Through the Land of the Serb

Such is the story of Hayduk Veljko. His was a strong soul blackened by the terrible times into which he was born, and in spite of his many faults he played a great part in the freeing of Servia. His monument, an obelisk with commemorative lines and the date of his death (1813) on the four sides of its base, stands in a little flower garden. His portrait, fierce with black moustachios and a scarlet fez, is carved and painted on the stone. I spelt slowly through the inscriptions; the old woman, caretaker of the spot, came out and picked me some roses. "He was a very good man," she said; "here are some roses from his garden." Poor plucky barbarian, whose ambition it was to be the greatest robber in the world, he had come to this – roses and a very good man! I took the flowers and strolled back; I looked at the older people and reflected that they had heard these things from the living mouth, for their grand-fathers had seen them. Yet with these traditions barely a century old the land is now orderly and peaceful; in this short space of the world's history it has leapt from savagery to civilisation. It has yet far to go, but it has done much.

When I returned to the inn, I found the landlord beaming. "You have two brothers and five sisters," he said. "It is so pleasant to know all about one's guests!" Marko had lost no time in spreading short biographies of me, and had done his work effectually. He parted from me with regret, for with recollections perhaps of Veljko, he had overcharged me liberally, as I learned when I was older and wiser; barring this slight defect, he was a most agreeable travelling companion, and, as he himself pointed out, "gave me Servian lessons for nothing."

The landlord was all friendliness. He knew all about the English, and he told me about Someone-avich-who-married-an-English-wife. "She is so happy," he added rapturously, "and he is now just like an Englishman!"

"What does he do?" I asked.

"Do? He does not do anything. He sits in Idepark like an Englishman."

"She must be an American," I said firmly; "Englishwomen are not rich enough for that."

Radujevatz, on the Danube, the port for Negotin and the last station before reaching the Bulgarian frontier, is but a couple of kilometres away. I returned to Belgrade by boat. All the world and Cook go down the Danube, so it needs no description. My guardian angel was as kind as usual, and gave me two most courteous Servian artists as travelling companions. There is nothing like a "brother brush" for help in need, and as a general rule my sketch-book is a great passport and finds me more useful friends than does my Foreign Office one. These two gave me lessons in the language and told me of their fatherland. That I should have come so far to see it pleased them greatly, but they were both, especially the elder man, very sad about it, and told me mournfully that I could scarcely have come in a worse period of its history. "Our old patriarchal system is dead, and we have nothing to replace it. Our people have had thrust upon them too suddenly Western ideas which they do not understand; we are in the most critical period of a nation's history, the half-educated period. The nations that criticise us passed through this period so long ago that they have forgotten it." He talked of the Great Empire and of Kosovo and of the black years that followed. "Look at the few old churches that the Turks have left us. In those days we were not behind the whole of Europe. Our past was heroic; our future looks black. I am an old man, and I shall die with all my hopes disappointed. No one in the West knows how we have suffered. I, of course, remember when the Turks still occupied our forts." They sang me snatches of Servian ballads – all monotonous wails over the slaying of someone by the Turks, ending in a cry for vengeance. I commented on their unrelieved melancholy. "Ah, Fräulein," said the elder, "it is the suffering of five hundred years, and it is your nation that keeps the Turk in Europe. The Crimean War was a blow to us, and the Berlin Treaty was only a shade less bitter. They did not consider us as peoples. They marked out the Balkan peninsula into spheres of influence awaiting the pleasure of the great Powers, and we are in the Austrian sphere. England has never troubled about us. Russia is our only friend; Russia could save us, but she is too busy in the Far East. The only other land situated as we are, with no outlet to the sea, is Switzerland. All Europe takes care of Switzerland. We have no one to help us in the whole world."

We reached the Iron Gates. The stream was enormously swollen, and we steered up the middle, a huge wide swirl of water eddying and coiling with terrible rapidity. The boat began its upward climb, shuddering and trembling violently; it seemed to be straining every nerve, and the deck vibrated underfoot. Beyond and above gleamed the line of smooth water, and the panting vessel struggled into it and regained its breath. As I stood in the bows and watched the struggle and heard the tale of Servia's woes, Servia seemed to me like the struggling boat, with the melancholy difference that there was no strong hand at the helm to save her from shipwreck.

This was, however, the boat's supreme effort. We lay off Orsova all night, were more and more behind time next day, and did not lounge up to the quay at Belgrade till very nearly midnight. Belgrade was fast asleep when I walked through the silent streets that were entirely deserted save for the sentinels standing motionless at the street corners with rifle and revolver. Belgrade, I had been told in West Europe, was a gay, reckless, dissipated capital. In outward appearance it is about as wild as Little Peddlington. Appearances may be deceptive. I do not know.

CHAPTER XV

THE SHUMADIA AND SOUTH-WEST SERVIA

Everyone said I must go to the Shumadia, because it is the "heart of Servia," the centre in which arose her struggle for freedom. So to the Shumadia I went. Having read in a German book that it was quite impossible to explore that part of the country without a guide and letters of introduction, I took only as much luggage as I could carry easily in one hand and set out by train for Kragujevatz. As the best-laid plans are apt to go wrong, I left this expedition entirely to Fate. People like being trusted; often, in fact, serve you much the better for it. Fate did this time. She put me into the carriage with a gentleman who most kindly furnished me with an introduction that took me round all the rest of Servia. That I should have been thrown on the land quite unassisted distressed him. "You must yourself see," he said, "that if your Consul and Minister have given you no letter, it looks very bad. But that is the way your country behaves. If you had been German, for example, you would have had plenty of letters." This astonished me; my new friend, on the other hand, seemed still more astonished that I had got so far letterless. Servia loves letters of introduction and is not happy without them. From this time forward I made a sort of triumphal progress, was passed from town to town, and received so much hospitality and kindness that Servia and the friends that helped me on my way will ever remain in a warm corner of my memory. I changed my plans from day to day, and I went wherever the police captains and the district engineers advised me; nor can I wish anyone better guides than these gentlemen. They lent me maps, they planned my routes, they took me walks, they hired my carriages, found my guides and horses, and drove my bargains. What they were pleased to consider the mad Englishness of my enterprise appealed forcibly to their sense of humour, and my various adventures made them shout with laughter. I cannot repay their kindness, but I certainly amused them.

The Shumadia takes its name from "shuma," a forest; the woods of Servia were the last shelter of a desperate people and the rallying-point of the nation. If it be true that "all that is most Servian is in the Shumadia," it is here that we should look for the type of the race. The peasant of the Shumadia is tall, fair, and blue-or grey-eyed. He is more strongly built and more active than his brethren in other districts, and is more like the fair type of Montenegrin than are the men of any other part of Servia. The race question in the Balkans is so exceedingly complicated that I cannot attempt to unravel it, and can only note marked types where they occur.

So much for the peasant. The country now is no longer a forest, though well supplied with woods and trees; it is a most fertile district, and is better cultivated and far more enterprising than any other part of Servia.

Kragujevatz, Milosh' capital, is a very go-ahead place, and next to Belgrade is Servia's most important commercial town, busy and flourishing, with some 14,000 inhabitants. It has a fine gymnasium and a large girls' school, both handsome and spacious buildings very well fitted; the girls' school built by private gift. All trace of the Turk has been wiped out of the town, but the relics of Milosh are carefully preserved. His konak, a medium-sized whitewashed house, now forms part of the officers' quarters. The old church stands near, a small plain whitewashed building with a wooden annexe for the women, who were not then admitted to worship in the main body of the church – which shows forcibly how deeply the Turk had set his mark upon the Servian people. By the church stands the long low whitewashed shed that was Servia's first parliament house. Milosh, like Karageorge, took care to assemble his parliament very seldom and to pay little or no attention to it then. Kragujevatz otherwise is brand-new, and here as elsewhere it is easy to see that the Servians have done more in fifty years for the improvement of the place and the conditions of life than the Turk did in four centuries. Much yet remains to be done, nevertheless a journey from Servia into Turkey is like stepping off the pavement into the sewer.

On leaving Kragujevatz I left the railway. None exists in West Servia, which has to rely entirely on ox-carts for the transport of its produce. Carriage travelling in Servia is, as I have said before, but slow work. But it gives one excellent opportunities of seeing the country. The start must be made early. The man usually suggested 4 a.m., but I made it 5 when possible. The peasant was always on the road or already at work; for he, like the coachman, likes to take his time about things, and has to get up very early in order to spread a six or seven hours' job very thinly over sixteen. This gives him ample leisure to lie under a beech tree and play upon a wooden pipe (a double pipe it is, too, two pipes with one mouthpiece), but in spite of the old proverb it has not yet contributed much either to his wealth or wisdom. He is descended from a long line of forefathers who lived oppressed by foreign rule in troublous times, when the accumulation of property would have been labour in vain and would have but enriched the pocket of Pasha or Janissary. He sees no object in exerting himself; it is unjust to call him lazy. He is undeveloped; his wants are so simple that he can satisfy them easily without working up to his full power, and he has no ideas beyond. He walks, thinks, and acts in leisurely fashion, and appears to be slow to wrath and very good-natured. The spare time which remains upon his hands unfortunately is not always harmlessly employed upon the penny whistle, for your Servian peasant is a great politician. Slow to grasp a new idea on this as on all other subjects, and with no traditions of good government behind him, he is eternally dissatisfied with the government he happens to be under. For centuries "government" in Servia meant "the Turk" and was a thing to be resisted or at least evaded, and the Servian peasant still ascribes every evil to it. So the corn waited while the reaper sat in the shade and discussed the latest scandal about Queen Draga. "If our women," said a Serb to me, "took to politics like yours do, I do not know what would happen. All work would be at a standstill."

Very early in the day, even before the peasant has begun politics, the coachman is ready to rest at a "mehana" (inn), and in spite of all my efforts I became acquainted with the interior of a vast number. The bare whitewashed room with fly-blown portraits of Milan and Natalie, and new and gay ones of Alexander represented as about forty, and Draga as, say, five-and-twenty; the boarded floor; the rush of chickens in at the door when they heard the refreshments coming; the cavern in the brick wall where the little copper pots of black coffee are heated in glowing charcoal; the miniature glass bottles about three inches high, in which the slivovitz (plum brandy) is served; the white-kilted, sandal-shod men who sat round on rough benches and consumed it; and the host and hostess eager both to serve me and to find out all about me, made up a homely and not unpicturesque scene. And a plateful of white curd cheese covered with clotted cream (kaimak), a lump of rye bread, some onions, and some thin red wine, are a breakfast a Prince would not disdain, after driving for three hours with nothing but a thimbleful of black coffee inside him. By midday every inn has dinner ready, and supplies food, which is generally far better than the outside of the den leads one to expect, at a very cheap rate. The penny wine of the country is good of its kind, and shows that Servia only requires science to become a first-class wine-growing country. The untravelled Serb has at present but vague ideas as to what West Europe considers first-class wine. "Our wine," said a Serb to me, after I had tasted a thin red variety, "is not so well known as it ought to be. We send a great deal of this to Marseilles and sell it very cheap. The French probably sell it as the best champagne, at a high price!" which showed he had much to learn as yet about vintages.

I had long days upon the road, but was never lonely. All the country life of Servia dawdled past; living pictures of which I never tired. The school children, who often have to tramp a great distance, are out early, carrying their books and inkpots. In bad winter weather they are often unable to return, and are put up at the school for many nights. Or there will pass a gang of Albanian horse-dealers, their tight striped leg-gear, their scarlet sashes and shaven heads looking outlandish even in this out-of-the-way spot. Sitting high on their saddles, they amble smartly past, driving a herd of ponies in front of them. The Albanian does not let the grass grow under his feet, and his movements are full of nervous energy.

Wildest of all in appearance are the gipsies – brown untamed animals, long, lean, sinewy, and half-clad. As a matter of convenience they adopt the dress of the country they happen to be in; their individuality they never change. The Servian looks down on them with contempt; they are the lowest of the population. "Tsiganin! do this," shouts a Serb to any of the swarthy young rascals who are hanging about the street corner, and the boy obeys like a dog. But the gipsy is fiercely proud of his race. "You are English, but I am a Gipsy!" said an old woman to me, with indescribable majesty, as she drew up her head; the coins glittered in her filthy elf-locks, and she fixed me with her eagle eyes. She took the black pipe from her mouth and waved it round her head till she was wreathed in blue smoke, and she smote her bare breast dramatically. "I am a true Gipsy," she repeated. In a piece of a dirty shirt and half a petticoat, she looked like an empress. Yet the savage who possesses a hut, even the wild beast with a den, is a more civilised being. Without any kind of a tent, much less a cart, will they camp; some poles propped against a bush and covered with an armful of fern are often their only covering from the weather, and a couple of lean unhappy bears may share with them the bundle of filthy rags that is their bed, for your gipsy is a great showman. I once passed a group encircling a caldron, asquat and eager for the pot to boil; they turned as I drove by to look at me, and I saw, with something of a shock, that one of the party was a huge blue-nosed baboon. He wore about as much clothing as the others, and it was not till I saw his face that he was distinguishable from his friends. The cavemen and the prehistoric lake-dwellers cannot have lived less luxuriously than do these strange wild folk now, in Europe in the twentieth century. When I met them upon the road, they seemed to have walked out of another age, another world. Untrustworthy and dishonest are the mildest terms applied to them, and they are said to be responsible for a large proportion of the crime of the land. More extraordinary than their filth and their savagery, more wonderful than their superb vitality, is their marvellous gift – a gift that amounts to genius – for playing stringed instruments. It is in the blood to such an extent that there are fiddlers in every gang; it seems as natural for a gipsy to fiddle as for a fish to swim. I am not speaking of those who wear civilised garments and perform in the large towns, – many of these are known to fame, – but of the ragged ruffians who fiddle for their own amusement on the road, by the camp fire, or sprawled under a tree, and who display a command of the instrument and a technical facility that tends to confirm the theory that music is the least civilised of the arts. I have seen a child, of certainly not more than ten years, perched on the top of a loaded waggon, executing the wildest runs, turns, and flourishes upon his fiddle with an ease and certainty that the industrious student of a conservatoire does not attain to after years of labour, the ease and certainty of a singing skylark. But he and his associates were such that it was disgusting to pass on the lee side of that waggon. How these people have attained this art is an insoluble mystery; that it belongs pre-eminently to them as a birthright is shown by the curious fact that most of the world's fiddlers hail from gipsy-haunted lands.

And these strange wild things, with life running fierce in their veins, passed in their turn, and I was alone with the dead.

By every roadside, even by lonely mountain tracks, stand the monuments of the soldiers who have fallen in war – tall stones, sometimes solitary, sometimes in groups of two or three, almost all carved in very flat relief or incised with a rude full-length portrait of the dead man, painted in bright colours. Some of these stones are small, others five or six feet high. With a blue coat and black moustachios, with his arms and fingers straight and stiff by his side and his feet turned out at right angles, stands the soldier, staring straight in front of him with round black eyes, and presents arms to the passer-by. Upon the older stones, he wears a scarlet tarboosh and carries a sword; upon those put up since the last war, he carries a gun and wears the present uniform. An inscription tells how he met his death: "For the Glory and Freedom of his brother Serbs." The monument is usually near his home, but sometimes on the actual spot where he fell. To the Serbs these stones are an everyday sight. To me it seemed sometimes that I was the only thing left alive out of the slaughter and was passing constantly through the ranks of a phantom army awaiting the trumpet call. Their grotesque and childish simplicity added a strange pathos. Thus I travelled through a land green as our own, with oaks and beeches and fern, and everywhere the print of war was upon it, and through storm and sun and wind and rain I passed from town to town.

Chachak, on the Morava, stands on flat land down by the river. I drove through the ford by moonlight and entered the town with a terrible clatter, but, having come properly introduced, I met with a very hospitable reception. I was travelling to see Servia and the Servians; that was now a recognised fact. Should I like to see something truly Servian? It was fortunate that I had arrived this night, for I was in time to see four murderers shot on the spot where they had committed their crime! I was urged to go, and offered special facilities. Taken aback, I listened, speechless, while the plan was unfolded. I was to rise very early and to drive for three hours up the mountains with the condemned men and the file of soldiers who were to carry out the sentence. The words called up before me a picture of the grisly little procession crawling uphill in the grey of the dawning. Adding up the pros and cons rapidly, I said to myself that it was my duty to see everything, but searched my brains for a decent way out of it. Then I recollected that if I went, for the next fifty years it would be said that all Englishwomen were in the habit of seeing men shot before breakfast. Gripping thankfully at this idea, I said I had rather not accept the invitation; I had not come so far to see Servians killed. My reply caused disappointment, and I was strongly urged to go. The murder had been a peculiarly atrocious one, so that I need not mind seeing the punishment; for the murderers, after cutting the throats of their victims, had gouged out the eyes and otherwise barbarously mutilated the corpses. Twenty men had been arrested, the last gang of Hayduks on that side of Servia. Four were to die to-morrow. Moreover, my route lay that way, and there was nothing at all to be seen in Chachak. My coachman listened anxiously for my decision, but was doomed to disappointment. I did not go.

Chachak is proud of being the first town taken from the Turks by Karageorge. It is a bright and enterprising place, and dreams of constructing an electric railway that shall connect it with the world. It boasts a church that was church, then mosque, and is now church again. At least so I was told, but I believe myself that it was born a mosque and that the old bells belonging to the former Christian period, which were found recently when digging the foundations of one of the public buildings, belonged to an early church long since destroyed and forgotten. I spun out the resources of Chachak as long as I could, and my coachman hung about, buoyed up by the hope that we should yet be in time. I even found the horses harnessed and ready, waiting for me, a most unusual event in Servia, and he started off at a great pace for the first and last time in that land. He had a pleasant, smiling face, and was very civil, and as he looked at his watch every few minutes, I marvelled that he should crave so ardently to see red blood run in the sunshine. To have once seen it hurrying down an Italian gutter was enough for me.

So we drove on through woods that I knew were beautiful, but they gave me only a sickly feeling of being on the track of death, and the farther I got, the less I liked it. In starting, I had calculated that I was late enough, and then began to wonder if there was any limit to the lateness that a Servian is capable of.

When we arrived at Markovich, the village nearest the top of the pass, I saw the soldiers stopping outside the inn to cheer themselves with rakija on their homeward march, and I knew that the deed was done. An officer rode up, touched his cap and told me politely where I should see the graves; he expected me to be disappointed, but I was greatly relieved. We reached the top of the hill, a large grassy plateau, and there were the four raw heaps of damp mould. A peasant was patting down the last one, and a stake had been driven in at the head of each. My coachman pulled up and said regretfully, "We are only three-quarters of an hour too late!" "Drive on," said I, cutting short the details of how they had stood in their graves and been shot down into them, and as the peasant shouldered his spade and turned away too, we left them alone on the hilltop.

At Pozhega we had to put up the horses for an hour and find food for ourselves. The landlady – a stout woman with a good-natured face – was considerably exhausted, having been to the top of the hill to see the men shot. She had risen very early and had walked all the way, but there was a great crowd, and much to her annoyance she had not got a good view of the end. Nor could I make her understand that I had purposely avoided the sight myself.

From Pozhega it was but a few hours' drive to Ushitza, my next stopping-place, the prettiest little town that I know in Servia – a place that no traveller in the country should omit to visit. It sprawls through two wooded valleys in a mountainous country as beautiful as anyone need wish to see. It is hospitable and cheery, and should make an excellent centre for a sportsman, for I am told that the surrounding mountains are well supplied with game birds, that there is no lack of wolves and bears, and no difficulty about procuring permission to shoot. I clattered up to the inn, and it received me with characteristic simplicity; its landlady asked if I wanted a place as chambermaid, and was much mystified, for it seems that she had never before seen a lady travelling alone. Laughing over this, I gave my letter of introduction to the master of the establishment and asked him to have it delivered at once. It seemed a simple enough request, and I sat down to some coffee without any anxiety, unaware that he had stowed the letter away carefully behind the rakija bottles in the bar and had sent the potboy to tell the gentleman that his sister had arrived! He turned up in a great hurry, much mystified, as his only sister lived in America and had shown no symptoms of visiting him. The innkeeper then produced the letter and explained that, as the gentleman was a Bohemian and possessed the only pair of blue eyes in the town and I also was a blue-eyed foreigner, it had never occurred to him to doubt our relationship. I had a gay time in Ushitza. The schoolmasters, the head of the police, and other local authorities all came to call on me and devise plans for me, and we drank beer festively by the market-place, for as I was the first Englishwoman in Ushitza, health drinking was necessary.