Heroic Serbia

FROM THE FRENCH OF

VICTOR BERARD

Women's Printing Society, Ltd.,

Brick Street, Piccadilly,
'
W,
'? LIBRARY

1-03 A,
 M. VICTOR BERARD.
M. VICTOR BERARD is one of the ablest and
most cultivated French political writers. Born in
1864 and educated at the Ecole Normale Sup6rieure
he rapidly distinguished himself by the brilliance
of his intellect and the versatility of. his talent.
His Hellenic studies stimulated his interest in

Near Eastern questions, and after publishing, in

1894, his first important work

*'
De 1'Origine des
Cultes Arcadiens," he produced in rapid succession
valuable works upon Turkey and Hellenism, the
policy of Sultan Abdul Hamid, Macedonia, and
Cretan affairs. In 1900 he published one of the
best books yet written on England and British

Imperialism, in the preparation of which he had

the assistance of the late Mr. Joseph Chamberlain.

Returning then to his classical studies he produced

an excellent work upon the Phoenicians and the
Odyssey, which was followed by a series of volumes
on foreign questions, including works on Russia and
on " France and William II."
Since the beginning of the war he has devoted
himself entirely to spreading in France knowledge of
the Allies, and of the allied cause. He has lectured
and written constantly upon Serbia and Southern
Slav unity, of which he is an ardent supporter,
All his writings are marked by profound knowledge
and by a vivacity of mind which renders attractive
his treatment of even the most arid subjects.
 HEROIC SERBIA

I. SERBIA AND ITS HISTORY.

the year 1912 Serbia was one of the

weakest states in Europe and her very
UNTIL existence as a nation was threatened.

Though larger than Belgium (11,000 square miles),

Holland (12,500 square miles) or even Denmark
(15,500), and Switzerland (15,900), Serbia was far
more sparsely populated. Its territory was eleven
times smaller than that of the United Kingdom
and population fifteen times less for in an area
its ;

of 18,600 square miles (the United Kingdom has

121,600) Serbia had only 2,900,000 inhabitants (as

against 45,000,000). The whole population of
Serbia scarcely equalled that of Paris alone.
Serbia's geographical situation was even less
favourable that that of the other small European
states. Completely cut off from any sea-board,
she lacked those commercial relations and possi-
bilities of expansion which have given to Denmark,
Holland and Belgium their good fortune and their

security. She was shut in on all sides like

Switzerland by land frontiers :

powerful states cut

2045480
4 HEROIC SERBIA
her off from the rest of the world and she had not
yet become, like Switzerland, a road and railway
centre where the travellers of half Europe meet.
Switzerland has been called the shunting pivot of
the railway engines and tourists of the West. The
Serbia of 1912 remained what she had been for
five or six centuries past the battlefield on which
the ambitions and diplomatic intrigues of the East
met. Already neighbouring armies were marking
it out as the rendezvous for the battles of the
morrow.
For five or six centuries Serbia had never
known complete independence. During the close
of the Middle Ages, before the arrival of the Turks
in Europe, she had been a great and prosperous
state stretching from the Save to the Adriatic.

Peopled entirely by Jugoslavs (Southern Slavs), she

was Christian and highly civilised. Thanks to her
Adriatic ports, where the fleets of Venice touched,
she could preserve contact with the West and
especially with the Latin nations. She had
intimate relations with the Italian cities and with
the Kings of France and Spain. Western influence
introduced to her our ideas, fashions and arts, and
Serbia still has churches erected by the ancient
master-builders and decorated by the fresco painters
of the West.
But in the middle of the fourteenth century
the Turks of Asia Minor invaded the European
provinces of the Byzantine Empire. They
advanced by the valley of the Vardar into the
 HEROIC SERBIA 5

heart of the Serbian lands, to the plain of Kosovo,

" the field of the blackbirds." At the battle of
Kosovo (1389) Serbian heroism was crushed by
superior numbers ;the Turks reduced the whole
of Serbia, and not long afterwards Hungary, upper
and lower, and the whole plain of the middle
Danube to within easy distance of Vienna.
For four centuries then (1400-1804) Serbia
was massacred and pillaged. A quarter of her
population was reduced to serfdom or perished by
the sword, another quarter was forcibly converted
to Islam, the religion of the Turks and Arabs, and
became under the name of Bosniaks a Moslem
people which still spoke the language of its
ancestors, the same Slav language as the other
Serbs, but which was attached by a community of
religion to the service of the conquering Turks.
A third quarter emigrated to Russia, to Italy and
even to Provence, but above all to the " Military
Frontiers" of the Habsburg Monarchy. It was

the Southern Slav race which during four centuries

furnished the House of Austria with those famous
Croat regiments which proved its best defenders
against invasion from without and rebellion from
within.
In what had once been Serbia there only
remained two groups of mountaineers, unchangeably
attached to the soil and to the faith of their

ancestors, the men of the

Sumadija (the forests of
modern Serbia), and the men of the Black
Mountain (Montenegro, as the Latins of the
6 HEROIC SERBIA
Adriatic call it, Crna Gora as it is called by the
Slavs themselves).
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the
ideas of the French revolution rekindled the

courage and patriotism of this nation of slaves.

In 1804 the Serbs were the first Balkan people to
rise against the Turks, and followed the French

people in its conquest of the Rights of Man. It is

interesting to note that Stephen Zivkovic, director

of the insurgents' powder magazine at Valjevo,
translated Serb the Telemaque of Fenelon.
into

Throughout last century an indomitable courage

and patriotism, aided by Russia and France, won
first autonomy and then independence for the two

groups of Serbs which had always remained

Christian and recalcitrant in the Sumadija and in

Montenegro. Piece by piece the remnants of their

ancestral territory was delivered and divided
between the two Serbian States, which became the
Principalities and eventually the Kingdoms of
Serbia and Montenegro, with their two capitals in
Belgrade and Cetinje.
In 1912 Serbia and Montenegro were still
separated from each other by the two Turkish
provinces of Kosovo and Novibazar. The Serbs
were still far from having attained their national
resurrection. To the south, and in the centre of
the Great Serbia of former days, Turkey still held
a million Serbs in subjection, in Macedonia and
Kosovo. To the north, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in
Slavonia, in the Banat of Temesvar, in Croatia and
 HEROIC SERBIA 7

in Dalmatia, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy had

for two centuries taken the place of the Turks,
whom the arms of loyal Croats and Serbs had

expelled from these dependencies of Hungary.

Austria persisted in subjecting to its bureaucracy
and police as the victims of intolerance and exploi-
tation, five or six million of these*} ugoslavs, who
speak one and the same language but practise
three religions. The Croats of Croatia and
Dalmatia are Roman Catholics, the Serbs are
Orthodox, while a considerable section of the
inhabitants of Bosnia- Herzegovina are Mohamme-
dans. But all these peoples in Austria- Hungary
belong to the same branch, the Serbo-Croat, of
the Jugoslav race ;
all speak an identical language
and are one in outlook in the present as in the past.

The imperial and royal dynasty of Austria-

Hungary, the House of Habsburg, which held by
right of conquest the countries of Croatia, Slavonia,
Dalmatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, had the design,
publicly avowed, of adding to them sooner or later
the two independent Serbian states, Serbia and

Montenegro, with the object of creating a single

Serbo-Croat Kingdom, to be annexed to its other
kingdoms of Hungary, Bohemia, Poland and
Austria.
The Habsburg dynasty regarded the conquest
as legitimate because the annexation of the two
Serbian kingdoms seemed to it necessary if the
Monarchy was to endure. This Monarchy has
never known such a thing as national unity, it
8 HEROIC SERBIA
includes seven or eight subject nations under two

ruling peoples, theGerman and the Magyar, with

two capitals, Vienna and Budapest, the one German
and the other Magyar. It owes its survival to a
balance maintained with difficulty between these
two peoples and states which are not so much
friends as rivals. It has repeatedly been found
"
necessary to negotiate an agreement or com-
"
as it is called, between the two cabinets
promise
ofVienna and Budapest, between the two govern-
ments of this " Dualist regime. Thus the future
"

of the dynasty was precarious. The Heir Apparent,

Francis Ferdinand, who expected to become
Emperor upon the death
of the aged Francis

Joseph had
(born in 1830), the idea of substituting
"
for this Dual system a project of Trialism," more
firmly planted on the triple base of the three
kingdoms which would be obtained by annexing
all the Jugoslav peoples and thus adding a Serbo-

Croat kingdom of Agram or of Belgrade to the

Austrian kingdom of Vienna and the Hungarian
kingdom of Budapest.
Since the year 1906 the official journalists ol
Vienna saw but a single alternative for the future
of the Jugoslav race. Either all the Southern Slavs,

forcibly annexed to the

Habsburg Monarchy,
would become the subjects of the Germans of
Vienna or of the Magyars of Budapest or, left free
to make their own choice, the people of Croatia,
Dalmatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina would sooner
or later unite with the Serbs of Belgrade and
 HEROIC SERBIA 9

Cetinje to make a single independent kingdom, a

national and democratic state of Serbia, just as

formerly Neapolitans, Romans, Tuscans, Venetians

Lombards and Piedmontese had united to make a
national kingdom of Italy.
Since 1906, but above all since 1909, Austria
was only looking for an opportunity or a pretext
for throwing her millions of soldiers against the
two little Serbian states. She counted upon easily
invading and annexing the kingdom of Belgrade,
and then encircling and reducing by hunger the
kingdom of Cetinje. Every year from 1909 to
1914 the government of Vienna found some perfi-
dious complaint to raise against the Serbs ; it

mobilised against them, threatened to make war,

but recoiled at the last moment
before the diplo-
matic intervention of the Triple Entente. In 1914
the renewed menace ended in war. The great
Serbian victories of 1912-1914 kindled the enthu-
siasm of all the Jugoslavs and turned the heart of
every Serb and Croat towards Belgrade. Austria
thought that she could no longer give way.

II. THE THREE WARS.

From 1912 to 1916 the Serbs have had to
endure three great wars :

(1) The war against the Turks, 1912.

(2) The war against Bulgaria, 1913.
(3) The war against Austria-Hungary,
Germany and Bulgaria, 1914-1915.
(i) The war against the Turks. In September,
10 HEROIC SERBIA
1912, the Turks held in Europe the pro-
still

vinces of Macedonia and Roumelia,

Albania,
that is to say the whole centre of the Balkan
Peninsula between the Adriatic and the Black
Sea. These Ottoman provinces were inhabited
by a Christian majority Bulgars, Serbs, Greeks
and Vlachs and a Moslem minority of Albanians
and Turks. They had always been very badly
administered. Since 1894 they were a prey
to anarchy and insurrection as the result of
administrative pillage and of the theocratic regime
of the Turks. On paper the Turkish administra-
tion was organised on European lines, but the
officialsnever being paid, they^ resorted to every
kind of theft in order to live. As the phrase goes
"
in that part of the world, they and the
ate,"
" "
appetite of these eaters was As the
insatiable.

generals and officers stole the pay, food, and

clothing of the troops, so soldiers and gendarmes
plundered in the towns and on the high roads. As
the prefects did not pay the salaries in their offices,
the officials under them demanded money from
the public for the simplest documents, and nothing
was possible in Turkey without innumerable docu-
ments. Even to travel in the interior a passport
was needed.
Above all the Christian peasantry were the

prey of the tax collector. The tenth part of the

harvest was due to the government, and the
government farmed out this tax to middlemen,
who extorted from the peasants a fifth and even a
 HEROIC SERBIA 11

quarter of his crop. Besides this the peasant was

molested, robbed, beaten and often killed by the
Mussulman chiefs who arrogated to themselves all
seignorial rights and treated the Christians as
subject to imposts and corvees. The Albanian
chiefs, above all Begs of the plain of Kosovo,
the

employed methods, one of which has remained

famous under the name of Tash-parassi, the
"tooth-penny." Every spring and every autumn
an Albanian Beg installed himself with his band
in one of the villages of Kosovo. They led a
jolly life, emptied the hay loft, the cellar and the
farm-yard and on leaving extracted from the
ruined peasant the " tooth-penny" to pay for the
wear and tear of their lordly jaws during this

pleasant week.
For fourteen years (1894-1908) it had been
possible to lay the responsibility for these excesses
upon the Sultan himself, who is at the same time
the supreme pontiff of Islam, the Mussulman Pope
or Caliph. At that time the Sultan-Caliph of
Constantinople was Abdul Hamid, who affected
extreme religious fanaticism. By his massacre of
Armenians he had earned the name of the " Red
Sultan," in Macedonia he continued his Armenian
exploits and he alone was believed to be responsible.
But when in the month of June, 1908 the outbreak
of the Young Turkish revolution had changed the
political facade of the Ottoman Empire, and when
the coup d'etat of August, 1909 had replaced the

tyranny of Abdul Hamid by that of the Committee

12 HEROIC SERBIA
of Union and Progress, was remarked that the
it

fate of the Christians in European Turkey was in

no way improved. On the contrary the Young
Turks, while calling themselves patriots and
liberals, were in reality fanatical imperialists, and
in order to earn pardon for their revolution against
the supreme Pontiff of Islam, they affected the
same religious zeal as Abdul Hamid and an even
greater hatred of the Christians.
They dreamt of driving all the Macedonian
Christians from their native soil, and they wished
to replace them by Mussulman emigrants, whom
they summoned from the provinces recently
annexed by Austria- Hungary and Russia. Under
the pressure of these emigrants, stripped of every-

thing and subject to pillage, the Christians of

Macedonia and Roumelia saw themselves forced
by thousands and take refuge in the neigh-
to fly

bouring kingdoms with their blood brothers in

Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece.

The arrival of these unhappy victims made
lifevery difficult for the government and peoples
of these kingdoms. The spectacle of such distress
kindled popular anger. The maintenance of
thousands of famished people involved great
expense upon individuals and upon the states,
while the subjects of these neighbouring states
were themselves persecuted and plundered in

Turkey by the Young Turkish administration,

which showed the same police tendencies and the
same appetite as that of Abdul Hamid,
 HEROIC SERBIA 13

Moreover during the summer of 1912, profiting

by Turco-Italian war in Tripoli, Serbia,
the

Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Greece demanded

under a threat of hostilities that Turkey should
become a tolerable home for all her subjects, and
that the Christians of Macedonia and Roumelia
should be assured of a minimum of personal
security, and of regular laws and administration,
and that, so far as is possible in Turkish countries,
massacre and pillage should be punished. The
advice of Germany and her ambassador at Con-
stantinople decided the Young Turks to reject all
the demands of the Balkan States. The Turco-
Balkan war broke out in October, 1912. While
the Bulgarians marched on Adrianople and Con-

stantinople, gained the bloody victories of Kirk-

Kilisse and Lule-Burgas and advanced right up to
the lines of Tchatalja, within a few short miles of
the Bosphorus while the Greeks in Macedonia
;

and Southern Albania won the victories which led

them to Salonica and Janina the Serbs of
;

Belgrade returned as victors to that plain of

Kosovo whose sad memory had been so long
celebrated by their national songs.
The Kosovo is a sort of fertile
lofty plain of
framework of mountains. In places the
oasis in a

ground is studded with masses of light quartz

resembling in shape broken fragments of bread.
The Serbian legend pretends that these are the
last provisions of the Christian combatants in 1389,

miraculously turned to stone when the Turks were

14 HEROIC SERBIA
about to devour them. Ever since 1389 all Serbia
awaited the day when they would take their
revenge by driving the Turks from the plain, and
would return to eat the " bread of Kosovo."
For three centuries the Christian villages of
Kosovo were decimated by the Albanian Begs and
forcibly converted to Islam, and especially during
the last fifty years the number of Christians in the
area of cultivation has steadily decreased. In
order not to be massacred, these unhappy people
had to renounce their national costume and
mother tongue, to assume Albanian dress and to
speak Albanian in public. When the troops of
victorious Serbia returned in November, 1912, to
this country of their ancestors, they were greeted
by the last bands of these unhappy victims, who,
clothed in Albanian rags but speaking the purest
"
Serb, wept as they kissed their hands. Brothers,"
said an old man who led one of these bands,
high time that you came. We
" was
Brothers, it

had waited 500 years for you, but in a few years

more you would have found no one left."
Then descending from Kosovo the Serbs, still
victorious, destroyed the Turkish army of Mace-
donia at the three great battles of Kumanovo,
Prilep and Monastir. Along the borders of the
lovely lakes of Prespa and Ochrida and through
many mountain gorges they crossed Albania to aid
their brothers of Cetinje who, from the heights of
the Black Mountain, had thrown themselves upon
the Albanians, but for lack of artillery could not
 HEROIC SERBIA 15

reduce the strong fortress of Scutari. After five

centuries (1389-1912) the Serbs reappeared on the
Adriatic coast, at the ports of Durazzo and San
Giovanni di Medua, which restored them to

intimacy with the West. After five centuries the

Serbs once more occupied the whole south of their
national territory between the Vardar and the
Adriatic. They had recovered that Macedonian
district of Ochrida and that Adriatic plain of

Alessio, which had been, with Kosovo, the best

provinces in ancient Serbia. After five centuries
they recovered the free sea and across the Adriatic
were once more in a position to enter into com-

mercial and friendly relations with the West, to

return to the schools of Italy and France, and to
become throughout the Jugoslav world the propa-
gators of Western ideas and democratic manners.
Henceforth the Turks and their military theo-
cracy were ejected from almost all their conquests
in Europe. All that was left to them was Constan-
tinople and a narrow slip of territory along the
Dardanelles and Bosphorus. The victory of the
Balkan was the triumph of modern ideas,
Allies
of democratic patriotism, and it also appeared to
be the dawn of an era of peace and civilisation in
the Balkan world. This triumph of the small
nations rid the Peninsula of its oppressors and
partitioned it among the states who had delivered it.

(2) The Serbo- Bulgarian War. But Austria,

which could only survive at the expense of these
nationalities and through their subjection to its
16 HEROIC SERBIA
imperialism, embroiled matters between the Balkan
Allies. In 1913 a new war broke out. Greece
and Serbia united had to meet the onslaught ot

Bulgaria Bulgaria
;
in her turn was attacked by
the Turks and the Roumanians. The Bulgarians
were punished for their aggression when the Greeks
defeated a Bulgarian army at Kukush. The Serbs
on the lines of the Bregalnitza made a heroic stand

against the furious onslaught of another Bulgarian

army, and won the victories of Zletovo, Kocana,
Istip and Krivolak, June-July, 1913.
Peace was only restored by the harsh Treaty
of Bucarest which robbed the Bulgarians of the

greater part of their recent conquests in Roumelia

and Macedonia. Serbia remained in possession of
her inland acquisitions, of the plains of Kosovo,
Skoplje and Monastir of the valleys of the Drin
;

and the Vardar. But this second war, despite its

victories and annexation, cost the Serbs almost as
dear as the Bulgars. Austrian threats forced the
government of Belgrade to renounce the Adriatic
coast and hinterland and free access to the sea ;

Montenegro had to give up Scutari, Serbia Durazzo

and Medua, to the new Albanian state which
Austria insisted upon creating against the Serbs.
After these two years of heroic warfare, Serbia,
aggrandised but still landlocked, still remained an
inland state subjected to the menace and economic
exploitation of Austria- Hungary.
This menace continued to weigh upon Serbia
and itscapital Belgrade, which was only protected
 HEROIC SERBIA 17

against invasion by the waters of the Save and the

Danube. Belgrade was always at the mercy of a
bombardment or a sudden assault. Belgrade at
the junction of the Save and the Danube occupied
a site very similar to that of Lyon during the
Roman epoch Lyon was at that time planted on
:

the high hill of Fourvieres, washed by the junction

of the Rhone and the Saone. From the height of
its hill which dominates the junction of the Save

and the Danube, Belgrade looks far out across the

great Danubian plain which stretches out flat and
marshy to that hill, 180 miles away, from which
the old Hungarian fortress of Buda looks out upon
Pest. Hungarian territory begins where these two
rivers join, at Semlin, whose cannon, with the
batteries of Austro-Hungarian monitors, command
Belgrade and the river.
The Austro-Hungarian customs weigh still
more heavily upon the whole economic life of the
Serbs. In order to starve Serbia and force her to
surrender, Austria-Hungary had no need to make
" "
a " war of men a " war of pigs seemed" to her
;

sufficient.Serbia exports a very large number of

these animals it is the sale of these pigs abroad
;

which forms the chief item in her revenue, but

virtually her only way of exportingwas them
through Austria-Hungary, and the Austro-Hun-
garian market was her best client. It was sufficient
for the latter under pretext of some contagious

malady, to close the Semlin customs house to

Serbian imports, and the pig war already raging,
18 HEROIC SERBIA
and the Serbian people and state were deprived of
their principal commerce.

(3) The Austro-Serbian War. Even cur-

tailed by the creation of an Albanian state and
threatened and ruined by the policy of Austria,
the Serbia of 1913, national and victorious,
independent and parliamentary, tolerant and
democratic, remained a bugbear for a feudal and
inquisitorialstate like Austria-Hungary. The
Southern Slavs, always oppressed by the Habsburg
Monarchy as their brothers and cousins of
Macedonia had been by the Ottoman Empire,
applauded the victory of the Serbs. That just
revenge for Kosovo which all had awaited for five
centuries, seemed to them the first step in their
complete and final deliverance, in the resurrection
of the entire race.
and exhausted, only dreamt
Serbia, victorious
of peaceand repose. She had lost men by tens of
thousands she had missed her harvest in 1913
;

(and this peasant people draws its whole revenue

from the soil) she had expended millions in
;

armaments and military outlay ;

she needed ten
or fifteen years of peace to restore her people, her
army and her finances and to organise and
assimilate her recent acquisitions. But Austria
was resolved to profit by this exhaustion to realise
"
the " great design which one of her military
journals, Danzers Armeezeitung, had publicly put
forward since the year 1906. This semi-official
organ demanded the occupation by the Austrian
 HEROIC SERBIA 19

army of the Serbian towns and fortresses of

Belgrade and Nis. It regarded the annexation of
Serbia to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as
necessary order to re-open to the House of
in

Habsburg the route of the Vardar, the conquest of

Macedonia and of Salonica, the Drang nach
Osten und nach Silden to which Vienna had aspired
for three centuries. The financiers of Vienna
agreed with the soldiers, that Serbia must be
annexed in order to make of Salonica an
Austro-German port and place the Levantine
Mediterranean under German control.
In the month of May, 1914, the German
Emperor, William II., and the Austro-Hungarian
Heir Apparent, Archduke Francis Ferdinand,
met at Konopisht and drew up the plan for the
operations which was regarded by the Austrian
and German generals as capable of easy and rapid
execution and as indispensable. The Albanian
kingdom artificially erected in 1913 could scarcely
be kept and the German Prince William of
alive,

Wied, who had been installed as Mpret (king),

was insulted by his unruly subjects. Would
Serbia and Montenegro then recover Scutari and
Durazzo, of which Austrian diplomacy had robbed
them in 1913?
The Albanians for five or six centuries past
have had a peculiar conception of the state.
Other peoples differ in their opinion as to the best
form 9f government ;
some remain faithful to

monarchy, others prefer a republic, but all consider

20 HEROIC SERBIA
that the first duty of a subject or a citizen is to

pay taxes to the state and to contribute to its

support. The Albanians alone considered that the

state ought to pay all its subjects or citizens and
ask of them nothing save military service.
From the spring of 1914, a few months after
the installation of the Albanian kingdom, revolu-
tion seemed inevitable and might have furnished
to the Austrians a pretext for invading the new
Serbian provinces, the guise of a temporary
in

passage'while restoring order in Albania. In June,

1914, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, once in
agreement with William II., went to Bosnia to
supervise on the Serbian frontier the completion of
the Austrian preparations and to announce to the

troops that in the near future the Serbs would

have J:o count upon their prowess. A fanatic of
the nameof Princip assassinated him in Sarajevo.

[J^jtPrincip was of Serb nationality but an Austrian

subject ;
he was not a Serb of Serbia or of Monte-
negro, but a Herzegovinian born in Austro-
Hungarian Orthodox parents.
territory of In

Bosnia-Herzegovina the Orthodox Christians have

always been affronted and even persecuted by
the Austrian bureaucracy, because they are of the
same religion as the Serbs of Belgrade and Cetinje,
and because Austria would have liked to convert
them to Catholicism in order to place them willy
nilly under the supremacy of her clergy. In all
the Southern Slav provinces of Austria-Hungary
the Catholic is favoured, the Mussulman protected,
 HEROIC SERBIA 21

but the Orthodox oppressed. The Herzegovinians

as near neighbours of Montenegro were even more
harshly treated than the others. Hence they
detested Austria and only dreamt of deliverance,
as the Italians of Lombardy and Venetia in the

days of Silvio Pellico. Princip was the incarnation

of all the rancour and hatred of all Herzegovin-
ians against the abuses of Austro- Hungarian
administration. He shared the hopes of all Serbo-
Croats for speedy liberation, and like them dreamt
of national unity. Princip had been expelled from
the gymnasium at Sarajevo and had seen a
number of his comrades at Mostar insulted by
Austrian garrison.
officers of the

As early as 1908 a Serbo-Croat agitation had

broken out in the Hungarian province of Croatia,
and the government of Vienna had accused Serbia
of fomenting revolution in its territory. The cele-
brated Agram had been instigated and
trial

brought to a conclusion on Austro-Hungarian soil

and had proved that Serbia had had no share
whatever in these affairs. In 1909 a new attempt
was made. A Viennese historian, Dr. Friedjung,
had published documents which he regarded as
proving a secret accord of the Serbo-Croat agitators
with Serbia. At the instance of the Croat deputies
a new trial, the Friedjung trial, opened in Vienna
itself. At it the documents produced were proved
to be forgeries, and these forgeries were proved to
be the work of the Austro-Hungarian Minister at
Belgrade, Count Forgach ; finally in open court
22 HEROIC SERBIA
Dr. Friedjung admitted his error and declared that
these false documents had come to him from the
very highest quarter.
In 1914 came the third attempt. The author
of these forgeries, Count Forgach, had become
Under Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign affairs
at Vienna. No sooner had the murder of the
Archduke become known, than the Viennese press
accused the government of Belgrade of being its
instigator for a whole month the official journals
;

of the whole Monarchy repeated this accusation

without giving the slightest proof.
After this campaign of calumny at the end
of July, 1914, the government of Vienna sent an
ultimatum to Serbia. Under threat of war, it

demanded that the military and civil authorities

of Austria-Hungary should have the right to enter
Serbia to pursue their enquiries and bring to book
the guilty, whom however they did not designate

by name. In a veiled form this was the assertion

of Austrian control over the government of

Belgrade, the subjection of Serbia to the officials

and to the armies of Vienna, in short the first stage
of annexation.

Despite the two wars which had so recently

exhausted and ruined her, Serbia preferred a third
war to this dishonouring subjection. But as in

1909-1913, Russia, France and Britain inter-

posed and sought to negotiate an acceptable

agreement between Vienna and Belgrade. Austria
again seemed on the point of yielding to the just
 HEROIC SERBIA 23

remonstrances of all civilised peoples, and was

offering new conditions, when the Emperor
William II. brusquely declared war on Russia, in

who, on
order, he said, to defend his Austrian ally,
that very day, had given her complete adherence
to the Russian proposals. It is thus that Austria

was driven by Germany into this war, in which the

Triple Entente has intervened to defend the right
of all independent peoples against the bad faith of
the two Central Empires.
On 29 July, 1914, the Austrians opened
hostilities by bombarding the open town of
Belgrade. Belgrade, being exposed to the
batteries and flotillas of Austria, had been
abandoned by the Serbian government, which had
withdrawn to the centre of the country at Nis. At
first Belgrade was only defended by a regiment of

the third Ban (Territorial reserve) ;

for 127 days
(Aug.-Dec., 1914) the Austrians bombarded the
town at intervals, but only made their entrance
on 2 December, to be driven out very soon
afterwards.

During this period the Austrians had twice

invaded Serbia from the West. In the month of
August an army of 200,000 men coming from
Bosnia crossed the Drina, but was held up on the
slopes of Mount Tser in the valley of the Jadar,
where was routed by 100,000 Serbs after four
it

days of bayonet attacks (15-19 Aug.). In October

a new Austro-Hungarian army of 250,000 men

again crossed the Drina. On a frontier of 100

24 HEROIC SERBIA
miles the Serbs held themselves entrenched for

over six weeks ;

but at the end of November the
rains forced them to evacuate the centre, their
ammunition began to run short and it was found
necessary to withdraw into the interior as far as
the slopes of Rudnik. The reinforced Austrians
hurried their pace, thinking that they already had
their hands upon Kragujevac, Serbia's only arsenal,
and Nis, the temporary seat of government.
Meanwhile the other army occupied Belgrade.
But when the ammunition arrived from France,
the Serbs assumed the offensive once more, and
from 3 to 7 December they flung back these
300,000 Austrians beyond the Drina and the Save,
driving them from Belgrade at the same time. By 14
December the whole of Serbia had been freed from
the invader, and an immense booty of rifles, cannon,
ammunition and stores, with 60,000 prisoners,
remained in Serbian hands. The Austrian assaults
upon the other little kingdom of Montenegro had
not been more successful. Thus two little peoples
which together count less than 5,000,000 inhabi-
tants, had put to flight the armies of an Empire of
50,000,000.
 HEROIC SERBIA 25

III. THE SERBIAN PEOPLE.

If these two little kingdoms have been able
to hold in check the Dual Monarchy with its

50,000,000 inhabitants, because they have

it is

been armed from French munition factories and

aided by the Triple Entente. During the three
wars which Serbia has had to wage, her principal
arm has been the French cannon, and it is the
French 75 and the officers with French training to
whom the victories of Kumanovo and Monastir, of
Zadar and Rudnik are due.
Francuzi su s nama (the French are with us),
the Serbian soldiers exclaim joyously when they
hear the sound of the 75, for out there the 75 is
called the Frenchman, and is credited with all the

qualities usually ascribed to the men of France.

The 75 always gay and always ready, he is agile
is

and of an accomplished and obliging humour, and

you very soon get to know and love him. At the
first great battle of 1912 at Kumanovo the
French 75 served by the Serbs was faced by Krupp
cannon served by the Turks. This first duel
enabled one to judge the worth of the two ad-
versaries. The Serbian batteries reduced the
Krupp cannon to silence and next day when the
Serbian troops occupied the enemy's position, they
found that all the Turkish officers and men alike

without flinching had bravely fallen by their guns.

They had been overwhelmed by the rapid avalanche

26 HEROIC SERBIA
" "
of Creusot shells. The
Frenchman had been
twice as quick as the "Schvaba" (this is the
Serbian name for the German " Swabians "). The
Turkish officers had found it so difficult to serve
their German guns, that some of the dead were
found with the little Krupp artillery manuals still
" "
grasped in their stiffened fingers. The Schvaba
is a very learned cannon but only useful to men of
" "
science and training, while theFrenchman is a
very logical and simple cannon who from the
first

makes himself understood by every sensible man.

With her cannon France had given to the Serbs
the pupils of her University. At the battle ofTser
there fell heroically Lieutenant Garasanin, former
pupil of the Lycee Janson-de-Sailly, son of that
Serbian Minister in France who fought in the
ranks of the French army in 1870.
But if French armaments won such victories,
it because they have been placed
is in the hands
of a people who is fully conscious of its national

rights and duties, is accustomed to collaborate and

has a profound sense of democratic solidarity, an
intimate knowledge of the sufferings and exploits
of its ancestors a knowledge spread throughout
all classes for many generations, and taught in
every hamlet by the poets and singers of its
national songs. The Serbian people conquered by
its patriotism, its democratic manners and its
popular poetry. Nine-tenths of the Serbian nation
consists of peasants owning the soil ;
it is a nation
of small proprietors who live upon their crops and
 HEROIC SERBIA 27

their vines, their flocks and which

their fruit trees,

they cultivate with their own hands. Every Serb

was well aware that in opposing the invaders he
was defending his own fields and the daily bread
of himself and his family. This war of inde-
pendence was for him a struggle for life. He
knew what fearful exploitation Turkish tyranny
had imposed upon his fathers and the rapacity
which Austrian tyranny still imposes upon the
Jugoslav peoples. With one heart the whole
nation flung itself upon the invader all for one
and one for all from the old men to the children,
;

from the King to the last shepherd, all took to

arms.
On 2 November, 1914, the following notice
could be read in the Serbian press :

"Crown Prince Alexander has just signed, on the

proposition of the Minister of War, the promotion
to the rank of corporal
Dragoljub Zelic, aged twelve
years. This boy's father was killed at the battle
of Kumanovo in November, 1912. Being a pupil
ot the 6th class in the gymnasium of Sabac and
not being able to enter the regular army, Dragol-
jub joined a corps of volunteers and took part with
them in seven fights against the Austrians.
Wounded at the battle of Suva, he refused to
leave the firing line and continued to fire until he
was exhausted. In a night attack he penetrated
with several comrades into the Austrian lines, and
the success of this adventure secured him a military
medal,"
28 HEROIC SERBIA
At the battle of Rudnik the old King Peter,
aged 71 and a martyr to rheumatism, seated him-
self among the combatants and addressed them in

the second person like a father or a big brother,

and himself took a rifle like one of the French
generals of the revolutionary era. As a former
pupil of St. Cyr and an officer of the French army
during the war of 1870, he set the example to his
citizen army, just as French citizen-generals to-day
set the example to the French nation under arms.
Dusan Nikolic was twenty when the war of
1914 broke out. He was the son of the former
Serbian Minister at Paris, Andrew Nikolic, who
had become President of the Chamber at Belgrade.
He had made his first studies at the Lyce Janson-
de-Sailly and was a student of law. Called to the
colours with the class of 1914 he soon got his
stripes,owing to his sporting qualities (he had been
one of the founders of sport in Serbia). At the
front where he was sent, his colonel was very care-
ful of this young class of 1914, which he wanted to
harden gradually before exposing it too much.
Besides Mr. Nikolic had already lost four children
of croup on the same day. But Dusan Nikolic
" I am the
demanded the most perilous missions :

son of the President of the Chamber," he said one

" I
evening, in giving in his report, ought to go
before all the others." His colonel sent him. The
first day Dusan returned with very valuable
information, the second day he was missing, and a
week after, when the Serbian army expelled the
 HEROIC SERBIA 29

Austrians from the conquered territory, they found

the body of Dusan Nikolic, former pupil of the
Lycee St. Janson-de-Sailly.
The following is a mourning announcement in
the official journal Srpske N
ovine :

Slobodan P. Jovanovic.
Sub-Lieutenant of Infantry, commanding the
3rd Company, 4th Battalion, ist regiment of the
Morava division, wounded 3Oth November before
Belgrade, died i8th December, 1914, buried in the
churchyard of Mali-Pozarevac.
"My son! I saved thee seven times from illness
and from death. I saved thee, I brought thee up to
thy nineteenth year, to see thee my first born give
thy life for thy country. Thou \vast hardworking,
intelligent, loyal. When thy comrades found time
to return to house and family, thou didst remain
at the frontbecause thou couldst not, and wouldst
not neglect thy work. Thy masters, comrades
and officers preserve thy memory. If thy father
had lived he would have been too old to take his
place in this Holy War. Thou hast replaced him
and hast done thy duty, thou hast given thy life to
deliver our hearths and our country which has
suffered so terribly. Thy young brother, thy
mother and thy three sisters weep for thee. But
thou hast found again thy father and thy colonel
Milutin Petrovic, who was killed beside thee. We
know that thou hast died as an intrepid hero for
the salvation of Serbia, We
pray God to recom-
pense thee. May thy ancestral soil which has
suffered so much rest lightly on thee. Thy
unhappy mother Vasilja."
The Victory of the Serbs is the triumph of a
free and conscientious nation. It is the victory

of the Greeks at Marathon, at Salamis and at

 HEROIC SERBIA
Plataea ; it is the victory of the Swiss at Morgarten ;

it is the victory of the French at Valmy.

The Serbs have a life of "fraternity" ; the
family, the commune, the nation, the race, have a
sense of fraternity which is not to be traced in the
same degree in any of the neighbouring peoples.
The peasant ordinarily grouped in
family is

Zadrugas, for
permanent association of property
and work, under the authority of the eldest or
most able member. The property is not partitioned
up; the lands, flocks and houses are held in
common ; all the children are educated together,
and all live in one big menage round the same
court in different apartments.
The Zadrugas are united by the same solidarity.
On the day fixed for the harvest or the vintage, in
this or that field or vine-yard, all work without
remuneration for the Zadruga. which provides
food and drink for its voluntary workers. A
beginning is made with fields which have lost their
men and are cultivated by widows or orphans.
The commune is an hereditary association of
Zadrugas. where all common interests are freely
discussedand dealt with under the influence of the
most respectable and capable.
But the sentiment of national unity and racial
affinity dominates this particularist life. In even-
Serbian hamlet children are taught that not only
"
the " brothers make up the Zadrugas, the kingdom,
the country, but that beyond the existing frontier
they hold the sister countries and kingdoms of
 HEROIC SERBIA 31

Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, etc.

One of the proverbs of this Serbian race, divided

between three religions, Orthodox, Catholic and
Mussulman a saying known to all and repeated in
Serbia as in Bosnia, in Croatia as in Montenegro
" Brat "
is je mio, Koje vjere vio (He is my brother,
whatever his religion may be).
After the battle of Kumanovo, November,
1912, they brought back to the village of Radljevo
the body of a young officer, the son of the priest
(the Orthodox popes are, and must be married).
When the father had officiated with the popes of
the neighbourhood, he said to the villagers : " Now
brothers, let us bear him to the cemetery." But
from the crowd of women, children and old men
who surrounded the coffin, the old mayor advanced
and said :
"
What cemetery, most reverend father ?

The cemetery is for the old and the women who

have done nothing for the country. Him we will
inter here before the church, that he may serve as
an example to all our children, that is the desire of
all our people." The pope refused, because the
law forbids burials round the churches. " Never
"
mind, go on," said the mayor, we will go to the
King, to the Chamber ; you will not be troubled."
The pope yielded. They dug the grave in front of
the church and placed in it the coffin with the
uniform and the sabre of the deceased man. But
the pope, taking back the sabre, gave it to his little
son of twelve, with the words : " Alexa, my son,
take and keep this precious gift Serbia will still
32 HEROIC SERBIA
have need of it, and after Serbia we shall have
millions of brothers to liberate, when the country
calls you to the service of the race."
After the battle of Rudnik in December, 1914,
the old King Peter was visiting the field ambulance.

They led him up to a dying man who had a bad

wound in the head. He looked up and recognised
" Where are "
the King. we, gospodar (sire) ? he
asked. " We have beaten the Austrians and re-

taken Valjevo." The man raised himself and

"
cried Long live the King, Long live the nation."
Then he asked for his uniform, pulled out of it his
"
pocket book and gave it to the King. It is for

the army," he said, and died. The pocket book

contained 700 dinars (28), all the savings of this

well-to-do peasant.
In mid-winter of 1912-1913, the Serbian troops
at last reached the Adriatic coast at Durazzo, after
two weeks of forced marching in the snow and icy
water of the Albanian highlands. On the last
heights when the sea came in sight an immense
joy overcame them all. They all understood that
in the history of the race and nation, it was a

memorable day. The gates of deliverance and

civilisation were open once more, and the last
of those peasants thought of the free future of his

regenerated country and felt that the Serbian

"
people was getting back its
'

lungs.
1
They ran
towards Durazzo before entering the town the
;

ranks were reformed and the troops marched to

the water's edge in admirable order. The Serbian
 HEROIC SERBIA 33

flag was planted in the sea amid cries of Zivelo

srpsko more (long live the Serbian sea). That

evening at the field ambulance the doctors dealt
with the cases of 147 men who had frostbitten

feet, but who, carried or

supported by their
comrades, had reached the Serbian sea, and had
insisted upon marching to the shore like the others.
It is these democratic habits, this national
solidarity, which have made it possible for the non-

combatants to till the fields and gather in the

harvest during these four years of almost con-
tinual war. All able-bodied men were at the

front, fighting for all ;

the whole population of
women, children and old men were in the fields,
cultivating for all. The families of the wounded
and were helped
killed in their work, succoured in
their distress and grief, fed in their need by the
" "
brothers of the Zadrugas or the villages. The
whole nation being but a single family shared in

common its resources, and its invincible hope.

Thus gradually among the Serbs the heritage
of a distant past has always been maintained by a
national popular literature of which the ancient
Greeks alone, or at a later date the French, had
an equivalent. The poets and singers of Pesmes
have during four centuries, from the defeat of
Kosovo in 1389 to the insurrection of 1804, been
the true defenders of the independence of the
Serbian race and language. When the whole race
lay crushed under the double tyranny of Turkey
and Austria, the singers and poets celebrated
34 HEROIC SERBIA
everywhere the memory of their ancestors, their

exploits and defeats. Kosovo ! Kosovo ! for

five centuries Serbia has re-echoed to this name of
sorrow as medieval France to the name of
Roncevaux. But Roncevaux the French
at
Roland had fallen. At Kosovo, in spite of the
defeat, the Serbian Roland, Marko Kraljevic, had
miraculously escaped he was living always, merely
;

fallen asleep in his mountain grotto, whence his

invincible aid would return to his people on the
" Kosovo
great day of avenged."
On the day of " Kosovo avenged," in 1912, in
1913, in 1914, Marko Kraljevic fought in real
truth in the ranks of his people. Along the whole
front, in all the battles, the popular singers, the

guslars, who accompany on a one-stringed fiddle,

recited the virtues of Marko, and held up as
an example his incomparable bravery, his indomit-
able strength, his hatred of tyranny and oppression,
his love of the weak and his eternal victory over
" As ancient Greece
the three-headed Arab."
had in its Achilles, medieval France in its Roland
and modern France in its Jeanne D'Arc, its
Bayard, its Hoche and Marceau, the ideal and
type of their national virtues, so it is Marko
Kraljevic who incarnates and the maintains
devotion of the Serbs to their past, their race and
their national duties.
In 1912 the first Serbian troops crossed the
Turkish frontier. They arrived in torrents of rain
in a muddy plain furrowed by torrents. They had
 HEROIC SERBIA 35

to remain in the water ;

their convoy had not been
able to follow them, and the wind brought down
the tents. It was a night of hunger and suffering,

a night too of anxiety. For the Turks were known

to have their railway station only a few miles off
and were receiving reinforcements and provisions
from Mitrovitza. When dawn came, there be-
came visible on a distant hillock the mosque where
once the Sultan Murad, the conqueror of the
Serbs, had been interred. One word ran through
the army Kosovo they had reached Kosovo
: ! !

In one minute the whole front was dancing and

singing, and the march was resumed, as though
they had slept and eaten. At the station of
Mitrovitza, evacuated by the Turks, they found
eight truck-loads of biscuits, and the Serbian
officers merely had to distribute to the troops the
"
bread of Kosovo."
In Macedonia after the hard field of Kumanovo
another battle had lasted all day before the town
of Prilep, the historic home of Marko Karljevic.
The Turks, strongly entrenched, had repelled four
assaults the Serbians were exhausted and began
;

to give ground. A
ray of sunshine suddenly
illuminated the old tower of Marko above the river.
An officer started one of the Pesmes which cele-
brated the " "
hero's exploits. Forward and
Marko himself led
avengers.the
By evening
Prilep was in Serbian hands.
Ljuba Kovacevic, the former minister, is a
well-known Serbian historian. He had five
36 HEROIC SERBIA
daughters and a son, Vladeta Kovacevic, former
student of the University of Paris. At the battle
of Kumanovo, where he commanded the Mitrail-

leuses, Vladeta was killed. His body was brought

back to Belgrade. On
the day of the funeral his
mother and five sisters wept and groaned aloud.
At the grave the old father without a tear made
"
the following speech :
My son, depart in peace.
Thou hast done thy duty. My son, do not weep:
I

I am
proud of thee. Thou hast joined the heroes
whose sufferings and death of old saved by millions
the lives and souls of our nation. Tell the
heroes of Kosovo, Dushan and Lazar and all the
martyrs of former days, that to-day Kosovo is
avenged."
Heroic Serbia
FROM THE FRENCH OF
VICTOR BERARD

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