of felony, could be liberated by the grace of Tzar Ferdinand and become Premier; because a Serbian Minister used to buy himself corner-houses, while his Bulgarian colleagues seem to own most of the houses in Sofia. There was a minor Serbian official over against whom I took my meals for about a month; one of his ways was to produce a pocket-knife and cut his bread with it. Certain other parts of his ritual did not appeal to me, but who knows whether I did not disgust him by breaking my bread with my fingers? And who knows what sentiments were awakened some years ago at the Orthodox monastery of Gromirija, in Croatia, when a foreign guest proposed to wash himself in water, though by the joyous custom of that house there was no other liquid on the premises but wine? If there is in both countries, in Serbia and Bulgaria, a movement against the cynicism which does not clothe its corruption with a decent Western drapery, that is something; if there is a further movement in the direction of probity, that is something more. And, whatever some Serbs may tell you, it is undeniable that honesty has made important strides in the public life of that kingdom, even without having added to the Statute Book those rigorous proposals of the newly-formed Peasants' party, one of which would punish a peculating official with death. It is, however, apparent that this party has not arrived at a sense of discretion, for it wants to terminate the practice of allowing pensions to officials, so that each man is obliged to make his own provision for old age. Bulgaria, the younger country, has made a proportionate progress; there is trustworthy German evidence to the effect that the corrupt Radoslavoff Government was despised by the people, not in the hour of disaster but in 1916, when the Bulgarian soldiers changed the words of an anti-Serb song and instead of "Our old allies are brigands" proclaimed that "the Liberals are brigands." This German, Dr. Helmut von den Steinen, the correspondent of the _Nordeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung_ (in which he was bound to speak favourably of Radoslavoff) used to deliver propaganda lectures in the Bulgarian language at Sofia during the War. He was very well acquainted with Bulgarian affairs and being summoned to Berlin at the end of 1917 he made a speech[120] _in camera_ to a committee of German savants and artists. In the course of this he lamented that his country had attached herself to Radoslavoff, who, said he, was hated and would at the next elections be swept away.

As one must repeat _ad nauseam_, the gulf between Serb and Bulgar has not been caused by an extreme divergence of their private or their public morals, academically considered, but by the various incidents which in the eyes of each of them testified to the other's depravity. And at the bottom of it all was Macedonia--Macedonia which now, being wisely administered, will be the foundation-stone of Yugoslavia.

At the end of his book, _Balkan Problems and European Peace_, Mr. Noel Buxton agrees that such a Yugoslav Federation has become a practical possibility. But his two alternative proposals with respect to what should meanwhile be the fate of Macedonia would indefinitely postpone that Federation. We have already dealt with the proposal of autonomy, put forward also by Mr. Leland Buxton. As for what Mr. Noel Buxton calls the ideal solution--"a plebiscite conducted by an impartial international commission over the whole of the historical province of Macedonia"--this is aiming no higher than at a perpetuation of the two distinct countries, Serbia and Bulgaria. We should probably have had more plebiscites in Europe if more Allied armies had been available, but the campaign of intimidation and every sort of ruthlessness which occurred in Upper Silesia and Schleswig make us look rather askance upon this method of registering the popular will. Mr. Buxton airily asks for a plebiscite over the whole of the historical province of Macedonia, ignoring altogether the special difficulty that "Macedonia" means something quite different to the Serb, the Bulgar and the Greek. He dismisses likewise the universal difficulty of plebiscites, which is to be just in laying down the limits of the various regions. But there is really no need for Mr. Buxton to take us on to those quagmires, since he knows, and is good enough to tell us, what the result of the plebiscite will be. "The Bulgarian sympathies," says he, "of the mass of the Macedonian population are apparent to every inquiring traveller." If Mr. Buxton were to encounter one of those pretty lawless Karaka[vc]an nomads, who from the Monastir district wander all over the Balkans, his recognition of the man's Roman and Thraco-Illyrian descent would be facilitated by the permanent cheesy odour which pervades his person. There is nothing so permanent about the Macedonian Slav. His sympathies, as is natural, have gone out to that Balkan country which cultivated him and since, as Dr. Milovanovi['c], the Serbian statesman, says, "the Serbs did not begin to think about Macedonia till 1885," it would indeed have been extraordinary if the Macedonian Slavs--whose ethnical position, as scientists agree, is such a vague one--had been generally drawn to Serbia. One cannot help feeling that in this book Mr. Buxton does a serious disservice to his reputation as a Balkan expert. He says that Serbia until the accession of King Peter was Austrophil; which is, to put it mildly, a very sweeping remark--only that party which called itself Progressive was identified with Milan's views. He praises the Bulgars for being devoted to their national Church, and praises them for producing a large number of Protestants, whose sincerity, etc., so that one presumes he would have praised them still more if the whole nation, as was once on the cards, had joined the Protestant Church. Save me from my friends! the Bulgars might say. What is perfectly sincere about them is their patriotism; and while some of those who now change their religion have doubtless no ulterior, personal motive, the entire country would probably have as little reluctance as Japan in adopting any religion which, like the Exarchist Church of to-day, would be an instrument of the national cause. Mr. Buxton's knowledge of the Balkan protagonists has its limitations; for example, prior to Bulgaria's entry into the War he was all for the removal of the British Minister on account of his pro-Serbian sympathies, but he says no word about M. Savinsky, the Russian Minister, who was left by his Entente colleagues to play the first violin. This capricious gentleman was no diplomat, but a courtier. He did not even protest when German munitions for Turkey passed through Roumania, and far too much of his time was spent in motoring with pretty girls in the neighbourhood of Sofia. Many good observers were of opinion that with a more competent Russian representative, such as M. Nekludoff, who in 1914 was transferred to Stockholm, the situation would have been saved. In their memorandum submitted in January 1915 to Lord (then Sir Edward) Grey, Messrs. N. and C. R. Buxton said that their experience of fifteen years convinced them that the Bulgarian sentiment of the Macedonians could not in a short time be made to give way to another national sentiment. If we rule out, as being slaves of circumstance, all the Macedonians who now tell you that from Bulgar they have changed to Serb, there is no reason why we should not credit those who are so weary of the rival activities of both parties that they wish for peace and nothing else. They would follow, not the Messrs. Buxton, but the priest of the Bulgarian village of Chuprenia, who told me that he held that one might pray to God for the success of the Bulgarian arms, without saying whether they were in the right or in the wrong. After the end of the war this priest sent a telegram, which was perhaps a little indiscreet, advocating that the Bulgarian people should join in Yugoslavia.

To prevent the Southern Slavs being torn by internal strife, it is necessary between Serbia and Bulgaria that one of them should for a time be paramount. We may be confident that Serbia will not abuse her position. In fact it is the opinion of a Roumanian lady at Monastir that the Serbs were uncommonly rash in taking into their service so many who once had called themselves Bulgars and now maintain that they are Serbs. But Serbia has become relatively so strong that she can be indulgent. She will even satisfy that Bulgarian professor who is said to have discussed the Macedonian question with the British military attaché.

The attaché suggested a division between Serbia and Bulgaria.

"No," said the professor; "let the country remain a whole, like the child before Solomon."

"Would you be satisfied?" asked the attaché, "if this question were now decided once and for all?"

"Yes," said the professor, "if the judge be another Solomon."

Among the Bulgars who are looking forward to the day when their country will, in some form or other, join Yugoslavia, there are some who suggest that when comparative tranquillity has been assured upon the Macedonian frontiers (that is to say, between Macedonia and the Albanians) it would be as well to garrison the province with Croatian regiments, pending the employment in their own country of Macedonian troops. Gradually the time will come when, as one of the units of the Yugoslav State, Macedonia will enjoy the same amount of Home Rule as the other provinces. She will then, maybe, decide for herself such matters as the preservation of her dialects, local administration, police, etc.

* * * * *

Once on the banks of the Danube when I was going to sail from one of these countries to her neighbour with whom she had recently been at war, and some of the inhabitants had kindly come to see me off, I was presented, amongst other things, with an old gentleman's good wishes, which he had taken the trouble to express in French and in verse. I believe that he recited them, but there was a considerable tumult on the landing-stage. Then a very angry traveller appropriated one of my ears and began to tell me that they were for detaining him in this country; three or four natives of the country reported, simultaneously, into my other ear that he had been letting off his revolver and was altogether a dangerous man. I was to settle whether he should sail or not, and meanwhile his luggage had been put ashore. He waved his passport in my face. Both he and his opponents were gesticulating with great violence, and this they continued to do even after I filled their hands with most of the small and large bouquets which the friendly people had brought down for me. There was so much noise that the boat's whistle, which the captain started, was no more than a forest-tree soaring slightly over those around it. As I tried to disentangle myself from those who encircled me I caught sight of the old gentleman of the poem--in appearance he was a smaller edition of the late Dr. Butler of Trinity; he was clearly nervous lest I should depart without his lines, which he extended towards me, written on the back of one of his visiting-cards. I was just then being told by the agitated traveller that he had only been firing into the air because it was Easter, and that this was his invariable custom at midnight on Easter-Eve. The explanation was so satisfactory that everyone welcomed my suggestion that he should sail and that they should send his revolver on to him by parcel post. They all shook hands with him. The two nationalities were on excellent terms. And we may transfer the old gentleman's good wishes to them and the other Yugoslavs:

Oh! la belle journée de votre bonheur, Souhaitons votre bon voyage tout-à-l'heure. Couronné de grands succès du ciel je vous implore, Allegrèsse, santé et prosperité je vous augure.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 116: Cf. _Modern Italy_, by Giovanni Borghese. Paris, 1913.]

[Footnote 117: Cf. _Through the Lands of the Serb_.]

[Footnote 118: Cf. _The Children of the Illuminator_, by Bishop Nicholai Velimirovi['c]. London, 1919.]

[Footnote 119: _Edinburgh Review_, July 1920 (anonymous).]