“on arrive novice à toutes les guerres,” wrote the french philosopher; or if he did not, he said something like it. i have never known a place where being on the spot made so sharp a difference in one’s point of view as the near east, and where one’s ignorance, and the ignorance of the great mass of one’s fellow-countrymen, was so keenly brought home to one. the change in the point of view happened with surprising abruptness the moment one crossed the austrian frontier. there are other changes of a physical nature which happen as well when one crosses the frontier into any kingdom where war is taking place. the whole of the superficial luxuries of civilisation seem to disappear in a twinkling; and so adaptable a creature is man that you feel no surprise; you just accept everything as if things had always been so. the trains crawl; they stop at every station; you no longer complain of the inadequacy of the luxuries of your sleeping-car; you are thankful to have a seat at all. it is no longer a question of criticising the quality of the dinner or the swiftness of the service. it is a question whether you will get a piece of bread or a glass of water during the next twenty-four hours.
belgrade station was full of reservists and peasants: men in uniform, men half in uniform, men in the clothes of the mountains—sheepskin coats, putties, and shoes made of twisted straw; dark, swarthy, sunburnt and wind-tanned, hard men, carrying rifles and a quantity of bundles and filling the cattle vans to overflowing. at every station we passed trains, most of them empty, which were coming back to fetch supplies of meat. every platform and every station were crowded with men in uniforms of every description. a servian officer got into the carriage in which i was travelling. he was dressed in[407] khaki. he wore a white chrysanthemum in his cap, a bunch of michaelmas daisies in his belt, and he carried, besides his rifle and a khaki bag which had been taken from the turks, a small umbrella. he had been wounded in the foot at kumanovo. he was on his way to uskub. he was a man of commerce, and had closed his establishment to go to the war; the majority of the officers in his regiment were men of commerce, he said. they had sacrificed everything to go to the war, and that was one reason why they were not going to allow the gains of the war, which they declared were a matter of life and death to their country, to be snatched from them by diplomatists at a green table. “if they want to take from us what we have won by the sword,” he said, “let them take it by the sword.”
i asked him about the fighting at kumanovo. he said the turks had fought like heroes, but that they were miserably led. he then began to describe the horrors of the war in the servian language. as i understood about one word in fifty, i lost the thread of the discourse, and so i lured him back into a more neutral language. he told me that someone had asked a turkish prisoner how it came about that the turks, whom all the world knew to be such brave soldiers, were nevertheless always beaten. the turk, after the habit of his race, answered by an apologue as follows: “a certain man,” he said, “once possessed a number of camels and an ass. he was a hard taskmaster to the camels, and he worked them to the uttermost; and after trading for many years in different lands, he became exceedingly rich. at last one day he himself fell sick; and feeling that his end was drawing nigh, he wished to relieve himself of the burden on his soul, so he bade the camels draw near to him, and he addressed them thus: ‘i am dying, camels, dying, only i have most uncivilly kept death waiting, until i have unburdened my soul to you. camels, i have done you a grievous wrong. when you were hungry, i stinted you of food, when you were thirsty, i denied you drink, and when you were weary, i urged you on and denied you rest; and ever and always i denied you the full share of your fair and just wage. now i am dying, and all this lies heavily on my soul, i crave your forgiveness, so that i may die in peace. can you forgive me, camels, for all the wrong i have done you?’ the camels withdrew to talk it over. after[408] a while the head camel returned and spoke to the merchant thus: ‘that you ever overworked us, we forgive you; that you underfed us, we forgive you; that you never remembered to pay us our full wage, we forgive you; but that you always let the ass go first, allah may forgive you, but we never can!’”
it took over twelve hours to get from belgrade to the junction of nish, where there was a prospect of food. when we stopped at one station in the twilight there was a great noise of cheering from another train, and a dense crowd of soldiers and women throwing flowers. then in the midst of the clamour and the murmur somebody played a tune on a pipe. a little slav tune written in a scale which has a technical name—let us say the phrygian mode—a plaintive, piping tune, as melancholy as the cry of a seabird. the very voice of exile. i recognised the tune at once. it is in the first ten pages of balakirev’s collection of russian folk-songs under the name “rekrutskaya”—that is to say, recruits’ song. plaintive, melancholy, quaint, and piping, it has no heartache in it; it is the luxury of grief, the expression of idle tears, the conventional sorrow of the recruit who is leaving his home.
“you are going far away, far away from poor jeannette,
and there’s no one left to love me now, and you will soon forget.”
so, in the song of our grandfathers which i have quoted earlier in the book, the maiden sang to the conscript, adding that were she king of france, “or, still better, pope of rome,” she would abolish war, and consequently the parting of lovers. but the song of the slav recruit in its piping notes seems to say: “i am going far away, but i am not really sorry to go. they will be glad to get rid of me at home, and i, in the barracks, shall have meat to eat twice a day, and jolly comrades, and i shall see the big town and find a new love as good as my true love. they will mend my broken heart there; but in the meantime let me make the most of the situation. let me collect money and get drunk, and let me sing my sad songs, songs of parting and exile, and let me enjoy the melancholy situation to the full.”
that is what the wistful, piping song, played on a wooden flageolet of some kind, seemed to say. it just pierced through the noise and then stopped; a touching interlude, like the[409] shepherd’s piping amidst the weariness, the fever and the fret, the delirious remembrance and the agonised expectation, of the last act of wagner’s tristan und isolda. the train moved on into the gathering darkness.
we arrived at nish at eight o’clock in the evening. it was dark; the station was sparsely lighted; the buffet, to which we had been looking forward all day, was as crowded as a sardine-box and apparently devoid of anything suggesting food. wounded soldiers, reservists, officers filled the waiting-room and the platform. the servian officer dived into the crowd and returned presently, bringing his sheaves with him in the shape of three plates of hot chicken.
nish seemed an unfit-like meeting-place for triumphant soldiers; it resembled rather the scene of a conspiracy in a melodrama, where tired conspirators were plotting nothing at all. one felt cut off from all news. in london, one knew, in every sitting-room people were marking off the movements of the battles with paper flags on inaccurate maps. here at nish, in the middle of a crowd of men who either had fought or were going to fight, one knew less about the war than in fleet street. one bought a newspaper, but it dealt with everything except war news.
a man came into the refreshment-room—the name was in this case ironical—and said, “i have had nothing to eat, not a piece of bread and not a drop of water, for twenty-four hours,” and then, before anybody could suggest a remedy—for food there was none—he went away. afterwards i saw him with a chicken in his hand. one man was carrying a small live pig, which squealed. in the corner of the platform two men, with crutches and bandages, dressed in the clothes of the country, were sitting down, looking as if they were tired of life. i offered them a piece of cold sausage, which they were too tired to accept; only at the sight of a cigarette one of them made a gesture, and, being given one, smoked and smoked and smoked. i knew the feeling. suddenly, in the darkness, a sleeping-car appeared, to the intense surprise of everyone—an international sleeping-car, with sheets, and plenty of room in it. my travelling companion and myself started for sofia, where we arrived the next morning.
at sofia the scene on the platform was different. the place was full of bustle; the platform crowded with red cross[410] men, nurses, and soldiers, in tidy, practical uniforms. the refreshment-room, too, was crowded with doctors. you heard fragments of many languages: the scene might have been mukden, 1904, or, indeed, any railway station in any war anywhere. an exceedingly capable porter got me my luggage with dispatch, and i drove to the hotel in a “phaeton,” but not with the coursers of the sun. the horses here had all gone to the war. at the hotel i was first given—the only room said to be vacant—a room which was an annex to the café. for furniture it had six old card-tables and nothing else.
full of manchurian memories, i was about to think this luxurious, when the offending adam in me quite suddenly revolted, and i demanded and obtained instead a luxurious upper chamber. i stayed about a week at sofia, and made unavailing efforts to get to the front. i was then told i would find it easier to get to the front where the servian army was fighting. so, laden with papers and passports, i started for uskub.
i travelled from sofia to nish in the still existing comfortable sleeping-cars; but when i arrived once more at the junction of nish i learnt a lesson which i thought i had mastered many years ago, and that is, take in a war as much luggage as you possibly can to your civilised base, but once you start for the front or anywhere near it, take nothing at all except a tea-basket and a small bottle of brandy. i had only a small trunk with me, but the stationmaster refused to let it proceed. war goes to the heads of stationmasters like wine. this particular stationmaster had no right whatsoever to stop my small trunk on the grounds that it was full of contraband goods, and he could perfectly well have had it examined then and there; instead of which he said it would have to be taken to the custom house office in the town, which would involve a journey of two hours and the missing of my train. i was obliged to leave my trunk at the station, nor cast one longing, lingering look behind. the only reason i mention this episode, which has no sort of interest in itself, is to illustrate something which i will come to later. at nish i got into a slow train. the railway carriage was full of people. there was in it a servian poet, who had temporarily exchanged the lyre for the lancet, and enrolled himself in the medical service. his name was dr. milan cur?in—pronounced churchin. he showed me the utmost kindness.[411] like all modern poets, he was intensely practical, and an admirable man of business, and he promised to get me back my trunk and either to bring it to uskub himself, as he was continually travelling backwards and forwards between uskub and nish, or to have it sent wherever i wished. he spoke several languages, and we discussed the war. he said the servians resented the abuse which had been levelled against them by pierre loti. pierre loti, he said, accused them of being barbarians and of attacking turkey without reason.
“we,” said the poet, “hate war as much as anyone. what does pierre loti know of our history? what does he know of turkish rule in servia? he knows stamboul; ‘but what does he know of turkey who only stamboul knows?’ besides, if pierre loti’s knowledge of turkey was anything like his knowledge of japan, as reflected in that pretty book called madame chrysanthème—a book which made all serious scholars of japan rabid with rage—it is not worth much.” he had no wish to deny the turks their qualities. that was not the point. the point was turkish rule in servia in the past, and that was unspeakable. the poet was obliged to get out at the first station we stopped at, and after his departure i moved into another compartment, in which there were a wounded soldier, a young russian volunteer, who was studying at the military academy at moscow, two men of business who were now soldiers, and a gendarme who had been standing up all night, and who stood up all day. i offered these people some tea, having a tea-basket with me. they accepted it gratefully, and after a little time one of them asked me if i were an austrian. i said no; i was an englishman. they said: “we thought it extremely odd that an austrian should offer us tea.” the wounded soldier, thinking i was a doctor, asked me if i could do anything to his wound. as he spoke servian i could only understand a little of what he said. it seemed heart-breaking, just as one began to get on more or less in bulgarian, to have to shift one’s language to one which, although the same in essentials, is superficially utterly different in accent, intonation, and in most of the common words of everyday life! servian and bulgarian are the same language at root, but servian is more like polish, bulgarian more like russian. servian is a great literary language, with a mass of poetry and a beautiful store[412] of folk songs and folk epics. bulgarian compared with it is more or less of a patois; it is like russian with all the inflections left out. with the help of the russian student i gathered that the soldier had been wounded at the battle of kumanovo, that his wound had been dressed and bandaged by a doctor, but that subsequently he had gone to a wise woman, who had put some balm on it, and that the effect of the balm had been disastrous. i strongly recommended him to consult a doctor on the first possible occasion. it is travelling under such circumstances, in war-time especially, that one really gets beneath the crust of a country. every man who travels in an international sleeping-car becomes more or less international; and it is not in hotels or embassies that you get face to face with a people, however excellent your recommendations. but travel third-class in a full railway carriage, in times of war, and you get to the heart of the country through which you are travelling. the qualities of the people are stripped naked—their good qualities and their bad qualities; and this is why i mentioned the episode of the trunk, in order to call attention to the extreme kindness shown to me by the servian poet, dr. cur?in, who rescued the trunk for me at great personal inconvenience. i hoped that the “georgian” poets would do the same for a servian war correspondent, supposing there were a war in england and they were to come across one.
after many hours we came to a stop where it was necessary to change, at vranja; and then began one of those long war waits which are so exasperating. the station was full to overflowing with troops; there was no room to sit down in the waiting-room. we waited there for two hours, and then, at last, the train was formed which was bound for uskub. there were several members of the servian parliament who had reserved places in this train, and in a moment, it appeared to be quite full, and there seemed to be no chance of getting a place in it. i was handicapped also by carrying a saddle and a bridle, which blocked up the narrow corridor of the railway carriage. but i got a place in the train, and room was found for the saddle owing to the kindness of an aviator called alexander maritch. he was one of those extremely unselfish people who seem to spend their life in doing nothing but extremely tiresome things for other people. he carried my saddle in his hands for half an hour, and at last managed to[413] find room for it where it would not be in the way of all the other passengers. he was an astonishingly capable man with his hands and his fingers. there appeared to be nothing he could not do. he uncoupled the railway carriages; he mended during the journey a quantity of broken objects, and he spent the whole of the time in making himself useful in one way or another.
towards nightfall we arrived at the station of kumanovo, and got out to have a look at the battlefield. it was quite dark and the ground was covered with snow. drawn up near the station were a lot of guns and ammunition carts which had been taken from the turks. here were some maxim guns whose screens were perforated by balls, which shows that they could not have been made of good material; and indeed at uskub i was told that there were no doubt cases where the turkish material was bad; but another and more potent cause of the disorganisation in the turkish army was the manner in which the turks handled, or rather mishandled, their weapons. they forgot to unscrew the shells; they jammed the rifles. this is not surprising to anyone who has ever seen a turk handle an umbrella. he carries it straight in front of him, pointing towards him in the air, if it is shut, and sideways and beyond his head, if it is open.
we arrived at uskub about half-past eight. the snow was thawing. the aspect was desolate. the aviator found me a room in the h?tel de la liberté; but the window in it was broken, and there was no fuel. it was as damp as a vault. we had dinner. i happened to mention that it would be nice to smoke a cigarette, but i had not got any more. at once the aviator darted out of the room and disappeared. “he won’t come back,” said one of his friends, “till he has found you some cigarettes, you may be sure of that.” in an hour’s time he returned with three cigarettes, having scoured the town for them, the shops, of course, being shut.
uskub is a picturesque, straggling place, and at that time of the year, swamped as it was in melting snow, an incredibly dirty place, situated between a mountain and the river vardar. like all turkish towns, it is ill-paved, or rather not paved at all, and full of mud. it is—or was—largely inhabited by albanian mohammedans. as the headquarters of the servian army, it was full of officers and soldiers; there was not much[414] food, and still less wood. here were the war correspondents. they had not been allowed to go any farther; but the order went out that they could, if they liked, go on to kuprulu, a little farther down the line, whence it was impossible to telegraph. a stay at uskub, as it was then, would afford a tourist a taste of all the discomforts of war without any of its excitement. the principal distraction of the people at uskub was having their boots cleaned; and as the streets were full of large lakes of water and high mounds of slush, the effect of the cleaning was not permanent. matthew arnold was once asked to walk home after dinner on a wet night in london. “no,” he said; “i can’t get my feet wet. it would spoil my style.” matthew arnold’s style would have been annihilated at uskub.
the stories told by eye-witnesses of the events immediately preceding the occupation of uskub by the serbians were tragicomic in a high degree. in the first place, the population of the place never for one moment thought that the turks could possibly be beaten by the servians. suddenly, in the midst of their serene confidence, came the cry: “the giaours are upon us.” every turkish official and officer in the place lost his head, with the exception of the vali (head of the district), who was the only man possessing an active mind. otherwise the turkish officers fled to the consulates and took refuge there, trembling and quaking with terror.
the two problems which called for immediate solution were: (a) to prevent further fighting taking place in the town; (b) to prevent a general massacre of the christians before the servians entered the town. to prevent fighting in the town, the turkish troops had to be persuaded to get out of it. this was done. the only hope of solving both these problems lay in the vali. all the consuls, as i said, agreed that the vali’s conduct on this occasion shone amidst the encircling cowardice of the other officers and officials. already before the news of the battle of kumanovo had reached the town about two hundred christians had been arrested on suspicion and put in prison. they were not of the criminal class, but just ordinary people—priests, shopmen, and women. about three hundred mohammedans were already in the prison. news came to the russian consul-general, m. kalnikoff, that these prisoners had had nothing to eat for two days. he went at once to the prison and demanded to be let in. he heard shots being fired inside. some of the[415] albanians were firing into the air. he asked the governor of the prison whether it was true that the prisoners had had no food for two days, and the governor said it was perfectly true, and that the reason was that there was no bread to be had in the town.
“in that case,” said the consul-general, “you must let all these prisoners out.”
“but if i let them out,” said the governor, “the mohammedans will kill the christians.”
finally it was settled that the prisoners should be let out a few at a time, the christians first, and the mohammedans afterwards, through a hedge of soldiers; and this was accomplished successfully. m. kalnikoff told me that among the prisoners were many people he knew.
then came the question of giving up the town to the servians without incurring a massacre. i am not certain of the chronology of the events, and all this was told me in one hurried and interrupted interview, but the vali took the matter in hand, and as he was driving to the russian consulate a man in the crowd shot him through the arm and killed the coachman. this man was said to be mad.
in the meantime, the various consulates were crowded with refugees, and in the french consulate a turkish officer fainted from apprehension, and another officer insisted on disguising himself as a kavass. the servians, who were outside the city, at some considerable distance, thought that the turks meant to offer further resistance in the town.
it was arranged that the various consuls and the vali (in their uniforms) should set out for the servian headquarters and deliver up the town. this was done. they drove out until they met servian troops. then they were blindfolded and marched between a cordon of soldiers through the deep mud until they reached those in authority. they explained matters, and the servian cavalry rode into the town, just in time to prevent a massacre of the christian population. as it was, the albanians had already done a good deal of looting. that there was no fighting in the town, and consequently no massacre, was probably due to the prompt action of the vali.
when the turkish and albanian soldiers retired south from kumanovo they were apparently completely panic-stricken. at uskub, horses belonging to batteries were put in trains, while[416] the guns were left behind. there is not the slightest doubt that the troops massacred any christians they came across. at the military hospital at nish i saw a woman who was terribly cut and mutilated. she told the following story: her house, in which were her husband, her brother, his son-in-law, and her two sons, was suddenly occupied by arnaut refugees. these were albanians from the north, who were fighting with the turks. the arnauts demanded weapons, which they were given. they then set fire to the house, killed the woman’s husband and everyone else who was there, and no doubt thought that they had killed her also. but she was found still breathing, and taken to the hospital. the doctor said that she might recover. stories such as these, and far worse, one heard on all sides. the arnauts were an absolutely uncompromising people. they gave and expected no quarter. in the hospitals they bit the doctors who tried to help them. they fought and struck as long as there was a breath left in their bodies.
at the military hospital of nish i saw many of the wounded. the wounds inflicted by bullets were clean, and the doctors said that they were such that the wounded either recovered and were up and about in a week, or else they died. there were cases of tetanus, and i saw many men who had received severe bayonet wounds and fractures at the battle of perlepe, where some of the severest fighting had taken place.
at the beginning of this battle somebody on the servian side must have blundered. a regiment was advancing, expecting to meet reinforcements on both sides. in front of them, on a hill, they saw what they took to be their own men, and halted. immediately a hot fire rained on them from all sides. the men they had seen were not their own men but turks. the servians had to get away as fast as ever they could go, otherwise they would have been surrounded; as it was, they incurred severe losses.
you had only to be a day in servia to realise the spirit of the people. they were full of a concentrated fire of patriotism. the war to them was a matter of life and death. they regarded their access to the sea as a question of life and death to their country. they had been the driving power in the war. they had had to make the greater sacrifices; and the part they had played certainly was neither realised nor appreciated. the servians were less reserved than the bulgarians,[417] but they had the same singleness of purpose and the same power of cleaving fast to one great idea.
i only spent four or five days at uskub, and as there seemed to be no chance of getting within range of any fighting, i went back to sofia. i stopped on the way to nish, where i visited the military hospital, and there i met once more the servian poet, and received my lost trunk from his hands. just outside the servian hospital there was a small church. this church was originally a monument built by the turks to celebrate the taking of nish, and its architecture was designed to discourage the servians from ever rising against them again, for the walls were made almost entirely of the skulls of massacred servians.
