With Serbs in Corsica

On July 28th, 1914 Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. The three Austrian invasions of 1914 were repulsed by the Serbs. On the last occasion Belgrade fell on December 2nd, 1914 but was retaken on December 15th. The Austrians fled, leaving 70,000 prisoners behind them. These prisoners brought typhus with them and the epidemic spread throughout Serbia. Austria left Serbia alone in 1915 until October. In this month Bulgaria, enticed by a promise of the part of Macedonia, taken by Serbia in 1913 came into the war on the German side. The Austrians, reinforced by the Germans under Mackensen, attacked Serbia from the north and north-west. On October 8th, 1915 they took Belgrade, and on October 12th the Bulgarians invaded Serbia from the east. The Serb army was now outnumbered by more than two to one. French and British divisions were sent from Gallipoli to Salonika to help Serbia. But the Allies who crossed the Serb frontier found a superior Bulgarian force in their way, and fell back on Salonika.

The Serb army decided to retreat rather than surrender, but the only way open to it now was across the mountains of Montenegro and Albania to the Adriatic. They began their retreat on November 30th. It has been estimated that 100,000 soldiers perished on the Albanian retreat, and about 50,000 civilians (mainly boys) and prisoners of war. Some refugee women and children had gone by train to Salonika and been shipped to Corsica. The bulk of the 150,000 surviving soldiers were taken to Corfu, but 10,000 were shipped to Bizerta. In 1916 the reconstituted Serb army sailed from Corfu and joined the French and British at Salonika. (In 1917 Bizerta became the headquarters of the Serb Reserve Army; the volunteer Yugoslavs from America were trained there and sent to Salonika.) In October, 1916 the Serbs took from the Bulgars Kaimakchalan, a mountain 8,000 feet high on the borders between Greek and Serbian Macedonia, and the Entente forces captured Monastir in November. But apart from this and an abortive attack in April, 1917 the Entente forces made no serious offensive until the autumn of 1918.

The half million Allied troops locked up in Salonika were called by the Germans their "largest internment camp," but in the autumn of 1918 the Serbs as their spearhead drove the Bulgars back to Bulgaria and the Germans and Austrians across the Danube. Armistice with Bulgaria was signed on September 30th and with Austria-Hungary on November 3rd, and with Germany on November II, I9I8. On July, 19I7, in the Corfu Manifesto, the Serb Government and the Yugoslav Committee had proclaimed a Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; this kingdom now came into being and was later called Yugoslavia. The Serbs, who had numbered four and a half million in 1914, by adding to their pre-war kingdom the Austro-Hungarian provinces of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Dalmatia and the Voyvodina became the dominant partners in a country with a population of nearly fourteen million.

Corsica

In April, 1917, my brother Maurice was lent by the Friends to the Serbian Relief Fund, who sent him to Bizerta to see what could be done for the thousands of disabled Serbs in North Africa. Soon after his arrival he asked the London Committee of the S.R.F. for two workers to help him. To me he wrote-"have you any notion of trying it? The idea is to be a sort of angel of comfort to some hundreds of men, maimed, halt and blind, who live in a barracks without any attention being paid them from unofficial sources. It would mean making your own job."

With the arrogance of youth I felt at once that I was the preordained angel for these men, although I knew no Serb. Fortunately Lady Grogan, who selected staff for the S.R.F., was a discerning woman: she chose an experienced worker, Margaret McFie, and allowed me to slip in with her, as she felt that I was malleable and might be moulded to fit in with needs. As Bizerta was a military zone, permits were difficult to obtain-and in the meantime, we were sent to Corsica, where the S.R.F. had already been working for a year and a half for Serb women and children. For Margaret McFie this was a return to old haunts. She had been an orderly in a hospital in Serbia in 1915, and come out with the refugees to Corsica.

Before starting I had lunch in his London chambers with Will Arnold-Forster and Ka Cox, whom he was soon to marry. Ka had been my earliest grande passion when I was a raw fresher at Newnham. She was in the van of culture and progress in those old days. She wore becoming clothes with Peter Pan collars, while the rest of us wrestled with things supported by whalebone that cut our necks, had little silver ornaments in her hair, belonged to the Fabian Society, went on walking tours with poetic young men from Bedales-very chaste walking tours, but bold for those days-rode with Lowes Dickinson, conversed with Darwins and Cornfords, boated with Rupert Brooke, acted in "Comus" with the elite of undergraduate Cambridge, had the walls of her room at College papered with plain brown paper, knew the poems of Meredith and Francis Thompson by heart, and talked of art, philosophy and literature like an initiate. My shy schoolgirl heart burst with admiration of her, and indeed at nineteen she was a wonder of poise, maturity and charm. I had not seen her since College days, but when I heard that she had been with the Serbs in Corsica, it lent the task to which I was being called, prestige and glamour.

"The S.R.F. are doing a fine piece of work there," she told me. "You know what relief very often is-a mere doling out of charity with no purpose behind it, and no co-ordination in its carrying out. The Corsican work has been sound from its start. The refugees to begin with were dumped into huge barracks by the French, sheltered and fed, and that was all. The S.R. F. has planted them in family groups in the villages, opened schools, dispensaries, churches and workshops for them, and are doing all they can to nurture their cultural life and make their exile not merely tolerable but beneficial. Margaret McFie is a tower of strength. She is quite young-about twenty-five-but she has a genius for organising. Ask her advice about some situation and she will say 'it is all very difficult and complicated-there are a hundred snags,' and then she will proceed to outline a plan for dealing with the problems and you will see she is always right. She is an excellent linguist and speaks Serb fluently already. She got a First in French at Oxford." (As Ka and I had only got Seconds in History, this impressed us.)

"I know," I said. "Lindsay Scott told me that before the war the only thing she was interested in was old French Epic on which she was researching at the Sorbonne, and that he could not imagine her doing anything active or practical. 'I think of her always,' he said, 'in an exquisite and critical repose."'

Margaret McFie and I started on our journey early in June. She was tall and dark, and as reposeful as Lindsay Scott had suggested-indeed she had something of a convent air about her, for she had been brought up in a French convent school, though she was no longer a Catholic and there was nothing nun-like in her speech. She had acquired a knowledge of the world, was realistic and unshockable, and had a manner of describing things that was, in a quiet way, pungent and racy. I got on with her at once and found the journey with her amusing.

She told me more about the work in Corsica. "When the refugees arrived the French put them into prisons or barracks wherever there was room. Ka and I worked together in an old penitentiary at Chiavari across the bay of Ajaccio. It was completely isolated. Food was brought in little boats. Two thousand refugees were jammed into it. Most of them had come via Salonika, but some had been in the Albanian retreat-we used to bandage their wounded feet every day. The refugees would have gone mad or jumped into the sea if they had been left there. There was nothing for them to do-it was terrible. Then Ka and I went into the Corsican villages to see if we could find looms, and the peasants climbed into their attics and brought down their old spindles and combs for the wool, and their looms too, and we took them back and they were all exactly right-just what the Serbs wanted. And then an old man said that he could make looms. So we started the workshops. And Marjorie Fry came over from the Friends' work in France. We had a conference and decided to put the refugees in villages and to give them all work-partly because their allowance from the French is so small and mainly for their morale. Among the men there are cobblers and potters and agricultural workers-they grow wonderful tomatoes in Ucciani. The Scottish women lend us nurses- they do all the medical work. And Evelyn Radford (she isn't here now) scrutinised all the Serbian designs and looked after the dyes they used. When they were westernised and debased she told them that wasn't what we wanted. And they were pleased because they take great pride in their patterns-they have an almost ritual significance for them, and quite often they are part of their lives. They will tell you of some quite conventional design-'that's the beehive we moved before the war,' or 'those are wheatears I made to bring a good harvest,' or 'these are roses I worked for my bridal year."'

In Paris we went to an Institut for the Re-education des Mutiles started by Maurice Barres, and gleaned many ideas from it. We also went to dinner with a couple said to be great guns in the philanthropic world. The man was American-his wife of some vague nationality but vociferously American because of her marriage. I see from a letter home that she told us how the war would now be run on a grand scale, and how when it was over America would undertake the moral re-education of Germany. They were going to bring over 100,000 aeroplanes and 7,000 miles of railway. When her husband, a meek little man, wondered if 7,000 miles would get into France, she explained scornfully that they would, "zigzagging about." She railed at the selfishness of French women, and gave the impression that but for her and her daughters there would be no canteens and no kindness to refugees. While she talked, her husband killed flies, making all the dishes on the table rattle, and muttering for each one, "that's the equivalent of a boche." Margaret McFie and I reflected when we at last escaped that it was unlucky that they should represent our new ally, but that, fortunately, the French would not understand them (for they only spoke English) and in any case had a poor opinion of most Anglo-Saxons.

We went from Nice to Ile Rousse on a ship blue with French soldiers on leave, and then had a long, slow journey by train through Corsica to Ajaccio. We stopped for half an hour at Bocagnano, the mountain village where the S.R.F. had planted, in family houses, a large number of Serb women and children and a few old men. Margaret McFie had worked amongst them for a year, so the whole colony was on the platform to greet her. It was an impressive greeting. They were extremely excited-they surged round her with cries of rapture, kissing her hands or any part of her they could get hold of. They laughed and cried, shouting what I supposed meant, "she has come back to us, our Mother, our Sister, our Beloved." Actually all I could detect was the word "Magavee," their version of her name, and I always called her this afterwards. The Serbs had put on their best clothes in her honour, and I saw the brilliant reds and yellows and deep browns of their national costume for the first time. I was moved by the scene-so exotic and unexpected. I felt excited too. Was it possible that the demure, detached, sensible Miss McFie whom I had been travelling with for the last week, and who was so sick on the sea, was really a demi-goddess-a kind of saint? Later I thought that though she wasn't our idea of a saint-too strong and matter-of-fact-perhaps she was more like the medieval saints than our stained-glass window conception of them. Even Sveti Sava, the greatest of the Serbian saints, had taught his people, I discovered, not only how to plough, weave, make rope and put windows into houses, but also how to make cheese and yoghourt.

When we got to Ajaccio, the headquarters of the Serbian Relief Fund in Corsica, I was alarmed to hear that Magavee was being reserved to deputise for workers due for leave, and that I was to serve my apprenticeship in Bocagnano-alarmed because I knew how disappointed the refugees would be. Otherwise it was an attractive proposition as Ajaccio, though it had a splendid situation on a huge Mediterranean gulf, was very hot at this season, and it was better to be in the highlands.

In Bocagnano I found that my first business was to master the Serb language. As I had to replace Gladys Barton, the S.R.F. worker there, in six weeks' time and there was no hope of an interpreter, this was urgent. Even before the end of these weeks I was sometimes left in charge of the community.

On one of these occasions I went to inspect the workrooms. This was a duty I enjoyed. I liked to watch the old Serb grandmothers spinning the wool with fingers that were still deft and supple or dyeing it rich colours, often from dyes they had made themselves from toadstools or the bark of trees while the younger ones wove it into the geometrical patterns of the Pirot carpets, or embroidered delicate muslins with stylised flowers and insects and other designs handed down to them from Byzantine days. Some were usually out in the village street, setting up the looms, a task which needed plenty of space. But to-day the workrooms were empty. I went into the village and saw our cobbler sitting lazily on his doorstep. I passed the carpenter's shop: it was also silent. Lower down I found a crowd of women and children, dressed in their brightest clothes. They explained their idleness to me in a chorus, but the only word I could disentangle was Sveti Ilia. At last I came on an old schoolmaster, who had a smattering of French. "Sveti Ilia-Saint Ilia. Beaucoup de feu," he said, pointing to the sky with a sweep of his arm. Later when I understood Serb better they told me that Elijah would call down fire on their crops or barns or strike their cattle lame if they worked on his day. He is one of the few saints who are still alive, as he went to Heaven without dying in his chariot of fire-St. Michael is another. Most are with the dead and on their days are given the consecrated wheat boiled with nuts and sugar called zhito or kolyivo which is always made for the souls of the departed. There are various legends about him, invented perhaps to account for his vindictive character. The devil deceived him and told him that some man was sleeping with his wife. Overcome with fury, he entered his bed-chamber and slew the sleeping pair, only to find in the morning that he had killed his parents. (At least this is the story told me by a peasant girl at Umka on the Sava, where a couple of years later I spent the day of Sveti Ilia.)

  To know it in its power, one must hear a Serb chant the Kossovo ballads. The first time I had this experience was after a dance, given by Yugoslav officer in Bizerta. An old soldier was called in. He sat down, quite unembarrassed by the foreign women and his superior officers, and began to chant to the accompaniment of the gusla. This is the national one-stringed instrument. He had made it himself out of some karubia wood and given it the traditional dragon's head and cunning carving. He chanted his song with so much passion that I thought it was his own experience he was telling, for Serbs often improvise. It was about a mother whose son had gone to the wars. There was much about the bravery and suffering of the son, and much about the waiting and longing of the mother. The singer lost the sense of time so completely that it seemed improbable that he would ever stop. The officers were also absorbed and transported-even on us strangers the loud and melancholy chanting had a hypnotic effect. They told me afterwards how for centuries these ballads had never been written down but were transmitted from generation to generation like the Homeric lays, and how this poetry has been as potent as the Orthodox Church in keeping alive the national consciousness of the Serbs. Without these memories, and without their religious difference, they would certainly have followed the easier path and become merged with their Turkish conquerors, as Gauls had with Franks and Normans. The strength of these ballads lies in their tragedy-for only a tragic conception of life is enduring and provides strong enough meat for humanity to feed on. Kossovo was not a victory-it was defeat: it was annihilation: it meant five hundred years of servitude. Yet Kossovo Day is still the most important of Serbian holidays-no Empire celebrations for them, no Quatorze Juillet nor Bismarck Tag nor Independence Day. Year after year they celebrate the ruin of their hopes on the Field of Blackbirds, and their heroes who died in vain. When people say to me that the Serbs are a superficial people with no great future, I remember this. And as I write I know that I am wrong: their heroes did not die in vain. They did not die in vain, because no Serb would admit this: because the Serbs and their brother Slavs are ready to perish again and again for freedom, as they have shown in this war. And so long as they keep the Kossovo spirit, so long will it be impossible to extinguish their race.

One day Magavee came to Bocagnano to visit her old friends. It was the Feast of St. Pantaleimon and the day of the Slava of the cobbler and his family, and we were invited to share in the celebrations. The Slava is the most important of Serb festivals-traditional to them and to the Macedonians, but to none other of the Orthodox Church. Every Serb and Macedonian has a saint who is the patron of his whole family-he has a saint also after whom he is called and whose day he keeps as we keep birthdays: this tradition he holds in common with others of the Orthodox Church, Greeks, Bulgars and Russians, but the Slava is something much more important and has descended from days when there were tribal gods. This patron saint was chosen by his ancestor in place of the god on the day he was converted to Christianity. The Slava is a long series of drinking, eating and rejoicing. Guests are counted like fine gold: the more that come and the more they eat and drink, the prouder are their hosts-indeed it is not uncommon for Serbs to spend a year's savings on the hospitality of this day. There are many ritual performances in connection with the Slava, but these mostly take place before the guests arrive- the lighting of candles, the waving of incense before the ikon of the saint, the sprinkling of the family with a sprig of basil dipped in holy water, the blessing and breaking of the cake baked of white flour and marked with a cross and the monogram of Jesus. When we came in the lunch was set, but I noted with surprise that Magavee and I were the only women who sat at the table-the rest were men, while the grandmother, wife and daughters waited on us, but she told me this was usual in Serbia. We began with toasts drunk in brandy. We toasted the gracious God, the cobbler's family, the Holy Trinity, the Serbs who were fighting on the Salonika front, the Serbs who were left behind in Serbia, and the great and glorious allies represented by Magavee and me. Then we ate roast suckling pig, tender as chicken, with salad and many sweetmeats. After, we drank thick, sticky Turkish coffee, and brandy again because we had omitted to toast the Corsicans and quarrels must be forgotten on such a day, and when everybody's head was going round, we all went out into the village street and, joining hands, danced in a ring the slow ceremonial dance of the kolo that is supposed to be a relic of sun-worship. Magavee, who kept her poise all through the brandy and rich food, explained this to me. She said that it was danced either in a ring, spiral or line and that each district and festival had its own kolo distinguished by the varying of the step. She said that the dish which I had thought was cold pudding was the kolyivo and was eaten because Saint Pantaleimon was amongst the dead. It had been adopted by the Serbs when they had been taught to give up their animal sacrifices but had wanted something instead. These links with the pagan past delighted me, but as I felt I should take them in better when I was more sober, we said good-bye to our hosts, and I retired to sleep off my first Slava.

Apart from the fascination of the Serbs and their madiaeval outlook and customs, life in Bocagnano had interest and even a lyrical quality. The air of the Corsican mountains had a tang, and the pungent odour of the maquis was a tonic. Gladys Barton had a warm, vivid personality and a lovely voice. She had picked up Serbian airs and sang them in the evening. She was very feminine and a good mother to the exiles, though apt to have favourites and to grow exasperated with those who had developed the refugee mentality and were exorbitant in their demands. These were mainly for clothes, pots and pans and pails, something extra for a delicate child, or a little medicine for an old woman. I started a kindergarten for the children who were too young for the Serbian school, and they were delighted to be occupied, and drilled and played with in the garden of the cottage where we lived with an ancient Corsican couple. Monsieur was a rugged type, and as he only spoke dialect, I could not understand him, but Madame conversed in French, and talked to me like a bergerette-"you are young now," she used to say. "Make the most of it-old age comes fast. You must gather rosebuds now, my pretty, soon it will be too late." I don't know where she thought the rosebuds grow, perhaps at the Orphanage a little outside our village, where besides Serb boys there were two young men. The boys were all survivors from the Albanian retreat-some of them as young as eleven and twelve. The terror of the Bulgars had been so great, and the belief that they killed even male children so prevalent, that mothers had besought the soldiers to take their sons away with them, and schoolmasters had gone through the villages ringing bells and collecting all the boys they could muster for the flight over the mountains. In charge of these lads were the two men-a young English professor of philosophy and a Slovene schoolmaster. The young Englishman was a character, not at all a typical product of Rugby and Oxford. The public school had not robbed him of his explosive spontaneity, nor had the University lent him either its famous accent or its affectation of cynicism-very fashionable as these were in those days. For a Quaker he was hot-tempered. We went round the Corsican houses together, taking inventories of the damage their Serb occupants had done to them, and I often had to intervene in the squalls that blew up between the professor of philosophy and the angry landlords. He was excellent with the boys, and though, when roused, he used to slap their heads and thunder at them, they were very fond of him. He had all sorts of nicknames for them- Grande la Bouche and Faun, Granny and Amerikanski Bik (American Bull), and he ragged them and fondled them like an affectionate brother. I watched him diving and swimming and racing with them in the stream. We used to discuss Conrad and Meredith-the favourite books of those days-and poetry. ("I believe we are in the heyday of a great poetic revival," I remember him saying.) And, of course, the Serbs, of whom he had grown fond. All the same, I don't think that he was a rosebud in my Corsican Madame's sense. The Slovene belonged more to this category-he had expressive blue eyes and golden hair, and sitting in the garden in the evening, watching the clouds that sailed across Monte D'Ora, and the forest fires that flamed on the opposite hillside, listening to the crickets in the trees and the liquid rustlings of the maize leaves, while he told me in a low, vibrant voice the wrongs of his people or of his adventures in Siberian prisons-for he had deserted from the Austrian army early in the war-I was conscious sometimes of a brush from the wing of romance.

The Slovene told me a great deal about the history of Serbia. He had been born outside it, but in some ways it was easier for me to get my initiation from a Slav whose country had been steeped for centuries in an elaborate and articulate culture, and though he regarded Austria as the Arch Enemy and Oppressor, I could see that he had learned a good deal from her. This initiation into the life, legends and language of a people till then unknown to me, and little known to the world, was exciting, and that and my work absorbed me so much that Corsica was just a background, like a tapestry. All the same) I did once climb Monte D'Ora by moonlight, though it was impossible to persuade any of the Serbs to come too. They had had their bellyful of mountains in the retreat, and in any case are not sentimental about scenery. I sampled Corsican wine, the headiest of the Mediterranean vintage, till I could scarcely find my bed, swam in a warm sea at Ajaccio, and had a long conversation with a melancholy gendarme, whose colleague had just been shot by a mountain brigand. "Ah, yes, Mademoiselle," he said. "Life is hard and full of dangers. But for you also, I know c'est bien dur. What a sacrifice for you to leave your country and live in these savage mountains amongst two savage peoples. I know you arc a Sister of Mercy-you are inspired by duty and your religion: all the same, quelle noblesse, quel sacrifice." When the gendarme left me I sat for a while under a Spanish chestnut tree, sniffing at the cistus, arbutus, rosemary, wormwood, sage and thyme that made up the odour of the maquis. The mountain air, the sun, the steep gorge below, the thought that the Slovene was coming again to tell me about Serbia that evening-all these things elated me. "Noblesse?" I thought. "Sacrifice?"

If I had had to spend the winter in Bocagnano, I should perhaps have thought that the gendarme was right, but in September Lady Grogan wrote that she had received permits for us to go to Bizerta. Miss Olive Lodge came to replace me, and at the beginning of October, when the mountains were covered with cloud and the glory of the summer had gone, Magavee and I set out on our travels again.

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In the margines of chaos, Francesca M. Wilson