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With Serbs in North Africa

I. Arrival in Bizerta

To Bizerta we sailed from Marseilles on the Biskra late in October, I917.

We arrived at the quayside of Bizerta at 7 a.m. on October 22nd. My brother Maurice ran on deck as soon as the gangway was placed, looking very well and handsome in his khaki uniform, and extremely pleased to see us-he had an open, expansive nature and did not conceal his feelings: this accounted, perhaps, for his popularity with foreigners.

Bizerta at first is stern and forbidding. It was the most important French naval base in the southern Mediterranean in the last war, and a garrison town. I was conscious, as we approached it from the sea, of forts, barracks, a mass of European buildings-warehouses, flats, hotels-while beyond the city I saw a ring of bare, unfriendly hills, where nothing grew but stubbly grass and an occasional gnarled olive tree or cactus. There was nothing to suggest Africa, though when we explored it we found an Arab town. As we had never seen one before we were impressed by the white-domed, windowless houses and the shops that were like caves, with a turbaned shopkeeper sitting on a mat surrounded with brightly coloured textiles (probably from Manchester), or a few pots and pans-but it is very poor compared with Tunis or Algiers. The pride of the town was its promenade, by the sea, fringed with dwarf palm trees, but it was too glaring and shadeless to enjoy except in the evening. The glory of Bizerta is its large lagoon or lake as it is called there, where its warships glower, but this is hidden from view. It is joined to the sea by a canal. At the far end of it one could see the lights of Ferryville and the Arsenal twinkling at night. On each side of it, anchored like white-sailed ships, there are Berber villages, but you only see these things if you cross the canal and climb through olive yards and maize fields two miles up to Ben Negro, the hill behind Bizerta. The streets of the town were always crammed with traffic-Arabs and Berbers with donkey carts or camels, a few military cars and lorries hooting their way past them, and soldiers and sailors in every kind of uniform, mostly Colonial French-but they were rather confusing than picturesque.

We spent the first days being introduced to officials, getting our flat ready, and going over the barracks where we were going to work. Caserne Lambert was the main centre. It was a huge, white, solidly built barracks with verandahs, adequate enough, but depressing because of the men in it. Maurice's workshops were the one cheerful thing there. He had been in Bizerta about six months and had got them going well. There were about three hundred working in them with Serb master-craftsmen as instructors-shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, brush makers, tinsmiths and cane-chair weavers. There was a Serb major in charge, a rough, bustling fellow, reputed to be a severe disciplinarian, but the excuse was that the men would never have been stirred from their lethargy without firm handling, and that they were learning something useful. Only the masters were paid-the men were given tobacco or extra wine, but were looked on as apprentices. In other rooms there were schools where a couple of hundred were being taught to read and write, for most of them were illiterate. Maurice had helped in the setting up of a printing press where disabled men were also working. This produced ABC's, French grammars and Serbian folk songs and legends. He did the accounts of the workshops and kept them supplied with materials, but he no longer had much say in the running of them. It was not for this going concern that he wanted us. It was for the grands mutiles, shell-shocked and nerve cases, who could not work in the shops.

These men filled half a dozen rooms in Lambert. Most of them were in bed, though some sat up, dressed in the blue French uniform which all Serb soldiers wore. Some were yellow and withered with prolonged dysentery or had the unnatural pallor of epilepsy, others were paralysed after fever, crippled through frostbite, or had had all their vitality burned out of them by malaria. There were blind men and men without hands or arms. Some of them were tremblers, shaking night and day without pause. The sight of them reminded me of a passage from Bacon's Essays which I had learned when I was a schoolgirl-"these wait upon the shore of death and waft unto him to draw near, wishing above all others to see his star, that they might be led to his place and be cut off before their hour." They did not move when we came in-probably because we were accompanied by an officer. One rather elderly man, who was obviously dying, said that he wanted to learn French. We gave him the little grammar from the printing press. He could not see the words but said it would be all right when the sun came out.

The disabled men were all technically reformes (discharged), but Bizerta, which at this time was like an armed camp, did not allow civilian Serbs within it, so they were subject to the diet and discipline of the regular army.

At the camp of Nador, three miles out of Bizerta, at the top of a bare hill, there were some thousands of Serbs-or Yugoslavs as they were called, as most of them had come from America and were originally from Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia or Herzegovina and had emigrated because under Austrian or Hungarian rule poverty had made life intolerable. The majority of these men were volunteers for the Salonika front and were in training. They had no reading room or social centre-nothing in the evenings but unlit wooden huts with mud or dust all round them, for there was no Y.M.C.A. in Bizerta. But as well as these sound men, there were at Nador some hundreds of disabled, for whom Maurice had so far not had time to do anything.

The first evening we were in Bizerta, we were invited to dinner by the Colonel in charge of Caserne Lambert, a Serb, stout, complacent, unimaginative and rather Germanic-looking. He was completely indifferent to the misery of his disabled men, but he appreciated Maurice's work because it made army discipline easier when the men were occupied. He was a soldier with no time for sentiment or philanthropic frills; in any case the Serbs have a primitive, peasant impatience with disease and suffering-the natural attitude of a healthy, virile people. "These men are not in the firing line-they are very well off," the Colonel remarked. Those who recovered went to the Salonika front, and the Colonel, who was quite satisfied with his comfortable base job, felt that that was much worse than Bizerta.

The next day we met Capitaine Hautfort-one of the few Bizerta French who felt sympathy with the Serbs. He described to us the horrors of their arrival, nearly two years earlier. They were all survivors from the Albanian retreat. They did not look like human beings, their privations and sufferings had been so terrible. Many of them were still half mad with starvation, and hundreds had died soon after landing. More might have been saved if they had not been given heavy food by well-meaning people. Of those who did not die straight away, many only made partial recoveries. They were tossed from one French hospital to another. In some they had been well treated, in others neglected. Most of them were not interesting to doctors, who had their hands, in any case, full with Senegalese, Zouaves, Arabs, Berbers: the off-scouring of the French army. A stream of similar cases were coming in from Salonika all the time. Their nurses were always men orderlies in Bizerta, as French women there did not think it proper to go into hospitals-"cela fera un scandale," they said. In Tunis and Algeria women were not so retrograde, and even preferred Serbs as patients to their own countrymen: they were so uncomplaining and grateful.

A few days after this we were shown over the hospital for nerve cases at Sidi Abdullah on the lake of Bizerta by Dr. Hesnard, the specialist in charge. He had just published a book on the nervous diseases of the war. He had been a naval doctor and had something of the seaman look about him still; he was wiry, straight and tall, and had that very clean clean-shaven look of naval officers.

To his patients he was charming-talking to them gently and smiling on them with his eyes all the time. There was a Berber who had lost the power of speech. When Dr. Hesnard asked him a question he made terrific efforts to answer him, but struck him all the time with his fist. He could not make a sound unless he did this. He was decorated for bravery and struck the Admiral while attempting to thank him. It was a disease that only attacked primitive races, Dr. Hesnard said.

"Before the War we used to fire off guns on Christmas Day when the celebrations began," a bright-eyed Serbian boy remarked to us. (He was paralysed as the result of fever.) "But now none of us will ever fire off guns for pleasure again. We could not bear the sound of it, God knows. Perhaps after fifty years there will be people who can bear it."

The men in Dr. Hesnard's "Service" were the exceptions. They got thorough treatment, had massage, hot baths and physiotherapy, and the wards were clean and comfortable. We had come to the conclusion that we must start a Home for the nerve cases in Lambert and Nador and all the similar places in Africa where they were mixed with the rest of the army. Dr. Hesnard was enthusiastic at the idea and promised to give his advice and help. He had no room for any more at Sidi Abdullah. The trouble was where in this overcrowded world could we find a building to put them into?

II. Bogosav Jordanovic

The Home was obviously the only proper way to tackle the problem of the nerve cases, but in the meantime we had to do something for them. Caserne Lambert at first overwhelmed me with shyness, but after all I had elected to be an angel to these people, and there was no going back on it. I went about the rooms trailing rafia, both naturalcoloured and dyed, and started the men on making baskets. It was much easier than I expected. The men took to the work eagerly, and soon they far surpassed me and were freaking the sides of their baskets with vivid Serbian patterns. I could speak their language easily now and enjoyed talking to them.

One of those I got on with best was Bogosav Yordanovitch. His legs were paralysed and he was always in bed. He was in a long room at the Caserne, with thirty-four others, all given up as incurable. His hair and beard were dark and he had an air of dignity and refinement. Many Serbs are fair and few have beards: they are a handsome race, usually with clear-cut features, fine eyes and teeth and bushy hair, but few look as sensitive as Bogosav did-he might have been a Greek bishop. The other men called him Tchitcha (grandfather) though he was only forty-nine, but that in their eyes was old age. There was something boyish about him, though he was so dignified and he had a child's unselfconscious gestures. He was very artistic, but baskets were too rough for him-he preferred to carve the handles of wooden spoons or to embroider muslin with silks and gold and silver thread. Bogosav told me that he had a daughter in Serbia and that I was, though not the living image of her, still rather like her. "When I saw you coming into the room I thought for a moment that you were she: but it is the same for all of us Serbs-God has left us alone. They are with the Bulgarians, my wife, my daughter and my little son, and God knows what has happened to them. I told them to stay there in the village where we had always lived, and not to flee as so many were doing. Perhaps I did wrong. The Bulgars are barbarians: they will not allow any letters to pass. I have never had word from them since the Bulgars came. I sometimes think," he added, "that for us Serbs it would have been better if we had never been born." The man in the next bed heard what he was saying and said in an eager voice, as though the idea had just occurred to him, "and that is true, God knows, though better still to have fallen in the Turkish War of I9I2."

I asked Bogosav what was the matter with him and he said: "I fought through the Turkish War. That was a noble fight, for it is fitting to shed blood for the Holy Cross-to avenge every man his fathers. And we freed the Southern land from the Turk, glory be to Jesus Christ." He crossed himself. "But when this war came I was too tired for it and yet I had to bear all that our young soldiers bear. We fought for a year-we drove back the Schwaber (the Austrians), we delivered Belgrade from their hands. Then the Bulgarians came in our flank and our rear, hundreds of thousands of them, and we had to flee. They told us we must get to the sea and the English and the French would save us. But between us and the sea were the mountains of Albania. You do not know those mountains, Sestro-no one who has not seen them can imagine them. They are naked, jagged rocks that go right up and pierce the sky. Through them there is a narrow track only broad enough for a mule-no ox cart can go there. And the dead lay all along the path-women and children as well as men. If a man slipped he fell down the rocks into the torrent below and was dashed to pieces. Winter came upon us as we went-blizzards hid the path from sight. At night we lay in the snow without even a blanket to cover us. And we were hungry. A ration of bread had to last Us three days, and beside that we had only a little uncooked maize like chickens eat. The Albanians shot at us from their mountains and made us pay fifty dinars for a loaf that in Serbia would have cost one. Happiest were those who lay down to sleep in the snow and never woke, for in the day the rocks were so steep that scarcely could we climb them. God was angry with us Serbs for our deadly sins." (I am translating literally from Bogosav's words.) "In the world there has yet never been neither who has seen such sights as we saw there, nor was tormented with such torments. At the end we had grown so changed that a man could not recognise his brother: nay, had my mother been there she would not have known her son. What Christ suffered when they nailed him to the Cross, we suffered in Albania.

"When we came to the sea, some waded out into it and were drowned, for in Serbia they knew only shallow rivers and lakes. And there was still no food. Only when we got to Corfu we were fed and could rest a little while, though many died there. Every day they rowed out the little boats, piled up with corpses and they cast them overboard without a prayer for the earth to cover them. But I grew so strong that they sent me back to Salonika. I fought in the trenches there till the marsh fever took me. I was never wounded-only tired."

Bogosav was a great reader. When I lent him a little book published by the printing press he was quite moved. It had in it extracts from the old Serb ballads and information of all kinds. He had a great thirst for information and asked me questions every time I went to see him. Was it true that there were factories in England, were there any peasants there, and what was the price of wool? When I had answered these questions he said politely, "and your King George- what a wonderful man! Your King Lloyd George I should say. I have read his speeches. He says the whole front should be one front-not west and east but all one. He says had you English and French fought with us on the Danube, then Serbia would have been saved and the Schwaber defeated. But Serbia is a little country and we could not stand alone. I think," he added, "that your King Lloyd George is like our King Stefan Dushan-glory to his name. Stefan Dushan lived a long while ago, and he told us Slavs that we must all be one, and he made Serbia great and powerful. But after his death we forgot his saying and we became divided and the Turks conquered us at Kossovo on the Field of Blackbirds."

To change the subject I asked him to tell me about his life before the war.

"There is no land like our land," he said, his eyes shining. "There you have all that heart desires, for the earth is very rich and every man is his own lord and no one works for another. It is not so in all countries. My village is not far from Rumania and there I have often heard live landless men, who labour all their lives for their masters and have only maize porridge to eat. For long we lived together on our estate in one big family we called the Zadruga-parents and brothers and sisters with their wives and children. But later my father gave me a house of my own and much land. We had oxen, cows, pigs and sheep, and four hundred fowls. We had pasture land and vineyard, maize, wheat and hemp, and much orchard of plum trees. And we had silk worms and my wife wove sashes and kerchiefs of silk for feast days. I never beat my wife. I honoured her, for true it is, as they say, that a house is not built on earth but on a woman. She had great skill-people came from far to see the tapestries she wove. She had names for all the patterns-'the tortoise,' 'the frog' and 'bees round their hives' are ones I remember. Our land was so rich we often had two harvests of hay and corn: and I was highly esteemed in my village. Once the Mayor sent me a long journey to buy a bell for the village church."

Bogosav had seen nothing of Africa except the walls of the barracks, but he imagined it a sad country for he heard that the Arabs pulled along little wooden ploughs, scraping the earth as with a small tooth, and that the women wore heavy veils and never saw the white world.

One day I found Bogosav reading a Serbian Bible which someone had found for him. He turned to me with great earnestness. "In the old days," he said, "God used to come very near. He walked about amongst the people-there were some who heard Him speak. But now He has gone-far away." He looked at me with searching eyes, but I could give no explanation. "Some people say there is no God," he went on, lowering his voice, "but once I saw not God, but Christ. It was in a dream. There was a bird with wings of fire, flying backwards and forwards and a sound of guns and everyone was rushing here and there, and then suddenly there was a light and a man stood by me and the cannon ceased and the bird of fire flew away, and I knew that the man was Christ and that the War will be over one day and our land freed."

Bogosav, buoyed by his dream, was one of the few Serbs who believed this, yet even his hopes were sometimes poisoned. He explained it to me in this way. "There is no drink of honey unmixed with gall, and my heart is often heavy. How can I explain it? Our land will be delivered, but what of me? I have become a foolish old man and very weak. I was strong when I left my home and handsome and revered of all men. What will my wife say when they carry me to her door? Will she recognize me? Will she not rather say-'who is this stranger you are bringing me? This is not my husband. Take him away-a wife is not deceived. You have brought an animal, a monkey, to me- not the father of my children."'

I told Bogosav then that we were going to make a Home where he would grow strong and handsome again and he laughed, not believing this, but ashamed of his outburst. "Kako reshi Bog (it is as God ordains)," he said in a non-committal voice.

III. The Authorities in Tunisia

We had many strings to pull before we could establish this Home. There were long reports to be sent to the London office. We reckoned that we would need &1,000 to equip it and &1,200 to run it for a year. The food and service would, of course, be given by the Serb army, but there was equipment, amenities and the staff to be covered. London voted the money in January, I918, and promised us more staff. They had already sent us two more young women: Miss Hill, who had learned how to make splints and came with her whole equipment, and Miss Brown whom we christened "Brankitsa" because she had the Slav cast of features and the Serbs adopted her at once. She was a masseuse and treated the more hopeful cases. We were very pleased with our two latest acquisitions. They helped us, not only with the work, but with our social life which had become rather strenuous. We had, for instance, decided a month after our arrival that we would have a quiet little exhibition of the work of the disabled men, and a day before its opening had received a message from Amiral Guepratte, in charge of the port of Bizerta, that we must put it off a week as he wanted the Resident-General of Tunisia to be present at it. When the day came it turned into a brilliant function. The place was packed with generals, commanders and captains of the army and navy, as well as all that Bizerta could muster of fashion and distinction. Amiral Guepratte capered about much in his element, for he loved functions and was a good friend, both to the Serbs and the English. The exhibits were impressive for the Serbs are remarkable craftsmen. Soon after, my brother and I were invited to lunch with the Amiral and to dine at the Residence in Tunis. I was indifferent to these honours for I had no worldly sense, but I was kept up to scratch by Magavee: it was important for our work, I must take these occasions seriously and behave properly. For my brother she had no fear-he was always gay and natural: he won everybody by his spontaneity and goodness.

It was just as well that we were on good terms with the potentates of Tunisia for we depended on them for our building. Fortunately Maurice's prestige was considerable. Soon after our arrival the Serbs had given him a decoration and made the occasion an impressive ceremony. It took place in the courtyard of Caserne Lambert in the presence of Amiral Guepratte and his staff, the officers of the Serb G.H.Q. and the disabled. The military band played patriotic airs. Colonel Michel made a speech in French and Serb. He said that it was to show his special care and admiration of his heroes, the disabled men, that the Regent Alexander was decorating their friend Maurice Wilson. Then he pinned the order on to his coat, and the Serbs shouted Zhiveo (long life to him) three times, and the Amiral congratulated him with eighteenth-century courtesy and pomp. I felt a little nervous and thought that Maurice, standing all by himself, looked like St. Sebastian awaiting the arrow of martyrdom, but Magavee whispered in my ear-"this is invaluable for our work. You will see. The presence of Amiral Guepratte gives it the finishing touch."

We had some interesting wild-goose chases for our building. We looked over an Arab palace by the sea near Tunis. It had a garden full of orange trees and a tiled patio with slender pillars like a Gothic cloister, but with more colour and more delicate proportions. But it belonged to the Bey and he saw no reason to give it up to Christian dogs of Serbs and English.

On one of these expeditions I had my first sight of the desert. I had expected it to be monotonous, but I was amazed by its colour and variety. The sand was a light gold and it wasn't flat because there were hills of sand, with-for it was late afternoon-long deep shadows. Far off near the horizon there was a rim of blue-it was difficult to believe that it was not the sea. Here and there oases made pools. When the sun set the dunes turned purple. The air was so light that one felt an inexplicable gaiety. It was so empty and silent that it seemed as though one had strayed outside the world of living things. It was like what Doughty had said of Arabia: "Hither lies no way from the city of the world, a thousand years pass as one daylight." Even the villages seemed only like the desert piled up. The houses had no chimneys or windows and inside there were mats and a few pots-no furniture. I could understand that the Arab peoples who inhabited this solitude had found their tyrant deities and fussy superstitions like "irritations on the one infinite mind" and had come to believe in one God, without mediator, priesthood or sacrament. I remembered the passage from the Koran-"Thou canst not see any disharmony in the creation of the Merciful. Look again-canst thou see a flaw? Gaze again and again. Thy sight shall return to thee dimmed and dazzled."

The British Consul, Terence Bourke, also tried to help us to find a building. Mr. Bourke was a character, and-unusual in our diplomatic service-he had an intimate knowledge of the people in whose land he worked. He was the son of the Earl of Mayo who had been Viceroy of India and was assassinated in I872. He spoke Arabic and studied its literature and art. He was held in great esteem by the native population, who believed that one so wise and good must be a follower of the Prophet: it was only because of his official position that he kept this secret. His name opened all doors in Tunisia. Using that magic my brother had seen the Assawaias (or Isa Weir)-a fanatical Moslem sect, dancing in the Mosque of Menz-el-Djemil, on the Bizerta lake. The Arabs of Menz-el-Djemil had for years brought their disputes to Mr. Bourke to settle, so they allowed him to bring his friends to their mosque, though this was closed to all other non-Moslems. For an hour the drums beat while the Arabs swayed and chanted in rhythm to them-then two sprang from their ranks into the circle and, throwing away their upper garments, stabbed their stomachs, arms and cheeks with knives, without drawing blood. But Maurice said the scene did not give the impression of frenzy or demoniac possession. Their gestures were poetic, their dancing as skillful and controlled as the dancing of Spaniards (who perhaps learned it from them)-it was as though they had a deep understanding of the human frame and could afford to play on its intricacies.

Mr. Bourke was growing old-he had had a stroke which affected the left side of his face and made his left eye leaky. Torpedoings- which took place almost daily outside Bizerta in 1917-caused such an enormous increase in work that his office was often thrown into confusion. At one time it was rare to pass the Consulate without seeing groups of half-naked sailors or coolies blocking its entrance. Once two thousand natives from Assam were brought into the harbour in tugs. Most of them were naked except for a piece of string and a flap and an occasional umbrella. They were being taken to France for work behind the lines. They were easy to handle-their philosophy did not admit the accidental: they were calm and dignified in foul weather as in fair, naked or clothed. Maurice helped Mr. Bourke whenever he was free, in the evenings or the hot summer afternoons when everyone else was having their siesta. He believed that Northerners could stand the heat better than natives, but he overdid it and contracted the disease of which he died a few years later. Maurice was the kindest man I have ever known. He never lost the sort of sensitive consideration and concern for other people which children-especially boys-often have but usually lose at puberty.

The English Naval Commander had a worrying time too, but that was no business of ours. He complained bitterly of French red tape and said that we had lost many ships because the rescuing had to be done through the French and they would not speed up their methods. The Italians got black marks too. They kept their ships safe in harbour and expected us to do all their transport for them. Convoys came into Bizerta very frequently and spent the night in the Lake. The English Commander gave them their further orders, planning out their route to Alexandria, Gibraltar or Salonika. I once saw a secret map he had in his office. On this were pinned little flags showing where the enemy submarines were on that particular day, according to the information of our intelligence service.

IV. The Serb Professor

I was too much involved in learning to understand the Serbs-their language, their poetry, their history, themselves-to pay much attention to our Arab background: besides I always feel ashamed at regarding human beings and human cultures as mere decoration and I had no time to study Arabic. I was exchanging lessons with Drago, who had formerly been classical professor at Belgrade University. He was at this time a captain in the army and had been sent to Bizerta by the Ministry of War to edit the Serbian daily paper Napred, and manage the printing press. It was he who compiled the folk stories, ballads, legends, ABC's and translations from world literature that gave so much pleasure to the disabled men.

Drago was considered rather a joke by his fellow officers. He was extremely learned, very absent-minded, and lived in a world of his own. I think they thought of him as old, but he was only thirty-six-a big-framed man with a fine mop of stiff, wavy black hair, red cheeks, and very white teeth: not our idea of an effete professor. Some said that he had had a tragic love affair and had tried to commit suicide. Whether as a result of that or of the wars, he suffered from agoraphobia and did not dare to cross the open squares and spaces of Bizerta by himself. Whenever he went out he always had an orderly with him-an old man of sixty, and they looked an odd couple as they passed abstractedly and apprehensively through the bustling town.

Besides his love of the classics, he had an intense interest in the past of his own country and collected Serbian legends and folklore. I thought that he would enjoy his Bizerta job of publishing these, but he shook his head grimly-he hated the whole thing: above all Napred. "It is a dark spot in my life, this sheet," he said sadly. (His English was very queer: he translated from a mixture of French, German and Serb when he talked to me.) "Assuredly I will go in the hell for its cause. But what will you? I am oblidged. You do not know our Serbian discipline. It is the greatest discipline in the world next to the Prussian." When I pressed him on the matter he said that he had not only to write lies about politics and lies about the War, but see that all the miserable activities in Bizerta, that despicable mongrel port- were recorded-fun fairs, military reviews, marriages and deaths, even amateur concerts where corpulent French bourgeoises, masquerading as a chorus of elves, sang for the Red Cross.

"And what do you really like doing?" I asked. "I like fighting," he replied simply. "Not in this War-in the last, in the Turkish War of I9I2. I was Captain of Infantry. Ah! that was a villegiature, how you call it? A picnic, a fantaisie. We went from victory to victory. In three weeks the Turks had all run away. All the same, there were bad moments. Once we were surrounded but we hacked our way through. For me it was the first time to see a dead man." "And I have never seen a dead man yet," I intercepted. "Then it is you alone left in the world who can still be Pontifox Maximus," he said solemnly. "For he, you know, must touch no corpse. But let me tell you. It was a big, moony night. I was at the head of my company and we advanced to a hill. It was horrible. The corpses were piled up like ramparts. We were in a delicate position-we had not known the enemy was so near. Part of my company ran away-indeed a great quantity." "And did you run?" I asked. "What, I beg?" he said politely. "Did you run?" I repeated. "No," he replied, "no-I was on the point, but I stayed. That is the reason of this,"-he pointed to the loops on his breast. "And that?" I asked, pointing to two other loops. "That too for being brave. It is the best medal, the Karageorge. It is very beautiful. Here I cannot wear it. Here I am an ambusque. I was happier a thousand times at the front. But the Minister of War says it is need for me to stay here, so I stay. I am oblidged but I am very unhappy. It is not only the lies for the sheet. I am writing the legends of the Serbian peoples and I have no books." "And what about that large library I saw at your printing press yesterday?" I inquired. "A few- yes, it is true-I have a very few. I went on foot through l'Albanie that I might save these books. I was ill with typhus, but at least I had all the books the mule could take. But they arc nothing. I would give a year of my life," he broke out violently, "for the book of Serbian proverbs I have left in Belgrade." "And when you go back, if the Schwaber have not left your library what will you do?" "God knows," he replied solemnly, "but I have not much fear. Every day I pray to St. George and Christos and the good God as well as to the Blessed Mother. Why have they preserved me until now if they will not preserve my books? You see I am a fetishist. It is need. There is no other way for me. It is from the experience. You will laugh at me perhaps but it must be. St. George, he is my guard, the saint of my slava: the Blessed Mother has heard my many prayers, and in the battle God has been my refuge. With the metaphysic I can demolish them in an hour, but with the experience they are my preservers, my shield and my sword. You have seen the icon of my saint above my bed? The lamp below it is burning always." "Does it really help?" I asked. "Vous croyez que j'ai un dieu tout a fait domestique!" he exclaimed, and smiled so much that his eyes disappeared.

"If you like occultism I could tell you some strange things," he said on another occasion. "You know that a dream that you have in a new place has the chance to become true. I had many occasions in the Albanian retreat to try this-each night it was somewhere new that I slept. One night my aunt spoke with me and said I must assist at her next slava." (He often translated from French when he spoke English.) "Now my aunt was dead since some months, and knowing this I was not pleased to be asked to her next slava which was in the spring. 'I cannot come to this next,' I replied, 'for I am too occupied, but I will come quite soon-perhaps to the one after."' "But you didn't keep the appointment," I said, "and all you are doing is to disprove an old superstition." "You have right," he said, "but the war is not yet over and perhaps there is still time. And sometimes indeed I regret the appointment of my aunt-when I am writing lies for my newspaper, for example. But it is need that I tell you a dream that did realise itself. It was also on the retreat. I dreamed that I saw a great quantity of graves. There was writing on the graves, but I could not read it, only on one. The letters were red, and the name was the name of my sergeant-major, Dragomir Lukitch." "And was he killed?" "Oh yes, he was killed," he reassured me. "He was killed three days after. He was a good soldier, but red letters mean that the death will be very soon. And in one way his death was of great interest to me. It furnished me the proof of a very ancient superstition, and it will appear in the commentary of my book on the Serbian religion. Not because of the dream: no, another thing more important. Next his heart he was wearing a bat's wing. In the medieval time a bat's wing was a very strong love charm. It could gain a love and also keep it." "It is useful to know of it," I remarked. "For you it is not need," he replied with a little bow, "but for me indeed. Ah, that indeed." "You are very gallant," I said, replying to his bow. "Oh yes, it is true," and again his smile made his eyes disappear. "A chevalier-that indeed!-but is it Coeur de Lion, or is it only Don Quichotte?"

Yet though he was quixotic and chivalrous, he found it hard to understand how we could give our time and hearts and interest to work for disabled and shell-shocked Serbs. "These men they are rabble," he said. "In the army they were heroes. But here they are ambusques, malingerers, deserters. They are tremblers because they do not want to go back to the front. You are like the Sisterhood of St. Clare. What sacrifice, what devotion! C'est quelque chose pour moi trop sublime."

When he had gone I thought over his "trop sublime" indictment. What was it that had driven us out of our homes to do relief work for refugees and disabled men? Motives are so complex. How can one explain to Serbs the love of excitement and adventure, the itch to meddle in other people's affairs, the nostalgia for foreign countries and for increased scope for one's powers, which drive the British abroad, to administer either their own Empire or a small slice of somebody else's? These motives do not sound very sublime, but once on the job other emotions quite often come into play-compassion, perhaps, or desire to help, affection for the people helped, or if it is merely ambition to do a piece of work properly, there is still some merit.

V. Ben Negro

In the end it was Amiral Guepratte who solved our building problem. He gave us fourteen military huts at Ben Negro. The Home at Ben Negro was from the start a cheerful place. There were flowers in its garden and many olives and eucalyptus trees. The spring in North Africa is over like a puff, but during its brief moment it is of startling brilliance, and it was in the spring that we began to get Ben Negro ready. The meadows round us were suddenly full of the flowers that only grow with us in gardens-crimson gladioli, purple Japanese irises, Madonna lilies and scarlet anemones, and there was a blue flower that spread like a sulphurous flame over the sand dunes near the sea, but I never found out its name. There were birds, too, that I had never seen before-goldfinches and jays and golden orioles, and the chasseur d'Afrique who transfixes insects on to cactus thorns until it wants to eat them. If we climbed for five minutes above the huts we could sit in the ruins of a Roman fort and have a view over the Bizerta lake to the mountains behind it, which in the spring are ultramarine as they are in the Highlands. Between the fort and the lake, the land undulates gently down, rich with blossoming orchard, ploughed field and greengrey olives. White clouds sail lazily overhead and are reflected in the lake. At night the crickets and cicadas start their screwing whistle, the frogs croak harshly, and the aloes and cactus turn silver in the moonlight to remind one that it is Africa-but in the daytime it might be some gracious landscape in France.

The first thing our nerve cases had to do when they came to Ben Negro was to improve the place-as we had only tackled rudiments. They enjoyed this, for after Lambert and Nador the Home was so friendly, informal and free that it won their hearts and they wanted it to be beautiful. Tremblers strung together pieces of bamboo and beads to make curtains to keep away the flies, paralytics plaited palm mats to make shady arbours for our meals, epileptics worked in the garden and blind men made straw hats for them, while the lame made shelves and chests in the carpentry workshop, so that everything could be kept tidy. My greatest success was in persuading a funny little tailor, whose only form of locomotion was a convulsive run, that he could manage a sewing machine. After that he spent all day at it, and made curtains and bed covers. Later on, when we had done all we could for Ben Negro, we set up proper workshops like those at Lambert, only much more free and easy, though they soon had their own laws and traditions. I was amazed how industries sprang into life and formed themselves into something like the medieval guilds, with masters and journeymen and apprentices. The crafts side of Ben Negro was my department, but all I remember doing was look on. Some tanned leather and made beautiful native waistcoats with appliqued patterns, others wove carpets or made the characteristic Serbian leather sandals that have turned-up ends like the prows of boats, or adapted them with heels for sale to French ladies, others had taught themselves how to make Spanish espadrilles with string soles and canvas tops, or Arab olive-presses; a one-armed man made toys, others made olive wood into boxes and polished them till they shone like marble. There was brush making and net making for the less skillful, and those who had still to lie most of the day did bead work or embroidery or made baskets-none of them was idle. As we always had over a hundred men It was kept busy supplying them with tools and materials and arranging for the sale of the goods, but the magic really was to have stumbled on a nation of craftsmen-or perhaps one should say on a people who had not had their pleasure and pride in making things destroyed by machinery. We had meals out of doors. In the evening the men often sang minor-keyed airs of their country that sound sad but that make people happy to sing. An old man who looked after our donkey had made himself a flute out of a reed, and at dusk he piped tunes on it. It made me think of what some Serbs who had been captured by the Byzantines in the sixth century had said of themselves-"we are Slavs," they said, "from the far-off sea. We graze our herds, make music with our pipes and do no harm to anyone."

We had many visitors to our Home at Ben Negro. Early in I9I8 a contingent of British soldiers had come to Bizerta, in charge of captive balloons fixed to ships, the latest device for the detection of submarines. These, in the clear Mediterranean waters, are more easily seen than elsewhere (and in those days their speed was much less great than now). Once this balloon contingent spent the afternoon at Ben Negro, but all I remember of the occasion was being overcome with shame when they sang-quite consciously jangled, out of tune and harsh, as though they were proud of it. The Serbs listened, puzzled and polite, as one might to Chinese music or something you know that you don't understand. Then they sang their own moving folk songs - in parts, in perfect harmony. Which was the superior culture, I wondered ?

But the visit that pleased me most was from my friend Drago, the Professor of Classics. I found him standing by Luka, an old soldier paralysed down one side, who looked after our fowls. He was watching him with a look of eager intensity. "At last," I thought, "he feels we are doing something worth while. Scratch a Serb and you find a peasant. This he thinks is really constructive work-animals, gardening, back to the land." Luka was putting eggs under a broody hen. "At last I have it," said the Professor, turning to me with an ecstatic look, "the little thing in the chain-how you call it-the link? You see this old imbecile Luka, foolish though he be, he works by tradition: he put nine eggs under this hen, he not would put eight nor ten. It is the uneven numbers that have the chance, that bring the luck. So the Third Heaven of St. Paul and the Seventh Heaven of Mohammed and of the Talmud, and a Fifth, I found in an old Slav proverb. So you will have a good crop of little hens with your Luka's nine eggs. There are Nine Muses too." "And there is the Holy Trinity," I said, entering into the spirit of the hunt, and liking to be helpful. "Yes, indeed," he said reverently, "the Holy Trinity as well."

Other visitors appreciated the remedial side of Ben Negro more than Drago did. Dr. Hesnard was enthusiastic and saw great improvements in the men in his later visits. Lady Grogan wrote from London that she felt that the place was particularly interesting as an experiment-she thought that there was nothing quite like it in England: not that same combination of Home and treatment and workshop. The men did receive whatever treatment our trained nurse could give them. She had been in hospitals in Serbia, Russia and Rumania in the war and had a good way with simple peasant people, and we had now another masseuse besides Brankitsa. They worked away at dropped wrists, stiff fingers or arms that were beginning to wither for want of exercise, and had considerable success-though all these wounds and disablements had been neglected far too long. But the personal attention and massage gave a great boost to morale, and the men made much greater effort to use their stiff limbs because interest was taken in them. They taught the Serbs to massage too and found them very apt pupils. The men were given baths and made to do exercises with parallel bars. Miss Hill had seven of the disabled in a workshop, making limb supports out of leather and metal. A barber with a dropped wrist was able to start work again with the contraption they produced for him. Very soon Bogosav was hobbling about on sticks and the same happened to most of the other paralytics. We felt that the experiment would be much easier in England where men would be living on their own soil with their families not far away, whereas we had a collection of farmers and shepherds who had been wrenched from their hillsides and fields to live in an exile they thought would never end, most of them without news of their wives and children. But they had more fatalism than our people-bred in them perhaps by their long subjection to the Turk-and more pleasure in making things. Perhaps we had the easier problem.

VI. The Camp at Nador

Soon after I arrived in Bizerta I started workshops for the disabled at the camp of Nador. For more than a year I used to drive up there three times a week in a coricola (Arab horse and trap). Magavee had thought of doing this, but she had started the re-education of the blind. She had scoured North Africa and eventually collected all the Serbs, blinded in the war, at Lambert. She had helped Sir Arthur Pearson to start his blind school in London in 1914, and he sent out braille typewriters and equipment. In our sort of work people were always turning up unexpectedly, and one day a Serb named Ramadanovitch came to Magavee and said that he had learned braille in Prag. She put him in charge of her Blind School. This was later transferred to Yugoslavia, complete with Ramadanovitch, and was the first and only institute of the kind in the country. Magavee had also helped in collecting all the nerve cases of North Africa for Ben Negro. She was a born organiser and wanted problems to be not just tinkered at but tackled as a whole.

The Camp at Nador was very dreary. As well as the active Yugoslav army in training, there were hundreds of disabled and sick men. Some of these were highly skilled and they did excellent work. There were 6,000 men up at Nador, and it speaks well for Serbs that I could go in and out of the camp without embarrassment. It is true I had a protector. The doctor at Nador was an enlightened man and he always accompanied me and helped with the workshops, believing in their therapeutic value. This doctor was very different from the other Serbs I knew. He was from Croatia-not a Croat but a descendant of the Serbs who, led by the Patriarch Arsenius, had, at the invitation of the Habsburg Emperor, crossed the Danube in the seventeenth century to escape from Turkish tyranny. He had studied medicine in Innsbruck and done his military service in Budapest. At the beginning of the war he had been attached to a hospital at the Austrian front in Bosnia and had deserted to the Serbs. They thought highly of him, but the French ; suspected him because he had once been in the Austrian army. They wounded him deeply by inviting him to return to Austria from Bizerta. He scarcely ever came down into Bizerta and lived like a prisoner at the camp. He was a brilliant surgeon, but his men were past the reach of operations. He was very lonely and my visits meant a lot to him, ; and they came to mean a great deal to me.

He suffered acutely at the camp because the commanding officers there were of the crudest type. At the front they had been heroes, but this was the rear: they were coarse and corrupt and out for themselves. At the front they had been friends of their men, calling them by their Christian names and drinking wine with them when off duty, but here they bullied them. The doctor was the only man of superior rank who was kind to them. He was completely single-minded and honest, and he had a large-hearted charity. Here, I thought, is what Serbs may become with education. Yet he had lost something that they have- buoyancy, belief in themselves and their destiny: a belief that smashes all before it. In society he was courtly, gracious, humorous, but in private he showed his sensitiveness and pessimism. He had very expressive grey eyes. I remember their amused benevolence, but also their sudden wounded-animal look of pain. He told me he was afraid his relatives and friends must be suffering terrible persecution for their pro-Serb sympathies. He had no hope of ever seeing them again. He did not talk about it, but I knew that he was pessimistic about the outcome of the war. The Austrian army was riddled with disaffection, but the Hungarians were good fighters, and he felt, I knew, that the German rnilitary machine was invincible.

"The Hungarians were becoming more and more oppressive in the years preceding the war," he said to me. "They forced us to speak their language, the most difficult one in Europe. If we didn't, we couldn't buy a ticket on the railway. They changed all the names of our towns and villages, which had had Slav names for centuries. How could a poor Croat peasant woman who wanted to sell her eggs in the market forty miles from her home remember the new name of the place? 'If you can't speak Hungarian, stay at home,' the man in the booking office would shout at her. And they tried to drive a wedge between us Serbs and our Croat neighbors. There is a difference, of course. We are Orthodox, they are Catholic-but that doesn't matter now as it used to in the Middle Ages. We speak the same language, and we were getting over our feuds, for we can only be strong if we are united. You have never heard of the famous Agram trials? How little you English know about European politics! They accused Serbs of making a conspiracy against the monarchy. The whole thing was an invention, but the point of it was that they bribed Croats to bear false witness against Serbs, so as to make enmity between us. The old divide et impera of the Habsburgs."

The dreary Nador camp had a brighter side to it, not only because of this friendship. The Yugoslav officers often gave a special dinner in our honour. There was an excellent gipsy orchestra-poor gipsies, they once said to me "we have no king and no country, why should we fight?" but there were many in the army. They played and we danced. There was always roast sucking pig on these occasions, and delicious tarts, and plenty of wine, and people got merry, though never too merry, for the Serbs had a strong sense of the respect due to English-women.

The soldiers also had their entertainment. They had made a huge open-air theatre in the side of the hill. I watched plays there, and saw three thousand men listening entranced to a hastily improvised comic sketch or a serious recitation. Once I saw a soldier giving a monologue of his own composition on the Retreat, carving chunks off a loaf and munching them unconcernedly as he recited. Also a satire about the Allies who were always expected and finally met-in Corfu.

Many of the young soldiers in the Nador camp were threatened with tuberculosis. Maurice had always been worried about them. He had set on foot a scheme for placing men on the land, both in Algeria and Tunisia. One hundred and forty-three had left Nador for work of this sort. We sometimes visited those who were on farms near Bizerta. The French were full of praise of them, they were excellent workers. Maurice was troubled about those in Algeria, a country of vast estates and selfish landlords who exploited their men. Algeria seemed to him worse in this respect than Tunisia where farms were smaller. But many of the men were too weak for land work, and the doctor was more concerned about them than about the disabled because they were the hope of Serbia and could still be saved. We concocted a plan of arranging special huts for them with verandahs where they could have open-air treatment as well as a special diet. In September, I9I8, I went home on leave and put this scheme before the London Committee. They adopted it enthusiastically, and I returned to Bizerta hoping to carry it out. I was to live at Nador to do the administrative side of it, and the doctor was to be in charge of the treatment. Unfortunately I was much delayed in the south of France as the mail boat from Toulon had been torpedoed. I waited at Bormes la Mimosa behind Hyeres, a mountain village, fragrant with lavender and pines, from which you can see the Mediterranean sweeping into the land in deep blue bays, gulf after gulf to half-guessed horizons. But all that loveliness was swamped for me by feelings of frustration and impatience. I arrived back in Bizerta on the morning of November 11th to be caught up in the news of peace. The joy of that was overshadowed for me two days later-my friend the Nador doctor was ordered to leave at once for Salonika. The plans for the tubercular Serbs were shattered, although it was probable that they would still have to spend months in Africa.

After this came a very difficult time. The Serbs, when their first ecstasy about the freeing of their country was over, became extremely excitable, impatient and hard to handle. The men at Ben Negro, Lambert and Nador all struck work. They were afraid if they carried on normally we would keep them in Africa. The idea spread round among the men that we were making a good thing out of them. I believe that in their hearts they knew that this wasn't so, but they had to find a reason for their agitation and misery. The real cause of their anguish was that they did not know what they would find at home, if their families would be alive or dead, and how they would restart life. As we were all of us working for bare maintenance, with or without a little pocket money, this notion that we were coining money was rather wounding. The workshops themselves were run at a loss, though we sold what we could in Tunisia and at a Serbian shop in London which my sister was running. Their aim was educational and therapeutic- they would become self-supporting if they continued long enough: it was not unsatisfactory.... The men calmed down after a while and started to work again as they wanted to earn as many francs as possible to buy presents to take home; for at Ben Negro we paid everybody- apprentices as well as masters. But they were never as friendly as they had been before.

With the Armistice I lost another friend as Drago was ordered off to Salonika. I had to look about for another Serbian teacher. I found Stefanovitch to brighten the last trying weeks in Bizerta.

VII. Talks with a Comitadji

Stefanovitch, though over forty, gave the impression of youth. He was tall, slender and wiry. He had dark hair, fine black eyes, and a look of suspended energy. I liked his looks, but when he came to the lesson with a large grammar and started off by telling me that he was a particularly good choice for me as he had been a schoolmaster for more than twenty years, I felt dashed. All I wanted was conversation: I hadn't bargained for a pedagogue, but I didn't want to be ungrateful or rude as, of course, there was no question of paying him. I asked him rather hastily what he thought of the Peace and that started him off. After that there was no more fear of grammar. "Peace," he echoed, turning to me with the swift, sharp movement that was characteristic of him. "Peace-I don't believe in it. I have been at war for eighteen years and I can't believe in it." "Eighteen years?" I thought I had misheard him. "Yes," he replied, "eighteen years. That is hard for you, an Englishwoman, to understand, with your old culture and your stable life. But we have a culture too, only we have had to fight for it. I will explain-I see you understand our language well. "I was born in Macedonia-a Serb, but a Turkish subject. When I was a boy I wore a fez-the sign of bondage. I was not allowed to call myself a Serb-but I was a Christian, not a Moslem: we were permitted to practise our faith. We went to the village church, and there every Sunday and feast day we prayed for freedom: I will repeat you our prayer-'Lord, set an end to the punishment of the sons of Lazar, the martyr of Kossova. Lord, grant us our place in the midst of the nations and deliver us from the Turk.' All around us the peoples were free. The Greeks had thrown out the Turk (ah, your wonderful Byron, Gospodjitze), our Motherland Serbia too-she was the first- even Bulgaria had been liberated by the Russians: why must we in Macedonia continue alone in Turkish chains?" "Disraeli," I murmured, "Peace with Honour," but he did not notice.

"I went to a Turkish school-my parents could neither read nor write but they wanted me to be educated. At school we were allowed to have lessons in Serbian grammar, but the Turk inspectors did not know what went on in those lessons-what appeals to our patriotism, what stories of our past. The Turkish censor was so ignorant that he took out the name of Pushkin from a reading book because it is like the Serbian word for gun, and he had never heard of the great Russian poet. The Ottoman Empire was dying. A fish starts stinking from its head, and the Sultan Abdul could not keep order in his own household. But oh, the misery of our country! The taxes and exactions of the Turks were more than the land could bear. Every male Christian had to pay a poll tax, there was an education tax and road tax, though there were no Serbian schools and the roads were like ploughed fields. These taxes were farmed to the highest bidder. But that was not the worst. We were the poor rayahs, the Christian subjects of the Turk. The agas, our landlords, took half of our produce, half of our flocks and herds. We could not gather our harvest until they staked their claims. I have seen my father scorch the roots of his peach trees because the aga had claimed more peaches than they would bear. We had to labour on their fields like slaves in the harvest time, hew their wood and lend them our oxen for haulage. And worse things happened-not in our family, God forbid. The beys and agas were all-powerful. When they stayed in the peasant houses they dishonoured the women. It was not enough to take our hospitality-we refuse that to nobody-but they wanted our sisters and our wives too. It was the custom in our country for the women to go about looking pregnant, so that the Turks should not desire them. There were no doctors in our country-only wise women-and no hospitals. When a plague broke out, thousands died- there was no help, no medicines, no remedy. The Turks took everything from our country and put nothing into it.

"But it is all in our ballads, Gospodjitze, our wonderful ballads: we are great poets, we Serbs. I will say to you part of a ballad and you will see. It was written in I804 at the time of the Karageorge rising against the Turks. There had been signs in the sky: the moon was eclipsed, it had thundered on St. Sava's day, and lightning had flashed on the day of Holy Chains, in mid-winter, mark you, and the sun was darkened on St. Typhon's day in the spring, and bloody standards had passed over Serbia in the clear sky. The Turks were afraid, and they summoned their wise men to interpret the signs from their holy books, and their wise men said this, shedding bitter tears" (he began to recite, and it was something like this):-

"Brother Turks, thus the holy books say: when such signs were seen over Serbia in the clear sky it was just five hundred years ago; then the Serbian Empire fell, and we then conquered the Empire and killed two Christian emperors, Constantine in the heart of Constantinople, beside the cold water of Sharatz, and Lazar on the plain of Kossova. For Lazar, Milosh killed our Sultan Murad, but Milosh did not kill him outright: Murad remained alive till we made the Serbian Empire ours. Then he called to him his viziers. 'Turkish brothers, noble viziers! I am dying, yours is the Empire. But take heed to what I say that the Empire may long be yours. Do not be bitter masters to the rayah but be very good to them. Let your head tax be fifteen dinars, or let it be even thirty, but do not load on them fines and contributions, do not load misery on the rayah, do not touch their churches, nor their laws, nor the things they respect. Do not wreak vengeance on the rayah, because Milosh has killed me; that is the fate of war; you cannot gain the Empire, sitting, smoking on soft cushions; do not drive the rayah into the forests for fear of you, but tend well the rayah like sons and then the Empire will long be yours. If you heed not my words but work tyranny on the ray ah, then you will lose the Empire.' The Sultan died and we did not heed him, but we set up a great tyranny. Now these signs have appeared, now the Empire will be lost. Fear not any King-a King will not attack a Sultan, neither can a kingdom attack an empire, for God has so ordered the world. But beware of the poor rayah: when the picks and hoes rise up the Turks will suffer in the land of the Medes, and their ladies will lament in Shama for the rayah will make them shed tears. Turkish brothers, thus say our holy books: that our houses will burn, grass will grow on their hearths and spiders will cover the minarets for there will be no one to chant the prayers; wherever we have made roads and pavements, wherever the Turks have passed and their horses' hooves have scratched the soil, grass will grow from the nailprints and the roads will long for the Turks but no Turk will come. Thus say the holy books."

I had been brought up on Gladstone and I liked to hear Stefanovitch on the Turks. I could understand that he had felt like fighting them for eighteen years, but he surprised me when he suddenly went on:-"but we had a much worse enemy than the Turks-a thousand times worse: the Bulgars!" "The Bulgars," I said; "but I thought you Macedonians loved the Bulgars." "Ah no, Gospodjitze. I must explain things to you for I see that you have been suborned by the Bracha Buxton (the Buxton brothers): they have done us much harm. Out of ignorance, no doubt-they are good men maybe, but the Bulgars got hold of them. They are masters of propaganda and that is where we are weak. The Bulgars have no right to Macedonia-did not our glorious Stefan Dushan rule over it in the fourteenth century? Have we Macedonians not the slava, that most ancient Serbian custom, unknown to the Bulgars and the Greeks? I could prove it to you in a thousand ways, but the Bulgars were very cunning. About I870, even before their own land was freed by the Russians, they sent down their missionaries into Macedonia-priests and schoolmasters: they built churches and schools and everywhere they went they taught the ignorant people to believe that they were Bulgars and not Serbs. They were crafty and greedy-they knew the riches of the land, the hidden minerals of the mountains, the fruitful earth with its tobacco, its rice and vineyards, its treasures of architecture, the ancient churches and monasteries of Lake Ochrida which the early saints who brought to us the Christian faith had consecrated. Thieves, murderers, dogs, they stole away the hearts of our own people from us. And we were blind, we Serbs-at least our Government was blind. Again and again petitions were sent to Belgrade-we begged them to send us down missionaries to teach the people and they remained deaf.

"It was in 1900 that I began to teach in Macedonia. It is a noble calling, a teacher's." "Very noble," I assented. "But what a responsibility," he went on. "We had to counteract the Bulgars. We had to teach the children that they were Serbs-that their heroes were not only Marko Kralyevitch and Lazar, but Karageorge and Obrenovitch who had freed our land a hundred years before. And it was not enough to teach," he went on in a low voice, "we had to fight too. It was the Bulgars who began it. For years they carried on an organised brigandage and we did nothing to protect ourselves. We bore it longer than we should have done. They carried away our finest men into the mountains, and when they could not force them by torture to deny their race, they shot them down. One day they took a friend of mine-a teacher, very young, almost a boy. The Bulgarian soldier when he saw him was horrified at what he had to do. 'Just say you are a Bulgar and I will let you go," he stammered. But the boy smiled scornfully. 'I cannot soil my lips with such a name,' he said. 'Then I shall have to kill you,' the soldier said, and timidly he stretched out his bayonet. 'What do you fear?' cried my friend, and rushing forward he impaled himself on it. Some months after one of their gang, an eye witness, described to me the scene and shuddered. We have a saying, 'Fear those who die joyfully,' and the Bulgar might well tremble at such heroic death.

"It was after the murder of my friend that my longing for vengeance became a passion. One day thirty of us met together in a house in a lonely place. The shutters were drawn and we had our watch outside the door. On the table there was a dish of wheat that had been blessed by the priest, a two-edged knife and firearms. We made the sign of the cross, kissed the knife and swore in the name of God and at the price of our possessions, our relatives, our children and our lives, to live only for our nation and to take revenge on the Bulgars. From henceforward we swore that for every Serb that fell we should kill two Bulgarians." "Two," I exclaimed, "two eyes for an eye, two teeth for a tooth!" "Ah, Gospodjitze, I see that the poison of the Bracha Buxton has eaten deep into your soul. If not you would know that never yet was born a Bulgarian whose life was equal in value to a Serb's. Then we drew lots. There were thirty pieces of paper-twenty-eight were blank, but on two there were black crosses. The men who drew the crosses had to kill the Bulgars-one each. Every time a Serb fell we held our meetings, we drew lots, and we chose out those who were to die. We did not leave the choice to chance. That would have been as unjust as warfare is when the peasant dies because kings and lords are quarreling. If the Bulgars killed our peasants we killed theirs; if they killed a priest, we chose out two of their priests; if officials or schoolmasters or merchants, then we also chose two of theirs. We were just. At the end of our meetings we ate of the consecrated wheat, that was our sacrament-we needed no wine: our wine was the blood of the Bulgars."

He paused, and I asked him politely what the name of his society was. "We were called comitadji," he replied, "because of our committee meetings. You too have committees, so I have heard, and we borrowed our name from you: it is not a pure Serbian word. But perhaps we ought to do a little grammar now." "No, I want to know how you got on. Were you ever in danger yourself?" "Yes," he said thoughtfully. "Yes-once in great danger. We were very' successful-we killed a great number. Of course you must remember we were living side by side in the same villages. The Turkish police paid no attention-only if we failed to pay their taxes they had a little massacre: they cared about nothing else. Usually the killing was quite simple-only occasionally there were complications. One of our members was a bishop- a very great man. I too was prominent in the movement and important in the whole neighbourhood. They found me out-they never discovered about the bishop; we had no traitor in our Committee, at least I think not. One day a Bulgar to whom I had done a good turn came to me in secret and warned me that his people had marked me out for death. He advised me to flee. But a Serb does not flee. I had my work and I had my cause-a man does not flee from these. I sent my wife and children to the home of my father-in-law in the mountains and awaited events. I was resolved that I should sell my life dear. I went about with the utmost caution. If there were a knock on my door I had my revolver ready. One day a Bulgar came up behind me when I was walking on a lonely road, but I was too quick for him-I knocked him senseless before he had time to draw his dagger. They tried three times to kill me.

"The next occasion our Committee met they all looked gravely at me. 'Anton,' they said to me, and their voices were so solemn that in spite of myself I was shaken. 'Anton-your days are numbered. You have escaped so far but you cannot escape for ever. Sooner or later they will have your life. We are your friends and we value you very highly. Fear nothing-your death will be revenged.' At the sound of the word revenge my heart was comforted again. Ah yes, Gospodjitze, revenge for one's friends is a sacred task, and I have seen many a man die in peace once he was sure that his friends would not forget their duty. They were good comrades and they went on to tell me that for me they would not be satisfied with the ordinary toll of two Bulgarian lives-no, for me three should fall, and those of my own choice. Believe me, I was touched by such a token of their love and esteem for me. I assured them of my unworthiness, but they insisted. Then I chose the three. All three were men of standing and importance-two were schoolmasters, that was only just, but one was a merchant and the richest man of the neighbourhood."

He laughed gaily. "I was not modest-he was fat and well-clothed. It is always the rich that die hardest. It was a good choice." "But you are still alive?" "I will finish and you will see how it happened. After I had made my choice we all repeated the vow of our society, took the sacrament, crossed ourselves and stood silent a moment. Then one after the other each of them kissed me, as though I were already a corpse. It was only then that the idea struck one of us that perhaps it was not necessary that I should die. How would it be to warn the three Bulgars that if I were killed their lives were forfeit? We drew a skull and crossbones on three slips of paper, put them into three empty cartridge cases and threw them into the windows of the three men. You can guess what happened next. The two schoolmasters never moved, but the next day the rich merchant fell at my feet in tears, beseeching me to leave the neighbourhood. 'We have no longer two lives, thou and I,' he said, 'but have become as one soul.' 'God forbid that I should be of one soul with a Bulgarian,' I replied. 'If thou diest I must die,' he continued. 'For thee it is easy. Thou hast no wealth-but for me it is different. I am a man of much importance and great substance.' And here the old scoundrel took out his pouch and threw it at my feet. 'Napolye!' I shouted at him. 'Get out-swine of a Bulgar. Wert thou to pave the road from here to Constantinople with gold napoleons, all for me, I should not go. A Serb does not desert his post.' 'Ah God, that I should die for a Serb's foolish bigotry,' he said, sobbing. I kicked him out of my house, but they are artful, these rich men. He found a means to preserve his worthless life. With his gold napoleons he bribed the Bulgarian committee men and they spared his life by sparing mine."

Stefanovitch told me some other curious things in our last conversation lesson. He said that he had been several months in North Africa, and when I asked him how it was that I hadn't seen him, he looked mysterious and said that he had been living in an old Arab fort, imprisoned by the Serb military authorities. I asked him for what crime, and he said, "for no crime, Gospodjitze, I am a great patriot and a member of the Black Hand: a very good organisation. All the bad officers here, like that swine up at Nador who imprisons young lads if their buttons are not polished, are White Handers and against us. You know nothing of our politics, but perhaps you have heard of Colonel Dimitrievitch who was court-martialled and shot on the Salonika front. That was a crime if there was one in this war. He was our leader, and a greater hero and patriot we have not had in our lifetime. He was accused of making a conspiracy against the Regent Prince Alexander. That was a lie put about by his enemies. We are not against the young Prince, but we want him to be held in some check. He has learnt too much of the autocratic ways of the Tsars from his long years in Russia. Now that rule has ended and the Tsar and his family have paid the price. We do not yet know what will come out of the Revolution, but we know the oppression there was in the Tsarist days. Well, as I was saying, the Regent is an autocrat and young and headstrong. He refused to listen to the generals and the advice of the army-he insisted on taking command himself, and he threw away our best men in a desperate task: he insisted on their storming a hill on the Macedonian front and thousands perished. It was because we were critical of this action that Dimitrievitch was court-martialled and I was sent to prison."

Black Hand-it awoke a memory in my mind. I had heard that they had been implicated in the murder of Alexander and his Queen in I903. Then they had overthrown the Obrenovitches and restored the Karageorges, and now had become critical of their own creation. Hadn't they had something to do with Princips and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo too? Stefanovitch's eyes looked bright and meaningful when I asked him this, but at this moment Dushan, our orderly, came into the room and he did not reply. (Dushan always found pretexts for coming in and out when Stefanovitch was with me.)

When Dushan went out Stefanovitch resumed in a low voice-"I must tell you, Gospodjitze Vilson, of a remarkable prophecy made by a simple peasant in Uzhitze in the middle of the nineteenth century. This man one day rushed through the village crying out-'they are killing the Prince, they are killing the Prince.' Everyone thought he was mad, but when a few days later they heard that on that very day the good Prince Michael had been murdered at Topchider they thought differently. Then everybody listened to him and he prophesied the future. He foretold everything just as it happened. He told of the assassination of Alexander Obrenovitch and of Draga-may the earth spew them up-in all its detail. Then he came to the Great War. 'In the latter days,' he said, 'a Power shall come from the North and another from the East, and they will join and our land shall be swamped as by a flood. And our people will flee, and so great will be their sufferings on that flight that the living will cry out to the dead "open your graves that we may come down and lie with you and be at peace." And Serbia shall be emptied of her manhood and at that time the women will come out from their houses and, shading their eyes with their hands, will look up and down the highroads in search of a man and they will not find one. And there will be weeping and wailing and desolation. But the end will come suddenly. Serbia will arise out of her tribulations and become greater than ever before, and her kingdom will stretch far beyond the river of the North. But her troubles will not be ended. Again there will be Haiduks and outlaws in her mountains. And the House of Karageorge will go the same way as the House of Obrenovitch."'

"Oh dear," I said, "how sad. You are going to be a great country now-you will join together with your brothers the Croats and Slovenes and Macedonia will be free, but there will still be comitadji in your mountains, and there will still be violence and fury and hatred. I hope that the prophecy is not true. And the Regent Alexander-is to be murdered too?" Stefanovitch shook his head and sighed-"I don't know, Gospodjitze," he whispered. "I don't know-God forbid." But his "God forbid" had not much conviction in it-he hadn't forgiven him for the death of his leader, I could see.

I knew nothing of the Regent myself at that time-but old King Peter was a picturesque figure not without a certain grandeur. He was said to have visited his country in disguise during the Obrenovitch rule and to have gone from village to village with a tame bear. He had shared the Retreat and fought with his men in the trenches, and Serbia seemed to have prospered during his rule until war came.

The prophecy depressed me, so I suggested we read a ballad for a change. Stefanovitch roused the pedagogue in himself and read the ballad of the building of Scutari to me, explaining words as he went. He was astonished that I did not understand the Serbian words for breast and suckle. "They are very important for you as a woman," he said earnestly. I looked up at him, startled, but he was detached, remote, completely matter-of-fact. "This man would kill you as soon as look at you if he considered it his duty," I thought, "but he thinks of women as his sisters."

VIII. End of Bizerta

Early in 1919 Colonel Michel evacuated Ben Negro and brought the men down to Caserne Lambert again. The break-up of our Home was sad, though most of the men were deceived into thinking that it meant an early transport back to Serbia-after all, as Luka said, they ought to be sowing their maize in a week or two's time and could not afford to dally in North Africa. Milosh, the most serious of our mental cases, was the last man to leave Ben Negro. He had loved wandering about where he liked there, and though he had had long spells when he refused to talk to anyone, he had always smiled in a meaningful way at us and been friendly. When the morning of departure came he would not get up. At last four men dragged him out and got him into the ambulance bare-footed and wild, but he waved everyone out of the way and jumped out. They let him alone for a while: in the end it took nine men to get hold of him, rope him to a mattress and carry him off. All the way down to Lambert he wailed and howled. Perhaps someone had to sing a dirge for Ben Negro, and we were too busy sweeping up. At last, the whole hundred and eighty were at the Caserne: we found it very hard to do anything much for them there.

In the end we were all anxious to leave Bizerta. Some of the men who had been in the advance through Serbia came back, wounded, with terrible tales-bridges broken down, roads impassable, homes looted of furniture and farms of their stock, orphans wandering about uncared for, shortage of every necessity of life, horrible atrocities against civilians. It sounded as though there were much more to do there than in North Africa.

Yet we had been happy in Bizerta. We had had ups and downs- external crises, when Colonel Michel had been restive because we were a civilian group with undefined status and disturbing to army discipline, and internal tensions when our numbers had leapt from five to ten and we had not all seen eye to eye. But the work had continuously grown and expanded: we had all felt that it was worth while, and our devotion to the people we were helping had increased all the time.

Of course, living in an armed camp, most of us women under thirty, life had not been without romantic interludes, for we had felt it part of our duty to entertain a good deal. Yet such was the influence on us of Victorian breeding (we had all, after all, been born in the nineteenth century) that our love affairs were never discussed amongst us. We would have thought it vulgar to boast of whatever proposals, honourable or otherwise, we received. Brankitsa, the youngest, gayest of our community, with her pale, distinguished face, and the eager manner that concealed a determined character, had exchange lessons night after night with a handsome young lieutenant-a former law student-with out any indiscreet tittle-tattle among the rest of us. My brother used to hover outside the room where these lessons took place, expressing disapproval of their undue length, but as he afterwards married Brankitsa, there may have been something already burgeoning in him, though he was unconscious of it at the time. He didn't seem to have the leisure or the plenitude of mind in Bizerta to fall in love. Magavee was the most deceptive of all of us to the Serb male. With her heavy dark hair and eyes, her serene and gentle manner, she was their idea of womanhood. They saw in her wifely submission and the mother of their children. True she was reserved and looked as unassailable as an abbess, but that did not deter them from sending their orderlies with little notes to her at breakfast time; though they never risked anything but the most honourable proposals, and never forgot to mention their incomes and prospects. But I only found out about these notes by accident years after. Had they known her as we did, they would have realised that their Florence Nightingale was not only a Lady with a Lamp, but had another side to her that would not have fitted in with their notions of womanhood-a genius for organisation and strength of character that fitted her rather for dictatorship than for subservience.

The Serbs were not as discreet as we were and annoyed me by imagining love affairs for us or spiteful feminine intrigues. I was being pressed to go for a holiday by my colleagues, for instance, not because I had malaria and it was very hot but because I was a rival who should be got out of the way. "How little do you understand the English," I protested priggishly-"we are above these female manouvres." And looking back, I think I was right-odd though it is. But Anglo-Saxon women are capable of real friendship for one another, and the bond between us was strong in Bizerta.



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In the margines of chaos, Francesca M. Wilson

 
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