Bosnia

Bosnia

ROAD

A MOSLEM WOMAN WALKING BLACK-FACED IN WHITE ROBES among the terraces of a blossoming orchard, her arms full of irises, was the last we saw of the Herzegovinian plains; and our road took us into mountains, at first so gruffly barren, so coarsely rocky that they were almost squalid. Then we followed a lovely rushing river, and the heights were mitigated by spring woods, reddish here with the foliage of young oaks, that ran up to snow peaks. This river received tributaries, after the astonishing custom of this limestone country, as unpolluted gifts straight from the rock face. One strong flood burst into the river at right angles, flush with the surface, an astonishing disturbance. Over the boulders ranged the exuberant hellebore with its pale-green flowers.

But soon the country softened, and the mountains were tamed and bridled by their woodlands and posed as background to sweet small compositions of waterfalls, fruit trees, and green lawns. The expression ‘sylvan dell’ seemed again to mean something. We looked across a valley to Yablanitsa, the Town of Poplars, which was the pleasure resort of Mostar when the Austrians were here, where their officers went in the heat of the summer for a little gambling and horse-racing. Before its minarets was a plateau covered with fields of young corn in their first pale, strong green, vibrant as a high C from a celestial soprano, and orchards white with cherry and plum. We drove up an avenue of bronze and gold budding ash trees and lovely children dashed out of a school and saluted us as a sign and wonder. We saw other lovely children later, outside a gipsy encampment of tents made with extreme simplicity of pieces of black canvas hung over a bar and tethered to the ground on each side. Our Swabian chauffeur drove at a pace incredible for him, lest we should give them pennies.

A neat village called Little Horse ran like a looped whip round a bridged valley, and we wondered to see in the heart of the country so many urban-looking little cafés where men sat and drank coffee. The road mounted and spring ran backwards like a reversed film; we were among trees that had not yet put out a bud, and from a high pass we looked back at a tremendous circle of snow peaks about whose feet we had run unwitting. We fell again through Swissish country, between banks blond with primroses, into richer country full of stranger people. Gipsies, supple and golden creatures whom the window-curtains of Golders Green had clothed in the colours of the sunrise and the sunset, gave us greetings and laughter; Moslem women walking unveiled towards the road turned their backs until we passed, or if there was a wall near by sought it and flattened their faces against it. We came to a wide valley, flanked with hills that, according to the curious conformation, run not east and west nor north and south but in all directions, so that the view changed every instant and the earth seemed as fluid and restless as the ocean.

‘We are quite near Sarajevo,’ I said; ‘it is at the end of this valley.’ Though I was right, we did not arrive there for some time. The main road was under repair and we had to make a detour along a road so bad that the mud spouted higher than the car, and after a mile or so our faces and topcoats were covered with it. This is really an undeveloped country, one cannot come and go yet as one chooses.

Sarajevo I

‘Look,’ I said, ‘the river at Sarajevo runs red. That I think a bit too much. The pathetic fallacy really ought not to play with such painful matters.’ ‘Yes, it is as blatant as a propagandist poster,’ said my husband. We were standing on the bridge over which the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife would have driven on the morning of June the twenty-eighth, 1914, if they had not been shot by a Bosnian named Gavrilo Princip, just as their car was turning off the embankment.

We shuddered and crossed to the other bank, where there was a little park with a café in it. We sat and drank coffee, looking at the Pyrus Japonica and the white lilacs that grew all round us, and the people, who were almost as decorative as flowers. At the next table sat a Moslem woman wearing a silk overall striped in lilac and purple and dull blue. Her long narrow hand shot out of its folds to spoon a drop from a glass of water into her coffee-cup; here there is Turkish coffee, which carries its grounds in suspension, and the cold drop precipitates them. Her hand shot out again to hold her veil just high enough to let her other hand carry the cup to her lips. When she was not drinking she sat quite still, the light breeze pressing her black veil against her features. Her stillness was more than the habit of a Western woman, yet the uncovering of her mouth and chin had shown her completely un-Oriental, as luminously fair as any Scandinavian. Further away two Moslem men sat on a bench and talked politics, beating with their fingers on the headlines of a newspaper. Both were tall, raw-boned, bronze-haired, with eyes crackling with sheer blueness: Danish sea captains, perhaps, had they not been wearing the fez.

We noted then, and were to note it again and again as we went about the city, that such sights gave it a special appearance. The costumes which we regard as the distinguishing badge of an Oriental race, proof positive that the European frontier has been crossed, are worn by people far less Oriental in aspect than, say, the Latins; and this makes Sarajevo look like a fancy-dress ball. There is also an air of immense luxury about the town, of unwavering dedication to pleasure, which makes it credible that it would hold a festivity on so extensive and costly a scale. This air is, strictly speaking, a deception, since Sarajevo is stuffed with poverty of a most denuded kind. The standard of living among the working classes is lower than even in our great Western cities. But there is also a solid foundation of moderate wealth. The Moslems here scorned trade but they were landowners, and their descendants hold the remnants of their fortunes and are now functionaries and professional men. The trade they rejected fell into the hands of the Christians, who therefore grew in the towns to be a wealthy and privileged class, completely out of touch with the oppressed Christian peasants outside the city walls. There is also a Jewish colony here, descended from a group who came here from Spain after the expulsory decrees of Ferdinand and Isabella, and grafted itself on an older group which had been in the Balkans from time immemorial; it has acquired wealth and culture. So the town lies full-fed in the trough by the red river, and rises up the bowl of the blunt-ended valley in happy, open suburbs where handsome houses stand among their fruit trees. There one may live very pleasantly, looking down on the minarets of the hundred mosques of Sarajevo, and the tall poplars that march the course of the red-running river. The dead here also make for handsomeness, for acres and acres above these suburbs are given up to the deliberate carelessness of the Moslem cemeteries, where the marble posts stick slantwise among uncorrected grass and flowers and ferns, which grow as cheerfully as in any other meadow.

But the air of luxury in Sarajevo has less to do with material goods than with the people. They greet delight here with unreluctant and sturdy appreciation, they are even prudent about it, they will let no drop of pleasure run to waste. It is good to wear red and gold and blue and green: the women wear them, and in the Moslem bazaar that covers several acres of the town with its open-fronted shops there are handkerchiefs and shawls and printed stuffs which say ‘Yes’ to the idea of brightness as only the very rich, who can go to dressmakers who are conscious specialists in the eccentric, dare to say it in the Western world. Men wash in the marble fountain of the great mosque facing the bazaar and at the appointed hour prostrate themselves in prayer, with the most comfortable enjoyment of coolness and repose and the performance of a routine in good repute. In the Moslem cookshops they sell the great cartwheel tarts made of fat leaf-thin pastry stuffed with spinach which presuppose that no man will be ashamed of his greed and his liking for grease. The looks the men cast on the veiled women, the gait by which the women admit that they know they are being looked upon, speak of a romanticism that can take its time to dream and resolve because it is the flower of the satisfied flesh. This tradition of tranquil sensuality is of Moslem origin, and is perhaps still strongest among Moslems, but also on Jewish and Christian faces can there be recognized this steady light, which makes it seem as if the Puritans who banish pleasure and libertines who savage her do worse than we had imagined. We had thought of them as destroying harmless beauty: but here we learned to suspect that they throw away an instruction necessary for the mastery of life.

Though Sarajevo has so strong a character it is not old as cities go. It was originally a mining town. Up on the heights there is to be seen a Turkish fortress, reconditioned by the Austrians, and behind it are the old workings of a mine that was once exploited by merchants from Dubrovnik. This is not to say that it had ever any of the casual and reckless character of a modern mining town. In past ages, before it was realized that though minerals seem solid enough their habits make them not more reliable as supports than the rainbow, a mining town would be as sober and confident as any other town built on a hopeful industry. But it was neither big nor powerful when it fell into the hands of the Turks in 1464. The capital of Bosnia was Yaitse, usually but unhelpfully spelt Jajce, about ninety miles or so north in the mountains. But after the conquest Sarajevo became extremely important as a focal point where various human characteristics were demonstrated, one of which was purely a local peculiarity, yet was powerful and appalling on the grandest scale.

It happened that the Manichæan heresy, which had touched Dalmatia and left its mark so deeply on Trogir, had struck even deeper roots in Bosnia, where a sect called the Bogomils had attracted a vast proportion of the people, including both the feudal lords and the peasants. We do not know much about this sect except from their enemies, who were often blatant liars. It is thought from the name ‘Bogomil,’ which means ‘God have mercy’ in old Slavonic, and from the behaviour of the surviving remnants of the sect, that they practised the habit of ecstatic prayer, which comes easy to all Slavs; and they adapted the dualism of this heresy to Slav taste. They rejected its Puritanism and incorporated in it a number of pre-Christian beliefs and customs, including such superstitions as the belief in the haunting of certain places by elemental spirits and the practice of gathering herbs at certain times and using them with incantations. They also gave it a Slav character by introducing a political factor. Modern historians suggest that Bogomilism was not so much a heresy as a schism, that it represented the attempt of a strong national party to form a local church which should be independent of either the Roman Catholic or the Orthodox Church.

Whatever Bogomilism was, it satisfied the religious necessities of the mass of Bosnians for nearly two hundred and fifty years, notwithstanding the savage attacks of both the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Churches. The Roman Catholic Church was the more dangerous of the two. This was not because the Orthodox Church had the advantage in tolerance: the Council of Constantinople laid it down that Bogomils must be burned alive. It was because the political situation in the East became more and more unfavourable to the Orthodox Church, until finally the coming of the Turks ranged them among the objects rather than the inflictors of persecution. The Latin Church had no such mellowing misfortunes; and though for a time it lost its harshness towards heretics, and was, for example, most merciful towards Jews and Arians under the Carlovingians, it was finally urged by popular bigotry and adventurous monarchs to take up the sword against the enemies of the faith.

At the end of the twelfth century we find a King of Dalmatia who wanted to seize Bosnia complaining to the Pope that the province was full of heretics, and appealing to him to get the King of Hungary to expel them. This began a system of interference which was for long wholly unavailing. In 1221 there were none but Bogomil priests in Bosnia, under whom the country was extremely devout. But the zeal of the Church had been fired, and in 1247 the Pope endeavoured to inspire the Archbishop of Bosnia by describing to him how his predecessors had tried to redeem their see by devastating the greater part of it and by killing or carrying away in captivity many thousands of Bosnians. The people, however, remained obstinately Bogomil, and as soon as the attention of the Papacy was diverted elsewhere, as it was during the Waldensian persecutions and the Great Schism, they stood firm in their faith again. Finally it was adopted as the official state religion.

But the Papacy had staked a great deal on Bosnia. It had preached crusade after crusade against the land, with full indulgences, as in the case of crusades to Palestine. It had sent out brigades of missionaries, who had behaved with glorious heroism and had in many cases suffered martyrdom. It had used every form of political pressure on neighbouring monarchs to induce them to invade Bosnia and put it to fire and the sword. It had, by backing Catholic usurpers to the Bosnian throne, caused perpetual disorder within the kingdom and destroyed all possibility of dynastic unity. Now it made one last supreme effort. It supported the Emperor Sigismund of Hungary, who held Croatia and Dalmatia, and who wished to add Bosnia to his kingdom. This was not a step at all likely to promote the cause of order. Sigismund was a flighty adventurer whose indifference to Slav interests was later shown by his surrender of Dalmatia to Venice. But the Pope issued a Bull calling Christendom to a crusade against the Turks, the apostate Arians, and the heretic Bosnians, and the Emperor embarked on a campaign which was sheer vexation to the tortured Slav lands, and scored the success of capturing the Bosnian king. The Bosnians were unimpressed and replaced him by another, also a staunch Bogomil. Later Sigismund sent back the first king, whose claim to the throne was naturally resented by the second. The wretched country was again precipitated into civil war.

This was in 1415. In 1389 the battle of Kossovo had been lost by the Christian Serbs. For twenty-six years the Turks had been digging themselves in over the border of Bosnia. They had already some foothold in the southern part of the kingdom. A child could have seen what was bound to happen. The Turks offered the Bogomils military protection, secure possession of their lands, and full liberty to practise their religion provided they counted themselves as Moslems and not as Christians, and did not attack the forces of the Ottoman Empire. The Bogomils, having been named in a Papal Bull with the Turks as common enemies of Christendom and having suffered invasion in consequence, naturally accepted the offer. Had it not been for the intolerance of the Papacy we would not have had Turkey in Europe for five hundred years. Fifty years later, the folly had been consummated. Bosnia was wholly Turkish, and the Turks had passed on towards Hungary and Central Europe. It is worth while noting that a band of Bogomils who had been driven out of Bosnia by a temporary Catholic king, while their companions had been sent in chains to Rome to be ‘benignantly converted,’ valiantly defended the Herzegovinian mountains against the Turks for another twenty years.

But the story does not stop there. It was only then that a certain peculiar and awful characteristic of human nature showed itself, as it has since shown itself on one other occasion in history. There is a kind of human being, terrifying above all others, who resist by yielding. Let it be supposed that it is a woman. A man is pleased by her, he makes advances to her, he finds that no woman was ever more compliant. He marvels at the way she allows him to take possession of her and perhaps despises her for it. Then suddenly he finds that his whole life has been conditioned to her, that he has become bodily dependent on her, that he has acquired the habit of living in a house with her, that food is not food unless he eats it with her.

It is at this point that he suddenly realizes that he has not conquered her mind, and that he is not sure if she loves him, or even likes him, or even considers him of great moment. Then it occurs to him as a possibility that she failed to resist him in the first place because simply nothing he could do seemed of the slightest importance. He may even suspect that she let him come into her life because she hated him, and wanted him to expose himself before her so that she could despise him for his weakness. This, since man is a hating rather than a loving animal, may not impossibly be the truth of the situation. There will be an agonizing period when he attempts to find out the truth. But that he will not be able to do, for it is the essence of this woman’s character not to uncover her face. He will therefore have to withdraw from the frozen waste in which he finds himself, where there is neither heat nor light nor food nor shelter, but only the fear of an unknown enemy, and he will have to endure the pain of living alone till he can love someone else; or he will have to translate himself into another person, who will be accepted by her, a process that means falsification of the soul. Whichever step he takes, the woman will grow stronger and more serene, though not so strong and serene as she will if he tries the third course of attempting to coerce her.

Twice the Slavs have played the part of this woman in the history of Europe. Once, on the simpler occasion, when the Russians let Napoleon into the core of their country, where he found himself among snow and ashes, his destiny dead. The second time it happened here in Sarajevo. The heretic Bosnian nobles surrendered their country to the Turks in exchange for freedom to keep their religion and their lands, but they were aware that these people were their enemies. There could be no two races more antipathetic than the Slavs, with their infinite capacity for inquiry and speculation, and the Turks, who had no word in their language to express the idea of being interested in anything, and who were therefore content in abandonment to the tropism of a militarist system. This antipathy grew stronger as the Turks began to apply to Bosnia the same severe methods of raising revenue with which they drained all their conquered territories, and the same system of recruiting. For some time after the conquest they began to draw from Bosnia, as from Serbia and Bulgaria and Macedonia, the pick of all the Slav boys, to act as Janizaries, as the Prætorian Guard of the Ottoman Empire. It was the fate of these boys to be brought up ignorant of the names of their families or their birth-places, to be denied later the right to marry or own property, to be nothing but instruments of warfare for the Sultan’s use, as inhuman as lances or bombs.

To these exactions the Bosnians submitted. They could do nothing else. But the two Bosnian nobles who had been the first to submit to the Turks came to this mining town and founded a city which was called Bosna Sarai, from the fortress, the Sarai, on the heights above it. Here they lived in a pride undiminished by conquest, though adapted to it. It must be remembered that these people would not see themselves as renegades in any shocking sense. The followers of a heresy itself strongly Oriental in tone would not feel that they were abandoning Christianity in practising their worship under Moslem protection, since Mohammed acknowledged the sanctity of Christ, and Moslems had no objection to worshipping in Christian churches. To this day in Sarajevo Moslems make a special point of attending the Church of St. Anthony of Padua every Tuesday evening. The Bosnian Moslems felt that they had won their independence by a concession no greater than they would have made had they submitted to the Roman Catholic Church. So they sat down in their new town, firm in self-respect, and profited by the expanding wealth of their conquerors.

It was then, no doubt, that the town acquired its air of pleasure, for among the Turks at that time voluptuousness knew its splendid holiday. An insight into what its wealth came to be is given us by a catastrophe. When Kara Mustapha, the Vizier who tormented Dubrovnik, was beaten outside Vienna his camp dazzled Europe with a vision of luxury such as it had never seen, such as perhaps it has never known since. His stores were immense; he travelled with twenty thousand head apiece of buffaloes, oxen, camels, and mules, a flock of ten thousand sheep, and a country’s crop of corn and sugar and coffee and honey and fat. His camp was the girth of Warsaw, wrote John Sobieski to his wife, and not imaginable by humble Poles. The Vizier’s tent—this I know, for I once saw it in Vienna—was a masterpiece of delicate embroidery in many colours. There were also bathrooms flowing with scented waters, gardens with fountains, superb beds, glittering lamps and chandeliers and priceless carpets, and a menagerie containing all manner of birds and beasts and fishes. Before Kara Mustapha fled he decapitated two of his possessions which he thought so beautiful he could not bear the Christian dogs to enjoy them. One was a specially beautiful wife, the other was an ostrich. The scent of that world, luxurious and inclusive, still hangs about the mosques and latticed windows and walled gardens of Sarajevo.

But however sensuous that population might be, it was never supine. Sarajevo, as the seat of the new Moslem nobility, was made the headquarters of the Bosnian Janizaries. These Janizaries, however, singularly failed to carry out the intention of their founders. Their education proved unable to make them forget they were Slavs. They insisted on speaking Serbian, they made no effort to conceal a racial patriotism, and what was more they insisted on taking wives and acquiring property. Far from inhumanly representing the Ottoman power in opposition to the Bosnian nobles, they were their friends and allies. The Porte found itself unable to alter this state of affairs, because the Janizaries of Constantinople, who were also Slavs, had a lively liking for them and could not be trusted to act against them. It had no other resources, for it had exterminated the leaders of the Bosnian Christians and in any case could hardly raise them up to fight for their oppressors.

Hence there grew up, well within the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, a Free City, in which the Slavs lived as they liked, according to a constitution they based on Slav law and custom, and defied all interference. It even passed a law by which the Pasha of Bosnia was forbidden to stay more than a night at a time within the city walls. For that one night he was treated as an honoured guest, but the next morning he found himself escorted to the city gates. It was out of the question that the Ottoman Empire should ever make Sarajevo its seat of government. That had to be the smaller town of Travnik, fifty miles away, and even there the Pasha was not his own master. If the Janizaries of Sarajevo complained of him to the Sublime Porte, he was removed. Fantastically, the only right that the Porte insisted on maintaining to prove its power was the appointment of two officials to see that justice was done in disputes between Christians and Moslems; and even then the Commune of Sarajevo could dismiss them once they were appointed. Often the sultans and viziers must have wondered, ‘But when did we conquer these people? Alas, how can we have thought we had conquered these people? What would we do not to have conquered these people?’

Things went very well with this mutinous city for centuries. Its independence enabled it to withstand the shock of the blows inflicted on the Turks at Vienna and Belgrade, which meant that they must abandon their intention of dominating Europe. There came a bad day at the end of the seventeenth century, when Prince Eugène of Savoy rode down from Hungary with his cavalry and looked down on the city from a foothill at the end of the valley. Then the Slavs proved their unity in space and time, and the Bosnians rehearsed the trick that the Russians were later to play on Napoleon. The town, Prince Eugène was told, had been abandoned. It lay there, empty, to be taken. Prince Eugène grew thoughtful and advanced no further, though he had been eager to see this outpost of the East, whose atmosphere must have been pleasing to his own type of voluptuousness. He turned round and went back to the Danube at the head of a vast column of Christian refugees whom he took to Austrian territory. Perhaps that retreat made the difference between the fates of Prince Eugène and Napoleon.

After that a century passed and left Sarajevo much as it was, plump in insubordination. Then came the great reforming sultans, Selim III and Mahmud II, who saw that they must rebuild their house if it were not to tumble about their ears. They resolved to reorganize the Janizaries and, when that proved impossible, to disband them. These were by now a completely lawless body exercising supreme authority over all lawfully constituted administrative units. Also the sultans resolved to reform the land and taxation system which made hungry slaves of the peasants. Nothing would have been less pleasing to Sarajevo. The Janizaries and the Bosnian nobility had worked together to maintain unaltered the feudal system which had perished in nearly all other parts of Europe, and the proposal to remove the disabilities of the Christian peasants reawakened a historic feud. The Bosnian Moslem city-dwelling nobles hated these Christian peasants, because they were the descendants of the Catholic and Orthodox barons and their followers who had opened the door to the invader by their intolerance of Bogomilism.

Therefore the Janizaries and the Moslem nobles fought the sultans. The Janizaries refused to be disbanded and when their brothers had been exterminated in Constantinople the prohibited uniform was still to be seen in Sarajevo: the blue pelisse, the embroidered under-coat, the huge towering turban, decorated when the wearer was of the higher ranks with bird-of-paradise plumes, the high leather boots, red and yellow and black according to rank. In time they had to retreat from the town to the fortress on the heights above it, and that too fell later to the troops of the central authority; Bosnian nobles were beheaded, and the Pasha entered into full possession of the city where for four centuries he had been received on sufferance. But after a few months, in July 1828, the Sarajevans took their revenge and, aided by the citizens of a neighbouring town called Visok, broke in and for three days massacred their conquerors. Their victory was so terrible that they were left undisturbed till 1850, and then they were defeated by a Turkish Empire which itself was near to defeat, and was to be drummed out of Bosnia by peasants not thirty years later. At last the two lovers had destroyed each other. But they were famous lovers. This beautiful city speaks always of their preoccupation with one another, of what the Slav, not to be won by any gift, took from the Turk, and still was never won, of the unappeasable hunger with which the Turk longed throughout the centuries to make the Slav subject to him, although the Slav is never subject, not even to himself.

Sarajevo II

We knew we should try to get some sleep before the evening, because Constantine was coming from Belgrade and would want to sit up late and talk. But we hung about too late in the bazaar, watching a queue of men who had lined up to have their fezes ironed. It is an amusing process. In a steamy shop two Moslems were working, each clapping a fez down on a fez-shaped cone heated inside like an old-fashioned flat-iron and then clapping down another cone on it and screwing that down very tight, then releasing the fez with a motherly expression. ‘What extremely tidy people the Moslems must be,’ said my husband; but added, ‘This cannot be normal, however. If it were there would be more shops of this sort. There must be some festival tomorrow. We will ask the people at the hotel.’ But we were so tired that we forgot, and slept so late that Constantine had to send us up a message saying he had arrived and was eager to go out to dinner.

When we came downstairs Constantine was standing in the hall, talking to two men, tall and dark and dignified, with the sallow, long-lashed dignity of Sephardim. ‘I tell you I have friends everywhere,’ he said. ‘These are two of my friends, they like me very much. They are Jews from Spain, and they speak beautiful soft Spanish of the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, not the Spanish of today, which is hard and guttural as German. This is Dr Lachan, who is a banker, and Dr Marigan, who is a judge. I think they are both very good men, they move in a sort of ritual way along prescribed paths, and there is nothing ever wrong. Now they will take us to a café where we will eat a little, but it is not for the eating they are taking us there, it is because they have heard there is a girl there who sings the Bosnian songs very well, and it is not for nothing that there are so many mosques in Sarajevo, this is truly the East, and people attach great importance to such things as girls who sing the Bosnian songs, even though they are very serious people.’

The men greeted us with beautiful and formal manners, and we went down the street to the café. It could be seen they liked Constantine half because he is a great poet, half because he is like a funny little dog. But at the door they began to think of us and wonder if they should take us to such a place. ‘For us and our wives it is nice,’ they said, ‘but we are used to it. Perhaps for an English lady it will seem rather strange. There are sometimes dancers ... well, there is one now.’ A stout woman clad in sequined pink muslin trousers and brassière was standing on a platform revolving her stomach in time to the music of a piano and violin, and as we entered she changed her subject matter and began to revolve her large firm breasts in opposite directions. This gave an effect of hard, mechanical magic; it was as if two cannon-balls were rolling away from each other but were for ever kept contingent by some invisible power of attraction. ‘Your wife does not mind?’ asked the judge and the banker. ‘I think not,’ said my husband. As we went down the aisle one of the cannon-balls ceased to revolve, though the other went on rolling quicker than ever, while the woman cried out my name in tones of familiarity and welcome. The judge and the banker showed no signs of having witnessed this greeting. As we sat down I felt embarrassed by their silence and said, in explanation, ‘How extraordinary I should come across this woman again.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ said the judge. ‘How extraordinary it is,’ I repeated, ‘that I should come across this woman again. I met her last year in Macedonia.’ ‘Oh, it is you that she knows!’ exclaimed the judge and the banker, and I perceived that they had thought she was a friend of my husband’s.

I was really very glad to see her again. When Constantine and I had been in Skoplje the previous Easter he had taken me to a night club in the Moslem quarter. That form of entertainment which we think of as peculiarly modern Western and profligate was actually far more at home in the ancient and poverty-stricken Near East. In any sizable village in Macedonia I think one would find at least one café where a girl sang and there was music. In Skoplje, which has under seventy thousand inhabitants, there are many such, including a night club almost on a Trocadéro scale. In the little Moslem cabaret we visited there was nobody more opulent than a small shopkeeper, but the performers numbered a male gipsy who sang and played the gusla, a very beautiful Serbian singer, a still more beautiful gipsy girl who sang and danced, and this danseuse de ventre, who was called Astra. When Astra came round and rattled the plate at our table I found she was a Salonika Jewess, member of another colony of refugees from Ferdinand and Isabella who still speak Spanish, and I asked her to come and see me the next day at my hotel and give me a lesson in the danse de ventre.

She was with me earlier than I had expected, at ten o‘clock, wearing a curious coat-frock, of a pattern and inexpert make which at once suggested she had hardly any occasion to be fully dressed, and that she would have liked to be a housewife in a row of houses all exactly alike. The lesson in the danse de ventre was not a success. I picked up the movement wonderfully, she said; I had it perfectly, but I could not produce the right effect. ’Voyez-vous, Madame,’ she said, in the slow French she had picked up in a single term at a mission school, ’vous n‘avez pas de quoi.’ It is the only time in my life that I have been reproached with undue slenderness; but I suppose Astra herself weighed a hundred and sixty pounds, though she carried no loose flesh like a fat Western woman, but was solid and elastic. After the lesson had failed we sat and talked. She came of a family of musicians. She had a sister who had married an Englishman employed in Salonika, and now lived in Ealing and had two pretty little girls, like dolls they were so pretty, Milly and Lily. It was terrible they were so far away. She herself was a widow, her husband had been a Greek lorry driver who was killed in a road accident after three years of marriage. She had one son, a boy of ten. It was her ambition that he should go to a French school, in her experience there was nothing like French education ‘pour faire libre l’esprit.‘ In the meantime he was at a Yugoslavian school and doing well, because he was naturally a good and diligent little boy, but she wanted something better for him.

It was very disagreeable, her occupation. She did not state explicitly what it included, but we took it for granted. It was not so bad in Greece or Bulgaria or in the North of Yugoslavia, in all of which places she had often worked, but of late she had got jobs only in South Serbia, in night clubs where the clients were for the most part Turks. She clapped her hand to her brow and shook her head and said, ‘Vous ne savez pas, Madame, à quel point les Turcs sont idiots.’ Her complaint, when I investigated it, was just what it sounds. She was distressed because her Turkish visitors had no conversation. Her coat-frock fell back across her knee and showed snow-white cambric underclothing and flesh scrubbed clean as the cleanest cook’s kitchen table, and not more sensuous. She was all decency and good sense, and she was pronouncing sound judgment.

The judgment was appalling. The Turks in South Serbia are not like the Slav Moslems of Sarajevo, they are truly Turks. They are Turks who were settled there after the battle of Kossovo, who have remained what the Ataturk would not permit Turks to be any longer. They are what a people must become if it suspends all intellectual life and concentrates on the idea of conquest. It knows victory, but there is a limit to possible victories; what has been gained cannot be maintained, for that requires the use of the intellect, which has been removed. So there is decay, the long humiliation of decay. At one time the forces of Selim and Suleiman covered half a continent with the precise and ferocious ballet of perfect warfare, the sensuality of the sultans and the viziers searched for fresh refinements and made of their discoveries the starting points for further search, fountains played in courtyards and walled gardens where there had been till then austere barbarism. At the end an ageing cabaret dancer, the homely and decent vanishing point of voluptuousness, sits on a bed and says with dreadful justice: ‘Vous ne savez pas, Madame, à quel point les Turcs sont idiots.’

When Astra came to our table later she told me that she hoped to be in Sarajevo for some weeks longer, and that she was happier here than she had been in Skoplje. ‘Ici,’ she pronounced, ‘les gens sont beaucoup plus cultivés.’ As soon as she had gone I found at my shoulder the Swabian chauffeur from Dubrovnik, whom we had paid off that afternoon. ‘Why is that woman talking to you?’ he said. He always immensely disconcerted me by his interventions. I was always afraid that if I said to him, ‘What business is this of yours?’ he would answer, in the loathsome manner of a miracle play, ‘I am Reason’ or ’I am Conscience,‘ and that it would be true. So I stammered, ’I know her.‘ ’You cannot know such a person,‘ he said. ’Do you mean you have been in some café where she has performed?‘ ’Yes, yes,‘ I said, ’it was in Skoplje, and she is a very nice woman, she has a son of whom she is fond.‘ ’How do you know she has a son?‘ asked the chauffeur. ’She told me so,‘ I said. ’You do not have to believe everything that such a person tells you,‘ said the chauffeur. ’But I am sure it is true,‘ I exclaimed hotly, ’and I am very sorry for her.‘ The chauffeur gave me a glance too heavily veiled by respect to be respectful, and then looked at my husband, but sighed, as if to remind himself that he would find no help there. Suddenly he picked up my bag and said, ’I came to say that I had remembered I had forgotten to take that grease-spot out with petrol as I had promised you, so I will take it outside and do it now.‘ He then bowed, and left me. I thought, ’He is really too conscientious, this is very inconvenient for now I have no powder.‘ But of course he would not have thought it necessary for me to have any powder.

But my attention was immediately diverted. A very handsome young man had come up to our table in a state of extreme anger; he was even angrier than any of the angry young men in Dalmatia. He evidently knew Constantine and the judge and the banker, but he did not give them any formal greeting. Though his hair was bronze and his eyes crackled with blueness, and he might have been brother to the two Moslems we had seen talking politics in the park that afternoon, he cried out, ‘What about the accursed Turks?’ The judge and the banker made no reply, but Constantine said, ‘Well, it was not I who made them.’ The young man insisted, ‘But you serve our precious Government, don’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Constantine, ‘for the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being in opposition.’ ‘Then perhaps you can explain why your Belgrade gangster politicians have devised this method of insulting us Bosnians,’ said the young man. ‘We are used,’ he said, stretching his arms wide and shouting, ‘to their iniquities. We have seen them insulting our brothers the Croats, we have seen them spitting in the faces of all those who love liberty. But usually there is some sense in what they do, they either put money in their pockets or they consolidate their tyranny. But this crazy burlesque can bring them no profit. It can be done for no purpose but to wound the pride of us Bosnians. Will you be polite enough to explain a little why your horde of thugs and thieves have formed this curious intention of paying this unprovoked insult to a people whose part it should be to insult rather than be insulted?’

The judge leaned over to me and whispered, ‘It is all right, Madame, they are just talking a little about politics.’ ‘But what has the Government done to insult Bosnia?’ I asked. ‘It has arranged,’ said the banker, ‘that the Turkish Prime Minister and Minister of War, who are in Belgrade discussing our military alliance with them, are to come here tomorrow to be received by the Moslem population.’ ‘Ah,’ said my husband, ‘that accounts for all the fezes being ironed. Well, do many people take the visit like this young man?’ ‘No,’ said the banker, ‘he is a very extreme young man.’ ‘I would not say so,’ said the judge sadly.

At that moment the young man smashed his fist down on the table and cried into Constantine’s face, ‘Judas Iscariot! Judas Iscariot!’ ‘No,’ said poor Constantine to his retreating back, ‘I am not Judas Iscariot. I have indeed never been quite sure which of the disciples I do resemble, but it is a very sweet little one, the most mignon of them all.’ He applied himself to the business of eating a line of little pieces of strongly seasoned meat that had been broiled on a skewer; and when he set it down wistfulness was wet in his round black eye. ‘All the same I do not like it, what that young man said. It was not agreeable. Dear God, I wish the young would be more agreeable to my generation, for we suffered very much in the war, and if it were not for us they would still be slaves under the Austrians.’

Cautiously the banker said, ‘Do you think it is really wise, this visit?’ Constantine answered wearily, ‘I think it is wise, for our Prime Minister, Mr Stoyadinovitch, does not do foolish things.’ ‘But why is it objected to at all?’ said my husband. ‘That even I understand a little,’ said Constantine, ‘for the Turks were our oppressors and we drove them out, so that we Christians should be free. And now the heads of the Turkish state are coming by the consent of our Christian state to see the Moslems who upheld the oppressors. I see that it must seem a little odd.’ ‘But how is it possible,’ said my husband, ‘that there should be so much feeling against the Turks when nobody who is not very old can possibly have had any personal experience of their oppressions?’

The three men looked at my husband as if he were talking great nonsense. ‘Well,’ said my husband, ‘were not the Turks booted out of here in 1878?’ ‘Ah, no, no!’ exclaimed the three men. ‘You do not understand,’ said Constantine; ‘the Turkish Empire went from here in 1878, but the Slav Moslems remained, and when Austria took control it was still their holiday. For they were the favourites of the Austrians, far above the Christians, far above the Serbs or the Croats.’ ‘But why was that?’ asked my husband. ‘It was because of the principle, Divide et impera,’ said the banker. It was odd to hear the phrase from the lips of one of its victims. ‘Look, there were fifty or sixty thousand people in the town,’ said the banker. ‘There were us, the Jews, who are of two kinds, the Sephardim, from Spain and Portugal, and the others, the Ashkenazi, who are from Central Europe and the East, and that is a division. Then there were the Christian Slavs, who are Croats and Serbs, and that is a division. But lest we should forget our differences, they raised up the Moslems, who were a third of the population, to be their allies against the Christians and the Jews.’

Their faces darkening with the particular sullenness of rebels, they spoke of their youth, shadowed by the double tyranny of Austria and the Moslems. To men of their position, for both came from wealthy and influential families, that tyranny had been considerably mitigated. It had fallen with a far heavier hand on the peasants and the inhabitants of the poorer towns, and there it meant a great deal of imprisonment and flogging, and occasional executions. But to these people there had been a constant nagging provocation and a sense of insult. The Moslems were given the finest schools and colleges, the best posts in the administration were reserved for them, they were invited to all official functions and treated as honoured guests, the railway trains were held up at their hours of prayer. The Turkish land system, which grossly favoured the Moslems at the extense of the Christians, was carefully preserved intact by his Catholic Majesty the Emperor Franz Josef. And it was a special source of bitterness that the Austrians had forced their way into Bosnia after the Slavs had driven out the Turks, on the pretext that they must establish a garrison force to protect the Christians there in case the Turks came back. That they should then humiliate the Christians at the hand of those Moslems who had stayed behind seemed to these men an inflaming piece of hypocrisy which could never be forgotten or forgiven.

They evidently felt this deeply and sincerely, although they themselves were Jewish. The situation was obviously one of great complexity. That was apparent when they likened the Turks to dogs and swine, and spoke the words with more than Western loathing, as the Turks would have done. ‘When I went to Berlin to study for my degree,’ said the banker, ‘I used to feel ashamed because the Germans took me as an equal, and here in my house I was treated as an inferior to men with fezes on their heads, to Orientals.’ In that statement too many strands were twisted. Later my husband asked, ‘But are the Moslems a sufficiently important and active group for it to matter whether they are encouraged or not?’ The lawyer and the banker answered together, ‘Oh, certainly,’ and Constantine explained, ‘Yes, they are very, very clever politicians, much cleverer than we are, for Islam taught them something, let us say it taught them not to run about letting off guns just because one of them had a birthday. Our Government has always to conciliate the Moslems. In the present Cabinet Mr Spaho is the Minister of Transport, and he is a Moslem from this town.’ ‘A most excellent man,’ agreed the judge and banker, beaming. All that they had spoken of for so long in such a steady flow of hatred was forgotten in a glow of local patriotism.

At last it was time to go. ‘No, your Mr Stoyadinovitch has not done well,’ said the banker finally. ‘It is not that we do not like the Moslems. Since the war all things have changed, and we are on excellent terms. But it is not nice when they are picked out by the Government and allowed to receive a ceremonial visit from the representative of the power that crushed us and ground us down into the mud.’ We rose, and Astra in her sequins and pink muslin bounced from the platform like a great sorbo-ball to say good-bye. I wanted to give her a present, but remembered that the chauffeur had taken my bag away to clean it, so I told her to come and see me at the hotel next day. As we went out the Swabian chauffeur suddenly reappeared, rising from a table which was concealed by the bushes and creepers which were set about to give the cabaret the appearance of an open-air beer-garden. He handed back my bag with a triumphant smile, and I perceived that he had hidden himself for this very reason, that I should not be able to find him and get my money if I felt a charitable impulse towards my unsuitable friend.

‘And please note,’ he said, his eyes passing uneasily from my husband to me and then back again, deeply distressed by our lack of sense, ‘it would be a good thing to stay indoors tomorrow morning, for the Turkish Prime Minister and War Minister are coming to visit the Moslems and there might be a disturbance. At any rate, it is not for you, there will be great crowds.’ He spoke with authority out of the mass of his ideal world, which was almost as solid as if it were real because it had been conceived by his solid mind: a world in which people with money were also reasonable people, who did not give alms to the unworthy and stayed indoors when it was not so safe outdoors. And his blindish-looking eyes begged us to remember that we were English and therefore to refrain from acting like these Slavs.

Sarajevo III

I woke only once from my sleep, and heard the muezzins crying out to the darkness from the hundred minarets of the city that there is but one God and Mohammed His prophet. It is a cry that holds an ultimate sadness, like the hooting of owls and the barking of foxes in night-time. The muezzins are making that plain statement of their cosmogony, and the owls and the foxes are obeying the simplest need for expression; yet their cries, which they intended to mean so little, prove more conclusively than any argument that life is an occasion which justifies the hugest expenditure of pity. I had nearly fallen asleep again when my husband said out of his dreams, ‘Strange, strange.’ ‘What is strange?’ I said. ‘That Jewish banker,’ he replied, ‘he said so proudly that when he was a student in Berlin he felt ashamed because he was treated there as an equal when here he was treated as inferior to the Moslems. I wonder what he feels about Germany now.’

In the morning we were not late, but Constantine was down before us, breakfasting in the café. One of the reasons why people of the Nordic type dislike Constantine is that he is able to do things out of sheer vitality for which they require moral stimulus. His good red blood can fetch him out of bed without a moment of sombre resolution, his vigorous pulse keeps him going without resort to perseverance. The writings of the early Christian Fathers show that few things irritated them like a pagan who was in full possession of the virtues. But though he was vigorous this morning he was not gay. ‘Look at all the flags,’ he said, ‘it is a great day for Sarajevo. See how I show you all.’ But he spoke glumly.

I suspected that he was secretly of his friends’ mind about the day’s doings; and indeed it was not exhilarating to look out of the café windows and see a stream of passing people, and none of the men without fezes, all of the women veiled. I do not mind there being such men and women, but one sees them with a different eye when they are in a majority and could put at a disadvantage all those not of their kind. ‘I can understand that such a ceremony as this can revive all sorts of apprehensions,’ I said tartlessly. ‘We had better go,’ said Constantine, ignoring my remark. ‘The party from Belgrade are not coming to the railway station, they stop the railway train at a special halt in the middle of the boulevards, near the museum, and it is quite a way from here.’

For part of the way we took a cab, and then we had to get out and walk. Because Constantine had his Government pass and we were to be present at the reception at the station, we were allowed to go down the middle of the streets, which were entirely lined with veiled women and men wearing fezes. Only a few Christians were to be seen here and there. ‘There seem to be a great many Moslems,’ I said, after the first two or three hundred yards. The crowd was close-packed and unified by a common aspect. The faces of the men were flattened, almost plastered by an expression of dogged adherence to some standard; they were all turned upwards to one hope. The women were as expressive in their waiting, though their faces were hidden. A light rain was falling on their silk and cotton overalls, but they did not move, and only some of them put up umbrellas, though most of them were carrying them. It was as if they thought of themselves already as participants in a sacred rite. Some of the spectators were arranged in processional order and held small, amateurish, neatly inscribed banners, some of them in Turkish script; and a great many of them carried Yugoslavian flags, very tidily, not waving them but letting them droop. There were many children, all standing straight and good under the rain. I looked at my watch, and I saw that we had been walking between these crowds for ten minutes. There are thirty thousand Moslems in Sarajevo, and I think most of them were there. And they were rapt, hallucinated, intoxicated with an old loyalty, and doubtless ready to know the intoxication of an old hatred.

We came to the halt at the right moment, as the train slid in and stopped. There was a little cheering, and the flags were waved, but it is not much fun cheering somebody inside the tin box of a railway carriage. The crowd waited to make sure. The Moslem Mayor of Sarajevo and his party went forward and greeted the tall and jolly Mr Spaho, the Minister of Transport, and the Yugoslavian Minister of War, General Marits, a giant who wore his strength packed round him in solid masses like a bull. He looked as Goring would like to look. There were faint, polite cheers for them; but the great cheers the crowd had had in its hearts for days were never given. For Mr Spaho and the General were followed, so far as the expectations of the crowd were concerned, by nobody. The two little men in bowlers and trim suits, very dapper and well-shaven, might have been Frenchmen darkened in the colonial service. It took some time for the crowd to realize that they were in fact Ismet Ineunue, the Turkish Prime Minister, and Kazim Ozalip, his War Minister.

Even after the recognition had been established the cheers were not given. No great degree of disguise concealed the disfavour with which these two men in bowler hats looked on the thousands they saw before them, all wearing the fez and veil which their leader the Ataturk made it a crime to wear in Turkey. Their faces were blank yet not unexpressive. So might Englishmen look if, in some corner of the Empire, they had to meet as brothers the inhabitants of a colony that had been miraculously preserved from the action of time and had therefore kept to their road.

The Moslem Mayor read them an address of welcome, of which, naturally, they did not understand one word. This was bound in any case to be a difficult love-affair to conduct, for they knew no Serbian and the Sarajevans knew no Turkish. They had to wait until General Marits had translated it into French; while they were waiting I saw one of them fix his eye on a distant building, wince, and look in the opposite direction. Some past-loving soul had delved in the attics and found the green flag with the crescent, the flag of the old Ottoman Empire, which these men and their leader regarded as the badge of a plague that had been like to destroy their people. The General’s translation over, they responded in French better than his, only a little sweeter and more birdlike than the French of France, and stood still, their eyes set on the nearest roof, high enough to save them the sight of this monstrous retrograde profusion of fezes and veils, of red pates and black muzzles, while the General put back into Serbian their all too reasonable remarks. They had told the Moslems of Sarajevo, it seemed, that they felt the utmost enthusiasm for the Yugoslavian idea, and had pointed out that if the South Slavs did not form a unified state the will of the great powers could sweep over the Balkan Peninsula as it chose. They had said not one word of the ancient tie that linked the Bosnian Moslems to the Turks, nor had they made any reference to Islam.

There were civil obeisances, and the two men got into an automobile and drove towards the town. The people did not cheer them. Only those within sight of the railway platform were aware that they were the Turkish Ministers, and even among those were many who could not believe their eyes, who thought that there must have been some breakdown of the arrangements. A little procession of people holding banners that had been ranged behind the crowd at this point wrangled among itself as to whether it should start, delayed too long, and finally tried to force its way into the roadway too late. By that time the crowd had left the pavements and was walking under the drizzle back to the city, slowly and silently, as those who have been sent empty away.

We had seen the end of a story that had taken five hundred years to tell. We had seen the final collapse of the old Ottoman Empire. Under our eyes it had heeled over and fallen to the ground like a lay figure slipping off a chair. But that tragedy was already accomplished. The Ottoman Empire had ceased to suffer long ago. There was a more poignant grief before us. Suppose that such an unconquerable woman as may be compared to the Slav in Bosnia was at last conquered by time, and sent for help to her old lover, and that there answered the call a man bearing her lover’s name who was, however, not her lover but his son, and looked on her with cold eyes, seeing her only as the occasion of a shameful passage in his family history; none of us would be able to withhold our pity.

Sarajevo IV

‘I am so glad that this is a bad spring,’ I said, ‘for otherwise I should never have seen snow on the roof of a mosque, and there is something delicious about that incongruity.’ ‘But it is killing all the plum blossom you like so much to see,’ said Constantine, ‘and that is a terrible thing, for in Bosnia and Serbia we live a little by our timber and our mines, but mostly by our pigs and our plums. But for you I am glad of the bad weather, for if it had been better you would have wanted to be out on the hills all the time, and as it is you have got to know my friends. Will you not agree that life in this town is specially agreeable?’ ‘Yes,’ said my husband, ‘it is all that I hoped for in Istanbul, but never found, partly because I was a stranger, and partly because they are reformists and are trying for excellent motives to uproot their own charm.’ ‘I have liked it all,’ I said, ‘except that afternoon when the Turkish Ministers were here and I went to see the mosque in the bazaar. Then I felt as if I had insisted on being present while a total stranger had a tooth out. But that was my fault.’

I had thoughtlessly chosen to see the mosque that afternoon, and had found the whole courtyard full of Moslems who were waiting there because a rumour had spread that the Turkish Ministers were going to visit it. On their faces lay that plastered, flattened look of loyalty to a cause which I had noticed in the crowd at the railway station that morning. But it was mingled now with that stoical obstinacy a child shows when it insists on repeating a disappointing experience, so that it can have no doubt that it really happened. It seemed indecent for a Christian to intrude on them at such a moment, and for a woman too, since the whole Moslem theory of the relationship of the sexes falls to pieces once any man has failed in a wordly matter. I had even hesitated to admire the mellow tiles and fretted arches of the façade or to go into the interior, so like a light and spacious gymnasium for the soul, to see the carpets presented by the pious of three centuries: what have been the recreations of the warrior must seem a shame to him when his weapons have been taken away.

But this was the one time when staying in Sarajevo was not purely agreeable. The visit was, indeed, like being gently embraced by a city, for all classes had borrowed from the Moslem his technique for making life as delightful as might be. Our Jewish friends were strict in their faith but their lives were as relaxed, as obstinately oriented towards the agreeable, as Mohammed would have had his children in time of peace. We went up to visit the banker in his large modern offices, which indeed almost amounted to a sky-scraper, and his welcome was sweet without reserve, and this was not due to mere facility, for he was a very wise man, sometimes almost tongue-tied with the burden of his wisdom, as the old Jewish sages must have been. It was only that till the contrary evidence was produced he preferred to think us as good as any friends he had. He was no fool, he would not reject that evidence if it came; but it had not come.

There were brought in, as we sat, cups of a sweet herbal infusion, as distinct from all other beverages as tea or coffee. We exclaimed in delight, and he told us, ‘It is a Turkish drink that we all give to our visitors in our offices in Sarajevo. It is supposed to be an aphrodisiac.’ He was amused, but without a snigger, at the custom he followed. ‘Think of it,’ he said. ‘I told that to a German engineer who was here last month, and he went out and bought two kilos of it. An extraordinary people.’ He went on to speak of his city, which he saw with the eye of a true lover, as astonished by its beauty as any stranger. That we should see it well he had arranged for two young women relatives of his to take us round the sights, and he produced them forthwith. They were entrancing. For theme they had the free, positive, creative attractiveness of the Slav; their style had been perfected in the harem. They had husbands and loved them, the banker was no more than kin and a friend, and my husband himself would admit that they felt for him only as the courtier speaks it in As You Like It, ‘Hereafter, in a better world than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.’ But though they kept well within the framework of fastidious manners, they reminded the banker and my husband that it must have been very pleasant to keep a covey of darlings in silks and brocades behind latticed windows, who would laugh and scuttle away, though only to an inner chamber where they could be found again after a second’s search, and sing and touch the strings of the gusla and mock the male and be overawed by him, and mock again, in an unending, uncriticized process of delight.

I record a wonder. The work of the bank was well done. That, with my cold inner eye that trusts nothing, least of all my own likings, I checked later. The banker was a man of exceptional ability and integrity and he worked hard according to the severest Western standards. But he appeared to keep his appointments with life as well as, and even during, his business engagements. Several times we went out with the two young women, and we always went back to the office and found the hot herbal tea, and coffee served with little squares of Turkish delight on tooth-picks, and much laughter, and a sense of luxurious toys. Once we went in and found half a dozen pictures of Sarajevo, bought by the banker out of his infatuation with the city, stacked on the big sofa and against the walls, and it was as if the caravans had come in from the North with a freight of Frankish art. The two women ran about from one to another of these novelties, they took sides, they became partisans of this picture and intrigued against that. There was an inherent fickleness in their admiration. They would tire of the familiar, but no doubt it is more important for the artist to have the new encouraged.

‘What do you think of them?’ the banker asked me. I wished he had not. They were the work of a Jewish refugee from Berlin, and though his perception was delicate and his brush subtle, each canvas showed him the child of that spirit which had destroyed him. There was the passion for the thick black line, the Puritan belief that if one pays out strength when making an artistic effort one will create a strong work of art. He had put a cast-iron outline to the tree on his canvas, and because it took vigour to make such an outline, and because cast-iron is an unyielding substance, he believed that the result was virile painting, even though his perception of the tree’s form had been infantile in its feebleness. It is the same heresy that expresses itself in the decree that had driven him into exile. Because it is a vigorous act to throw the Jews out of Germany and because it causes pain and disorder, it is taken as a measure of virile statecraft, although its relevance to the troubles of the country could be imagined only by an imbecile.

Something of this I said, and the banker motioned my husband and myself to step with him to the window, leaving the two women to bicker like birds over the pictures. With the grave smile, which could not possibly become laughter, of a sage confessing his own folly, he said, ‘I have remembered again and again a foolish thing I said when we first met. I told you that when I went to Berlin as a student I rejoiced as a Jew at being treated as an equal, while I was treated as an inferior here. That must have amused you. It was a piece of naivete like a man boasting of his friendship with one who has spared no pains to show him that he considers him a fool, a bore, an oaf.’ He looked out for a moment on the mosques, on the domes of the old caravanserai among the tiled roofs of the bazaar, on the poplars standing over the city like the golden ghosts of giant Janizaries. ‘But it is puzzling, you know, not to be able to look to Germany as one’s second home, when it has been that to one all one’s life long. But one can come home to one’s hearth, and I am fortunate that Sarajevo is mine.’

He went back and stood before the pictures, the young women each taking an arm, one fluting that he must hang the picture of the little Orthodox church over his desk, the other screaming that he must throw it away, he must burn it, he must give it to one-eyed Marko the scavenger. I thought he was promising himself too little. In this office there lingered something of the best of Turkish life; and in his integrity, in his dismissal of the little, in the seriousness which he brought to the interpretation of his experience, there was preserved the best of what a German philosophical training could do for a man of affairs. It seemed to me exquisitely appropriate that the vulgar should call the Jews old-clothes men. Since it is the peculiar madness of us other races to make ourselves magnificent clothes and then run wild and throw them away and daub ourselves with mud, it is well that there should be some old-clothes men about.

These Jews of Sarajevo are indeed an amazing community. I could bring forward as evidence the Bulbul and her mate, the two human beings who more than any others that I have ever met have the right arrangement and comforting significance of a work of art. They were not only husband and wife, they were kin; and this common blood had its own richness and its own discipline, for they came of a family that was considered among orthodox Jews as orthodox Jews are considered by liberal Jews, as the practitioners of an impossibly exacting rule. ‘His father,’ said Constantine of the Bulbul’s mate, who was named Selim, ‘was the most hieratic Jew that can ever be. All to him from the rising to the setting of the sun was a ritual, and he was very dominant, he made it so for all the world. I have seen it happen that when Selim was swimming in the sea at Dubrovnik, and he saw his father standing on the beach, and immediately he began to swim in a very hieratic manner, putting his hands out so and so, very slowly, and lifting his head out of the water and looking very gravely down his nose.’

This was credible, for Selim’s dignity was magnificent but not pompous, as if it were an inherited garment and its previous wearers had taken the stiffness out of it. He was a very tall man with broad shoulders, broad even for a man of his height. His build suggested the stylized immensity of a god sculpted by a primitive people, and his face also had the quality of sculpture; though his wit and imagination made it mobile, it was at once the tables of the law and the force that shattered them. He had an impressive habit, as we discovered the first night we went out to dinner with him and his wife, of stopping suddenly as he walked along the street when he had thought of something important and staying quite still as he said it. The spot where he halted became Mount Sinai, and in his leisurely and massive authority could be seen the Moses whom Michelangelo had divined but could not, being a Gentile and therefore of divided and contending will, fully create in the strength of his lawfulness.

But the fascination of himself and his wife lay initially in their voices. There is a special music lingering about the tongues of many of these Spanish Jews, but no one else gave it such special performance. Selim had constrained his gift a little out of deference to the Western tenet that a man should not be more beautiful than can be helped and that a certain decent drabness should be the character of all he does, but from his wife’s lips that music came in such animal purity that we called her the Bulbul, which is the Persian word for nightingale. Voices like these were the product of an existence built by putting pleasure to pleasure, as houses are built by putting brick to brick. A human being could not speak so unless he or she loved many other sounds—the wind’s progress among trees or the subtler passage it makes through grasses; note by note given out by a musical instrument, each note for its own colour; the gurgle of wine pouring from a bottle or water trickling through a marble conduit in a garden—all sorts of sounds that many Westerners do not even hear, so corrupted are they by the tyranny of the intellect, which makes them inattentive to any message to the ear which is without an argument. Listening to her, one might believe humanity to be in its first unspoiled morning hour. Yet she was accomplished, she used her music with skill, and she was wise, her music was played for a good end. She built for grave and innocent purposes on a technique of ingenuity which had been developed in the harem.

The Bulbul was not as Western women. In her beauty she resembled the Persian ladies of the miniatures, whose lustre I had till then thought an artistic convention but could now recognize in her great shining eyes, her wet red lips, her black hair with its white reflections, her dazzling skin. This brightness was like a hard transparent veil varnished on her, wholly protective. Even if someone had touched her, it would not have been she who was touched. Within this protection, she was liquid with generosity. She was continually anxious to give pleasure to her friends, even were they so new and untried as ourselves. If we were in a café and a man passed with a tray of Turkish sweetmeats, her face became tragical till she was sure that she could call him back and give us the chance of tasting them. If we were driving down a street and she saw the first lilies of the valley in a flower shop, she would call on the driver to stop that she might buy us some, with an imperativeness found more usually in selfishness than in altruism. When she had brought us to the café where a famous gipsy musician was singing, she relaxed like a mother who has succeeded in obtaining for her children something she knows they should have. The seasons irked her by the limitations they placed on her generosity: since it was not mid-winter she could not take us up to the villages above Sarajevo for skiing, and since it was not mid-summer she could not open her country house for us. Had one been cruel enough to point out to her that one would have been happier with a million pounds, and that she was not in a position to supply it, she would for a moment or two really have suffered, and even when she realized that she had been teased her good sense would not have been able to prevent her from feeling a slight distress.

Yet there was nothing lax about this woman. Though she lived for pleasure and the dissemination of it, she shone with a chastity as absolute as that radiated by any woman who detested pleasure. She had accepted a mystery. She had realized that to make a field where generosity can fulfil its nature absolutely, without reserve, one must exclude all but one other person, committed to loyalty. That field was marriage. Therefore when she spoke to any man other than her husband she was all to him, mother, sister, friend, nurse, and benefactress, but not a possible mate. She was thus as virginal as any dedicated nun, and that for the sake not of renunciation but of consummation. But her nature was so various that she comprised many opposites. Sometimes she seemed the most idiosyncratic of natures; standing on a balcony high over a street, we looked down on the pavement and saw her walking far below, with a dozen before her and behind her, darkly dressed like herself, and we were able to say at once, ‘Look, there is the little Bulbul.’ But there were other times when everything she did was so classical, so tried and tested in its validity, that she seemed to have no individuality at all, and to be merely a chalice filled with a rich draught of tradition.

There was, indeed, a great range of human beings to be seen in Sarajevo, all of sorts unknown to us. In Dubrovnik we had visited an antique shop kept by a young man called Hassanovitch, of admirable taste, and my husband had bought me the most beautiful garment I have ever possessed, a ceremonial robe of Persian brocade about a hundred and fifty years old, with little gold trees growing on a background faintly purple as a wine-stain. We bought it in a leisurely way, over several evenings, supported by cups of coffee and slices of Banya Luka cheese, which is rather like Port Salut, brought in by his little brothers, of which there seemed an inordinate number, all with the acolyte’s air of huge quantities of original sin in suspension. He had given us a letter of introduction to his father, the leading antique dealer of Sarajevo, who invited us to his house, a villa up among the high tilted suburbs.

There we sat and enjoyed the crystalline neatness and cleanliness of the prosperous Moslem home, with its divans that run along the wall and take the place of much cumbrous furniture, and its wall decorations of rugs and textiles, which here were gorgeous. We told the father about his son and how much we had admired his shop, and we mentioned too a feature of our visits that had much amused us. Always we had found sitting by the counter a beautiful girl, not the same for more than a few evenings, an English or American or German tourist, who would look at us with the thirsty and wistful eye of a gazelle who intends to come down to the pool and drink as soon as the hippopotami have ceased to muddy the water. The elder Mr Hassanovitch stroked his beard and said in gratified accents, ‘And the kitten also catches mice,’ and took me to the women’s quarters so that I could tell his wife, the mother of his fourteen children. She was an extremely beautiful woman in her middle forties, peace shining from her eyes and kneaded into the texture of her smooth flesh; and she was for me as pathetic as the women of Korchula, who believed that they had earned their happiness because they had passed certain tests of womanhood, and did not realize how fortunate they were in having those tests applied. Like those others, she was unaware that these tests would be irrelevant unless the community felt a need for the functions performed by women, and that infatuation with war or modern industry can make it entirely forgetful of that need.

But our last impression of Mr Hassanovitch was not to be merely of benign domesticity. From the moment of our meeting I had been troubled by a sense of familiarity about his features, and suddenly my husband realized that we had seen his face many times before. When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife came to the Town Hall of Sarajevo on the morning of June the twenty-eighth, 1914, Mr Hassanovitch was among the guests summoned to meet them for he was already an active Moslem politician, and he is standing to the right of the doorway in a photograph which has often been reproduced, showing the doomed pair going out to their death. That day must have been a blow to him. The contention of our Jewish friends that the Austrians had pampered the Moslems at the expense of the Christians, and had made them zealous supporters, is borne out by the constitution of the assembly shown by that photograph; and other photographs taken that morning show that when Princip was arrested the men in the crowd who are throwing themselves on him are all wearing the fez.

But I think he would have preferred it to the day he had just endured. The friends accompanying us, who knew him well, spoke to him of the visit of the Turkish Ministers, and he answered them with words that were blankly formal, a splendid bandage of his pain and their possible embarrassment at having provoked it. It was surprising that the visit had evidently been as keen a disappointment to such an expert and informed person as it was to the people in the street. Yet I suppose an Irish-American politician would suffer deep pain if time should bring to power in Eire a president who wanted to break with the past and sent an emissary to the States to beg that the old Catholic nationalism should be forgotten; and that he would even shut his eyes to the possibility that it might happen. The analogy was close enough, for here, just as in an Irish ward in an American town, one was aware that the actions and reactions of history had produced a formidable amount of politics. One could feel them operating below the surface like a still in a basement.

But history takes different people differently, even the same history. The Sarajevo market is held on Wednesdays, at the centre of the town near the bazaar, in a straggling open space surrounded by little shops, most of them Moslem pastrycooks‘, specializing in great cartwheel tarts stuffed with spinach or minced meat. The country folk come in by driblets, beginning as soon as it is fully light, and going on till nine or ten or eleven, for some must walk several hours from their homes: more and more pigeons take refuge on the roofs of the two little kiosks in the market-place. There are sections in the market allotted to various kinds of goods: here there is grain, there wool, more people than one would expect are selling scales, and there are stalls that gratify a medieval appetite for dried fish and meat, which are sold in stinking and sinewy lengths. At one end of the market are stuffs and embroideries which are chiefly horrible machine-made copies of the local needle-work. The Moslem women are always thickest here, but elsewhere you see as many Christians as Moslems, and perhaps more; and these Christians are nearly all of a heroic kind.

The finest are the men, who wear crimson wool scarfs tied round their heads and round their throats. This means that they have come from villages high in the mountains, where the wind blows down from the snows; and sometimes the scarf serves a double purpose, for in many such villages a kind of goitre is endemic. These men count themselves as descendants of the Haiduks, the Christians who after the Ottoman conquest took refuge in the highlands, and came down to the valleys every year on St. George’s Day, because by then the trees were green enough to give them cover, and they could harry the Turks by brigandage. They reckon that man can achieve the highest by following the path laid down in the Old Testament. I cannot imagine why Victorian travellers in these regions used to express contempt for the rayas, or Christian peasants, whom they encountered. Any one of these Bosnians could have made a single mouthful of a Victorian traveller, green umbrella and all. They are extremely tall and sinewy, and walk with a rhythmic stride which is not without knowledge of its own grace and power. Their darkness flashes and their cheekbones are high and their moustaches are long over fierce lips. They wear dark homespun jackets, often heavily braided, coloured belts, often crimson like their headgear, the Bosnian breeches that bag between the thighs and outline the hip and flank, and shoes made of leather thongs with upcurving points at the toes. They seem to clang with belligerence as if they wore armour. In every way, I hear, they are formidable. Their women have to wait on them while they eat, must take sound beatings every now and again, work till they drop, even while child-bearing, and walk while their master rides.

Yet, I wonder. Dear God, is nothing ever what it seems? The women of whom this tale is told, and according to all reliable testimony truly told, do not look in the least oppressed. They are handsome and sinewy like their men; but not such handsome women as the men are handsome men. A sheep-breeder of great experience once told me that in no species and variety that he knew were the male and female of equal value in their maleness and femaleness. Where the males were truly male, the females were not so remarkably female, and where the females were truly females the males were not virile. Constantly his theory is confirmed here. The women look heroes rather than heroines, they are raw-boned and their beauty is blocked out too roughly. But I will eat my hat if these women were not free in the spirit. They passed the chief tests I knew. First, they looked happy when they had lost their youth. Here, as in all Balkan markets, there were far more elderly women than girls; and there is one corner of it which is reserved for a line of women all past middle life, who stand on the kerb hawking Bosnian breeches that they have made from their own homespun, and exchange the gossip of their various villages. Among them I did not see any woman whose face was marked by hunger or regret. All looked as if they had known a great deal of pain and hardship, but their experience had led none of them to doubt whether it is worth while to live.

It was quite evident as we watched them that these women had been able to gratify their essential desires. I do not mean simply that they looked as if they had been well mated. Many Latin women who have been married at sixteen and have had numbers of children look swollen and tallowy with frustration. Like all other material experiences, sex has no value other than what the spirit assesses; and the spirit is obstinately influenced in its calculation by its preference for freedom. In some sense these women had never been enslaved. They had that mark of freedom, they had wit. This was not mere guffawing and jeering. These were not bumpkins, they could be seen now and then engaging in the prettiest passages of formality. We watched one of the few young women at the market seek out two of her elders: she raised her smooth face to their old lips and they kissed her on the cheek, she bent down and kissed their hands. It could not have been more graciously done at Versailles; and their wit was of the same pointed, noble kind.

We followed at the skirts of one who was evidently the Voltaire of this world. She was almost a giantess; her greyish red hair straggled about her ears in that untidiness which is dearer than any order, since it shows an infatuated interest in the universe which cannot spare one second for the mere mechanics of existence, and it was tied up in a clean white clout under a shawl passed under her chin and knotted on the top of her head. She wore a green velvet jacket over a dark homespun dress and coarse white linen sleeves, all clean but wild, and strode like a man up and down the market, halting every now and then, when some sight struck her as irresistibly comic. We could see the impact of the jest on her face, breaking its stolidity, as a cast stone shatters the surface of water. The wide mouth gaped in laughter, showing a single tooth. Then a ferment worked in her eyes. She would turn and go to the lower end of the market, and she would put her version of what had amused her to every knot of women she met as she passed to the upper end. I cursed myself because I could not understand one word of what she said. But this much I could hear: each time she made her joke it sounded more pointed, more compact, and drew more laughter. When she came to the upper end of the market and her audience was exhausted, a blankness fell on her and she ranged the stalls restlessly till she found another occasion for her wit.

This was not just a white blackbird. She was distinguished not because she was witty but by the degree of her wit. Later on we found a doorway in a street near by where the women who had sold all their goods lounged and waited for a motor bus. We lounged beside them, looking into the distance as if the expectation of a friend made us deaf; and our ears recorded the authentic pattern, still recognizable although the words could not be understood, of witty talk. These people could pass what the French consider the test of a civilized society: they could practise the art of general conversation. Voice dovetailed into voice without impertinent interruption; there was light and shade, sober judgment was corrected by mocking criticism, and another sober judgment established, and every now and then the cards were swept off the table by a gust of laughter, and the game started afresh.

None of these women could read. When a boy passed by carrying an advertisement of Batya’s shoes they had to ask a man they knew to read it for them. They did not suffer any great deprivation thereby. Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does more than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered by learning to read. These women were their own artists, and had done well with their material. The folk-songs of the country speak, I believe, of a general perception that is subtle and poetic, and one had only to watch any group carefully for it to declare itself. I kept my eyes for some time on two elderly women who had been intercepted on their way to this club in the doorway by a tall old man, who in his day must have been magnificent even in this land of magnificent men. Waving a staff as if it were a sceptre, he was telling them a dramatic story, and because he was absorbed in his own story the women were not troubling to disguise their expressions. There was something a shade too self-gratulatory in his handsomeness; no doubt he had been the coq du village in his day. In their smiles that knowledge glinted, but not too harshly. They had known him all their lives: they knew that thirty years ago he had not been so brave as he said he would be in the affair with the gendarmes at the ford, but they knew that later he had been much braver than he need have been when he faced the Turks in the ruined fortress, they remembered him when the good seasons had made him rich and when the snows and winds had made him poor. They had heard the gossip at the village well pronounce him right on this and wrong over that. They judged him with mercy and justice, which is the sign of a free spirit, and when his story was finished broke into the right laughter, and flattered him by smiling at him as if they were all three young again.

I suspect that women such as these are not truly slaves, but have found a fraudulent method of persuading men to give them support and leave them their spiritual freedom. It is certain that men suffer from a certain timidity, a liability to discouragement which makes them reluctant to go on doing anything once it has been proved that women can do it as well. This was most painfully illustrated during the slump in both Europe and America, where wives found to their amazement that if they found jobs when their husbands lost theirs and took on the burden of keeping the family, they were in no luck at all. For their husbands became either their frenzied enemies or relapsed into an infantile state of dependence and never worked again. If women pretend that they are inferior to men and cannot do their work, and abase themselves by picturesque symbolic rites, such as giving men their food first and waiting on them while they eat, men will go on working and developing their powers to the utmost, and will not bother to interfere with what women are saying and thinking with their admittedly inferior powers.

It is an enormous risk to take. It makes marriage a gamble, since these symbols of abasement always include an abnegation of economic and civil rights, and while a genial husband takes no advantage of them—and that is to say the vast majority of husbands—a malign man will exploit them with the rapacity of the grave. It would also be a futile bargain to make in the modern industrialized world, for it can hold good only where there are no other factors except the equality of women threatening the self-confidence of men. In our own Western civilization man is devitalized by the insecurity of employment and its artificial nature, so he cannot be restored to primitive power by the withdrawal of female rivalry and the woman would not get any reward for her sacrifice. There is in effect no second party to the contract. In the West, moreover, the gambling risks of marriage admit of a greater ruin. A man who is tied to one village and cannot leave his wife without leaving his land is not so dangerous a husband as a man who can step on a train and find employment in another town. But the greatest objection to this artificial abjection is that it is a conscious fraud on the part of women, and life will never be easy until human beings can be honest with one another. Still, in this world of compromises, honour is due to one so far successful that it produces these grimly happy heroes, these women who stride and laugh, obeying the instructions of their own nature and not masculine prescription.

Sarajevo V

One morning we walked down to the river, a brightening day shining down from the skies and up from puddles. A Moslem boy sold us an armful of wet lilac, a pigeon flew up from a bath in a puddle, its wings dispersing watery diamonds. ‘Now it is the spring,’ said Constantine, ‘I think we shall have good weather tomorrow for our trip to Ilidzhe, and better weather the day after for our trip to Yaitse. Yes, I think it will be well. All will be very well.’ When he is pleased with his country he walks processionally, like an expectant mother, with his stomach well forward. ‘But see what we told you the other night,’ he said as we came to the embankment and saw the Town Hall. ‘Under the Austrians all was for the Moslems. Look at this building, it is as Moslem as a mosque, yet always since the Turks were driven out of Bosnia the Christians have been two-thirds of the population. So did the Catholic Habsburgs deny their faith.’

Actually it is the Moslems who have most reason to complain of this Town Hall, for their architecture in Sarajevo is exquisite in its restraint and amiability, and even in modern times has been true to that tradition. But this was designed by an Austrian architect, and it is stuffed with beer and sausages down to its toes. It is harshly particoloured and has a lumpish two-storied loggia with crudely fretted arches, and it has little round windows all over it which suggest that it is rich beyond the dreams of avarice in lavatories, and its highly ornamented cornices are Oriental in a pejorative sense. The minaret of the mosque beside it has the air of a cat that watches a dog making a fool of itself.

Within, however, it is very agreeable, and remarkably full of light; and in an office high up we found a tourist bureau, conducted with passion by a man in the beginnings of middle life, a great lover of his city. He dealt us out photographs of it for some time, pausing to gloat over them, but stopped when Constantine said, ‘Show these English the room where they held the reception which was the last thing the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Archduchess Sophie saw of their fellow-men.’ The head of the tourist bureau bowed as if he had received a compliment and led us out into the central lobby, where a young man in a fez, a woman in black bloomers, and an old man and woman undistinguishable from any needy and respectable pair in South Kensington shuffled up the great staircase, while a young man quite like an Englishman save that he was carrying a gusla ran down it. We went into the Council Chamber, not unsuccessful in its effort at Moslem pomp. ‘All is Moslem here,’ said the head of the tourist bureau, ‘and even now that we are Yugoslavian the mayor is always a Moslem, and that is right. Perhaps it helps us by conciliating the Moslems, but even if it did not we ought to do it. For no matter how many Christians we may be here, and no matter what we make of the city—and we are doing wonderful things with it—the genius that formed it in the first place was Moslem, and again Moslem, and again Moslem.’

But the three reception rooms were as libellous as the exterior. They were pedantically yet monstrously decorated in imitation of certain famous buildings of Constantinople, raising domes like gilded honeycomb tripe, pressing down between the vaults polychrome stumps like vast inverted Roman candles. That this was the copy of something gorgeous could be seen; it could also be seen that the copyist had been by blood incapable of comprehending that gorgeousness. Punch-drunk from this architectural assault I lowered my eyes, and the world seemed to reel. And here, it appeared, the world had once actually reeled.

‘It was just over here that I stood with my father,’ said the head of the tourist bureau. ‘My father had been downstairs in the hall among those who received the Archduke and Archduchess, and had seen the Archduke come in, red and choking with rage. Just a little way along the embankment a young man, Chabrinovitch, had thrown a bomb at him and had wounded his aide-de-camp. So when the poor Mayor began to read his address of welcome he shouted out in a thin alto, ’That’s all a lot of rot. I come here to pay you a visit, and you throw bombs at me. It’s an outrage.‘ Then the Archduchess spoke to him softly, and he calmed down and said, ’Oh, well, you can go on.‘ But at the end of the speech there was another scene, because the Archduke had not got his speech, and for a moment the secretary who had it could not be found. Then when it was brought to him he was like a madman, because the manuscript was all spattered with the aide-de-camp’s blood.

‘But he read the speech, and then came up here with the Archduchess, into this room. My father followed, in such a state of astonishment that he walked over and took my hand and stood beside me, squeezing it very tightly. We all could not take our eyes off the Archduke, but not as you look at the main person in a court spectacle. We could not think of him as a royalty at all, he was so incredibly strange. He was striding quite grotesquely, he was lifting his legs as high as if he were doing the goosestep. I suppose he was trying to show that he was not afraid.

‘I tell you, it was not at all like a reception. He was talking with the Military Governor, General Potiorek, jeering at him and taunting him with his failure to preserve order. And we were all silent, not because we were impressed by him, for he was not at all our Bosnian idea of a hero. But we all felt awkward because we knew that when he went out he would certainly be killed. No, it was not a matter of being told. But we knew how the people felt about him and the Austrians, and we knew that if one man had thrown a bomb and failed, another man would throw another bomb and another after that if he should fail. I tell you it gave a very strange feeling to the assembly. Then I remember he went out on the balcony—so—and looked out over Sarajevo. Yes, he stood just where you are standing, and he too put his arm on the balustrade.’

Before the balcony the town rises on the other side of the river, in a gentle slope. Stout urban buildings stand among tall poplars, and above them white villas stand among orchards, and higher still the white cylindrical tombs of the Moslems stick askew in the rough grass like darts impaled on the board. Then fir-woods and bare bluffs meet the skyline. Under Franz Ferdinand’s eye the scene must have looked its most enchanting blend of town and country, for though it was June there had been heavy restoring rains. But it is not right to assume that the sight gave him pleasure. He was essentially a Habsburg, that is to say, his blood made him turn always from the natural to the artificial, even when this was more terrifying than anything primitive could be; and this landscape showed him on its heights nature unsubdued and on its slopes nature accepted and extolled. Perhaps Franz Ferdinand felt a patriotic glow at the sight of the immense brewery in the foreground, which was built by the Austrians to supply the needs of their garrison and functionaries. These breweries, which are to be found here and there in Bosnia, throw a light on the aggressive nature of Austrian foreign policy and its sordid consequences. They were founded while this was still Turkish, by speculators whose friends in the Government were aware of Austria’s plans for occupation and annexation. They also have their significance in their affront to local resources. It is quite unnecessary to drink beer here, as there is an abundance of cheap and good wine. But what was Austrian was good and what was Slav was bad.

It is unjust to say that Franz Ferdinand had no contact with nature. The room behind him was full of people who were watching him with the impersonal awe evoked by anybody who is about to die; but it may be imagined also as crammed, how closely can be judged only by those who have decided how many angels can dance on the point of a needle, by the ghosts of the innumerable birds and beasts who had fallen to his gun. He was a superb shot, and that is certainly a fine thing for a man to be, proof that he is a good animal, quick in eye and hand and hardy under weather. But of his gift Franz Ferdinand made a murderous use. He liked to kill and kill and kill, unlike men who shoot to get food or who have kept in touch with the primitive life in which the original purpose of shooting is remembered. Prodigious figures are given of the game that fell to the double-barrelled Mannlicher rifles which were specially made for him. At a boar hunt given by Kaiser Wilhelm sixty boars were let out, and Franz Ferdinand had the first stand: fifty-nine fell dead, the sixtieth limped by on three legs. At a Czech castle in one day’s sport he bagged two thousand one hundred and fifty pieces of small game. Not long before his death he expressed satisfaction because he had killed his three thousandth stag.

This capacity for butchery he used to express the hatred which he felt for nearly all the world, which, indeed, it is safe to say, he bore against the whole world, except his wife and his two children. He had that sense of being betrayed by life itself which comes to people who wrestle through long years with a chronic and dangerous malady; it is strange that both King Alexander of Yugoslavia and he had fought for half their days against tuberculosis. But Franz Ferdinand had been embittered by his environment, as Alexander was not. The indiscipline and brutality of the officials who controlled the Habsburg court had been specially directed towards him. It happened that for some years it looked as if Franz Ferdinand would not recover from his illness, and during the whole of this time the Department of the Lord High Steward, believing that he would soon be dead, cut down his expenses to the quick in order to get the praises of the Emperor Franz Josef for economy. The poor wretch, penniless in spite of the great art collections Franz Ferdinand had inherited, was grudged the most modest allowance, and even his doctor was underpaid and insulted. This maltreatment had ended when it became obvious that he was going to live, but by that time his mind was set in a mould of hatred and resentment, and though he could not shoot his enemies he found some relief in shooting, it did not matter what.

Franz Ferdinand knew no shame in his exercise of this too simple mechanism. He was ungracious as only a man can be who has never conceived the idea of graciousness. There was, for example, his dispute with Count Henkel Donnersmark, the German nobleman who was a wild young diplomat in Paris before the Franco-Prussian War, returned there to negotiate the terms of the indemnity, astonished the world by marrying the cocotte La Païva, and changed into a sober and far-seeing industrialist on the grand scale. This elderly and distinguished person had bought an estate in Silesia, and had made it pay for itself by selling the full-grown timber and replacing it by a careful scheme of reafforestation. This estate he leased to the Archduke at a rent calculated on the assumption that so much game existed on the property and would do so much damage to the saplings. As the Archduke enormously increased the stock of game, and practically no new trees could grow to maturity, the Count very reasonably raised the rent. This the Archduke, who had the wholly whimsical attitude to money often found in royal personages, conceived to be a senseless piece of greed. He gave notice to terminate his lease and decided to punish the landlord by ruining the estate as a sporting property. The remainder of his tenancy he spent in organizing battues which drove all the beasts of the field up to his guns to be slaughtered in such numbers that slaughter lost its meaning, that the boundary between living and dying became obscured, that dazed men forgot that they were killing. But he and his staff found that the forces of life outnumbered them, so he let part of the shoot to a Viennese manufacturer, a man with whom he could not have brought himself to have relations for any other reason, on condition that he pursue the same crusade of extermination. That, however, was still not enough, and the employees of the hunt were set to kill off what was left of the game by any means, abandoning all sporting restraints. Because the forest still twitched with life, because here and there the fern was trodden down and branches stirred by survivors of the massacre, the Archduke suffered several attacks of rage which disgusted all witnesses, being violent as vomiting or colic.

It may be conceived therefore that, even as the game which St Julian Hospitaller had killed as a cruel hunter appeared before him on the night when he was going to accomplish his destiny and become the murderer of his father and mother, so the half million beasts which had fallen to Franz Ferdinand’s gun according to his own calculations were present that day in the reception hall at Sarajevo. One can conceive the space of this room stuffed all the way up to the crimson and gold vaults and stalactites with the furred and feathered ghosts, set close, because there were so many of them: stags with the air between their antlers stuffed with woodcock, quail, pheasant, partridge, capercailzie, and the like; boars standing bristling flank to flank, the breadth under their broad bellies packed with layer upon layer of hares and rabbits. Their animal eyes, clear and dark as water, would brightly watch the approach of their slayer to an end that exactly resembled their own. For Franz Ferdinand’s greatness as a hunter had depended not only on his pre-eminence as a shot, but on his power of organizing battues. He was specially proud of an improvement he had made in the hunting of hare: his beaters, placed in a pear-shaped formation, drove all the hares towards him so that he was able without effort to exceed the bag of all other guns. Not a beast that fell to him in these battues could have escaped by its own strength or cunning, even if it had been a genius among its kind. The earth and sky were narrowed for it by the beaters to just one spot, the spot where it must die; and so it was with this man. If by some miracle he had been able to turn round and address the people in the room behind him not with his usual aggressiveness and angularity but in terms which would have made him acceptable to them as a suffering fellow-creature, still they could not have saved him. If by some miracle his slow-working and clumsy mind could have become swift and subtle, it could not have shown him a safe road out of Sarajevo. Long ago he himself, and the blood which was in his veins, had placed at their posts the beaters who should drive him down through a narrowing world to the spot where Princip’s bullet would find him.

Through Franz Ferdinand’s mother, the hollow-eyed Annunziata, he was the grandson of King Bomba of the Sicilies, one of the worst of the Bourbons, an idiot despot who conducted a massacre of his subjects after 1848, and, on being expelled from Naples, retired into a fortress and lived the life of a medieval tyrant right on until the end of the fifties. This ancestry had given Franz Ferdinand tuberculosis, obstinacy, bigotry, a habit of suspicion, hatred of democracy, and an itch for aggression, which, combined with the Habsburg narrowness and indiscipline, made him a human being who could not have hoped to survive had he not been royal. When he went to Egypt to spend the winter for the sake of his lungs it appeared to him necessary, and nobody who knew him would have expected anything else, to insult the Austrian Ambassador. By the time he had passed through his twenties he had made an army of personal enemies, which he constantly increased by his intemperate and uninstructed political hatreds. He hated Hungary, the name of Kossuth made him spit with rage. When receiving a deputation of Slovaks, though they were not a people whom he would naturally have taken into his confidence, he said of the Hungarians, ‘It was an act of bad taste on the part of these gentlemen ever to have come to Europe,’ which must remain an ace in the history of royal indiscretion.

He had a dream of replacing the Dual Monarchy by a Triune Monarchy, in which the German and Czech crown lands should form the first part, Hungary the second, and the South Slav group—Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina—the third. This would have pleased the Croats, and the Croats alone. Most German Austrians would have been infuriated at having to combine with the Czechs and to see the South Slavs treated as their equals; Hungary would have been enraged at losing her power over the South Slavs; and the non-Catholic South Slavs would have justly feared being made the object of Catholic propaganda and would have resented being cut off from their natural ambition of union with the Serbs of Serbia. By this scheme, therefore, he made a host of enemies; and though he came in time to abandon it he could not quickly turn these enemies into friends by making public his change of mind. As he was the heir to the throne, he could announce his policy only by the slow method of communicating it to private individuals.

He abandoned his plan of the Triune Monarchy, moreover, for reasons too delicate to be freely discussed. In 1889, when he was thirty-three, he had paid some duty calls on the Czech home of his cousins, the Archduke Frederick and the Archduchess Isabella, to see if he found one of their many daughters acceptable as his bride. Instead he fell in love with the Archduchess’s lady-in-waiting, Sophie Chotek, a woman of thirty-two, noble but destitute. He insisted on marrying her in spite of the agonized objection of the Emperor Franz Josef, who pointed out to him that, according to the Habsburg House Law, the secret law of the Monarchy, a woman of such low birth could not come to the throne as consort of the Emperor.

It was not a question of permission that could be bestowed or withheld, but of a rigid legal fact. If Franz Ferdinand was to marry Sophie Chotek at all he must do it morganatically, and must renounce all rights of succession for the yet unborn children of their marriage; he could no more marry her any other way than a man with a living and undivorced wife can marry a second woman, though the infringement here was of an unpublished dynastic regulation instead of the published law. But some mitigation of this severe judgment came from an unexpected quarter. The younger Kossuth declared that, according to Hungarian law, when the Archduke ascended the throne his wife, no matter what her origin, became Queen of Hungary, and his children must enjoy the full rights of succession. This weakened the vehemence of Franz Ferdinand’s loathing for Hungary, though not for individual Hungarians. He still meant to revise the constitutional machinery of the Dual Monarchy, but he no longer wished to punish the Hungarians quite so harshly as to take away from them the Croats and Slovaks. But this was not a consideration he could publicly name. Nor, for diplomatic reasons, could he confess later that he was becoming more and more fearful of the growing strength of Serbia, and was apprehensive lest a union of South Slav provinces should tempt her ambition and provide her with a unified ally. So, by his promulgation of an unpopular policy, and his inability to announce his abandonment of it, the first beaters were put down to the battue.

His marriage set others at their post. Franz Ferdinand had far too dull a mind to appreciate the need for consistency. That was once visibly demonstrated in relation to his passion for collecting antiques, which he bought eagerly and without discrimination. When he paid a visit to a country church the simple priest boasted to him of a good bargain he had driven with a Jew dealer, who had given him a brand-new altar in exchange for his shabby old one. Immediately Franz Ferdinand sat down and wrote to the Bishop of the diocese asking him to give his clergy an order not to part with Church property. But he was quite amazed when later this order prevented him from carrying out the sacrilegious purchase of a tombstone which he wished to put in his private chapel. He showed a like inconsistency in regard to his marriage. His whole life was based on the privileges that were given to the members of the Habsburg family because the Habsburgs had been preserved in a certain state of genealogical purity which Austria had agreed to consider valuable. He could not understand that, as this purity was the justification of those privileges, they could not be extended to people in whom the Habsburg blood had been polluted. He took it as a personal insult, a bitter, causeless hurt, that his wife and his children should not be given royal honours.

Nor did his inconsistencies end there. Himself a typical product of Habsburg indiscipline, he nevertheless made no allowances when his relatives and the officials of the court reacted to his marriage with a like indiscipline. He had here, indeed, a legitimate object for hatred, in a character as strange as his own. Franz Josef’s Chamberlain, Prince Montenuovo, was one of the strangest figures in Europe of our time; a character that Shakespeare decided at the last moment not to use in King Lear or Othello, and laid by so carelessly that it fell out of art into life. He was a man of exquisite taste and aesthetic courage, who protected the artists of Vienna against the apathy of the court and the imprudence of the bourgeoisie. The Vienna Philharmonic under Mahler was his special pride and care. But he was the son of one of the bastard sons mothered by the wretched Marie Louise, when, unsustained by the opinion of historians yet unborn that she was and should have been perfectly happy in her forced marriage with Napoleon, she took refuge in the arms of Baron Neipperg. To be the bastard son of a race which was so great that it could make bastardy as noble as legitimacy, but which was great only because its legitimacy was untainted with bastardy, confused this imaginative man with a passionate and poetic and malignant madness. He watched over the rules of Habsburg ceremonial as over a case of poisons which he believed to compose the elixir of life if they were combined in the correct proportions. ‘And now for the strychnine,’ he must have said, when it became his duty to devise the adjustments made necessary by the presence at the court of a morganatic wife to the heir of the throne. Countess Sophie was excluded altogether from most intimate functions of the Austrian court; she could not accompany her husband to the family receptions or parties given for foreign royalties, or even to the most exclusive kinds of court balls; at the semi-public kind of court balls which she was allowed to attend, her husband had to head the procession with an Archduchess on his arm, while she was forced to walk at the very end, behind the youngest princess. The Emperor did what he could to mitigate the situation by creating her the Duchess of Hohenberg: but the obsessed Montenuovo hovered over her, striving to exacerbate every possible humiliation, never happier than when he could hold her back from entering a court carriage or cutting down to the minimum the salutes and attendants called for by any state occasion.

It is possible that had Franz Ferdinand been a different kind of man he might have evoked a sympathy that would have consoled him and his wife for these hardships: but all his ways were repellent. When his brother, Ferdinand Charles, a gentle soul with literary tastes, doomed to an early death from consumption, fell in love with a woman not of royal rank, Franz Ferdinand was the first to oppose the misalliance and made violent scenes with the invalid. When it was pointed out that he had married for love he answered angrily that there could be no comparison between the two cases, because Sophie Chotek was an aristocrat and his brother’s wife was the daughter of a university professor. Such lack of humour, which amounts to a lack of humours in the Elizabethan sense, isolated him from all friends; so instead he created partisans. He had been given, for his Viennese home, the superb palace and park known as the Belvedere, which had been built by Prince Eugène of Savoy. He now made it the centre of what the historian Tschuppik has called a shadow government. He set up a military Chancellery of his own; and presently the Emperor Franz Josef, who always treated his nephew with an even remarkable degree of tenderness and forbearance, though not with tact, resigned to this his control over the army. But the Chancellery dealt with much more than military matters. Franz Ferdinand attracted every able man in Austria who had been ignored or rejected by the court of Franz Josef, and thanks to the stupidity and bad manners of that court these were not contemptible in quality or inconsiderable in numbers. Helped by Franz Ferdinand to form a running point-by-point opposition to the mild policy of Franz Josef, these men carried into effect his faith in half measures; and they drafted a programme for him which was indiscreetly spoken of as a scheme of reform designed for preventing the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to be applied as soon as Franz Josef was dead and Franz Ferdinand had ascended the throne.

This way of life set still more beaters around him. It automatically roused the animosity of all at the court of Franz Josef, and many of his own partisans became his overt or covert enemies. He became day by day less lovable. His knowledge that he could not leave the royal path of his future to his children made him fanatically mean and grasping, and his manner became more and more overbearing and brutal. He roused in small men small resentments, and, in the minds of the really able men, large distrust. They realized that though he was shrewd enough to see that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was falling to pieces when most of his kind were wholly blind to its decay, he was fundamentally stupid and cruel and saw his problem as merely that of selecting the proper objects for tyranny. Some of them feared a resort to medieval oppression; some feared the damage done to specific interests, particularly in Hungary, which was bound to follow his resettlement of the Empire. Such fears must have gained in intensity when it became evident that Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was taking more and more interest in Franz Ferdinand, and was visiting him at his country homes and holding long conversations with him on important matters. The last visit of this kind had occurred a fortnight before the Archduke had come to Sarajevo. There is a rumour that on that occasion the Kaiser laid before Franz Ferdinand a plan for remaking the map of Europe. The Austro-Hungarian and German Empires were to be friends, and Franz Ferdinand’s eldest son was to become King of a new Poland stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, while the second son became King of Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, and Serbia, and Franz Ferdinand’s official heir, his nephew Charles, should be left as King of German Austria. It is certain that Kaiser Wilhelm must, at that moment, have had many important things on his mind, and that it is hardly likely that he would have paid such a visit unless he had something grave to say. It is definitely known that on this occasion Franz Ferdinand expressed bitter hostility to the Hungarian aristocracy. It is also known that these remarks were repeated at the time by the Kaiser to a third person.

The manners of Franz Ferdinand did worse for him than make him enemies. They made him the gangster friends that may become enemies at any moment, with the deadly weapon of a friend’s close knowledge. Franz Ferdinand’s plainest sign of intelligence was his capacity for recognizing a certain type of unscrupulous ability. He had discovered Aehrenthal, the clever trickster who as Austrian Minister had managed to convert the provisional occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina into annexation behind the backs of the other great powers in 1907. Since Aehrenthal on his deathbed had recommended Berchtold to succeed him, that incompetent war-monger might also be counted as one of the works of Franz Ferdinand. But an even greater favourite of his was Conrad von Hötzendorf, whom he made the Chief of General Staff. This creature, who was without sense or bowels, fancied himself not only as a great soldier but as a statesman, and would have directed the foreign policy of his country had he been allowed. He was obsessed by the need of preserving the Austro-Hungarian Empire by an offensive against Serbia. ‘Lest all our predestined foes, having perfected their armaments should deliver a blow against Austria-Hungary,’ he wrote in a memorandum he presented to Franz Josef in 1907 which was followed by many like it, ‘we must take the first opportunity of settling accounts with our most vulnerable enemy.’ In the intervening seven years this obsession flamed up into a mania. In 1911 Franz Josef, with the definite statements that ‘my policy is pacific’ and that he would permit no question of an offensive war, obtained Aehrenthal’s consent and dismissed Conrad from his post, making him an Inspector-general of the Army. But Franz Ferdinand still stood by him, and so did all the partisans of the Belvedere, who numbered enough industrialists, bankers, journalists, and politicians to make plain the decadence of pre-war Vienna. Berchtold was so much impressed by Conrad that in 1912 he was once more appointed Chief of General Staff. He was preaching the same gospel. ’The way out of our difficulties,‘ he wrote to Berchtold, ’is to lay Serbia low without fear of consequences.‘

But at this time Franz Ferdinand’s convictions took a new turn. He was becoming more and more subject to the influence of the German Kaiser, and Germany had no desire at that time for war, particularly with a Balkan pretext. He admired the Germans and thought they probably knew their business. This infuriated Conrad, who thought that Franz Ferdinand ought to persuade Germany to support Austria, so that he could feel confident even if their offensive war against Serbia spread into a general conflagration, which shows that he knew what he was doing. But in 1913 Berchtold had to tell Conrad, ‘The Archduke Franz Ferdinand is absolutely against war.’ At this Conrad became more and more desperate. His influence over Berchtold had been sufficient to make him refuse to see the Prime Minister of Serbia when he offered to come to Vienna to negotiate a treaty with Austria, covering all possible points of dispute. He persuaded Berchtold, moreover, to withhold all knowledge of this pacific offer from either Franz Josef or Franz Ferdinand. This is the great criminal act which gives us the right to curse Berchtold and Conrad as the true instigators of the World War. But Conrad was no less crude when in 1913 he used a trifling incident on the Dalmatian coast to attempt to get the Emperor Franz Josef to mobilize against Serbia and Montenegro. This coercion Franz Josef, with a firmness remarkable in a man of eighty-seven, quietly resisted, even though Berchtold supported Conrad, and this time Franz Ferdinand was in agreement with the old man.

Shortly after this another incident lowered Conrad’s stock still further. Colonel Redl, the Chief of General Staff to the Prague Corps, who had been head of the Austrian espionage service, was found to be a spy in the pay of Russia. He was a homosexual, and had fallen into the hands of blackmailers. He was handed a loaded revolver by a brother officer and left alone to commit suicide. This caused Franz Ferdinand to fly into one of his terrible attacks of rage against Conrad, who had been responsible both for Redl’s appointment to the espionage department and for the manner of his death. He was incensed that a homosexual should have been given such a position partly for moral reasons, and partly because of the special liability of such men to blackmail; and it offended his religious convictions that any man should have been forced to commit suicide. This last was hardly a fair charge to bring against Conrad, since the loaded revolver was an established Army convention in the case of shameful offences. But thenceforward the two men were enemies.

There was no doubt about this after the autumn of 1913. At the Army manoeuvres in Bohemia Franz Ferdinand grossly insulted and humiliated his former friend, but refused to accept his resignation. He, however, made it clear that the only reason for the refusal was fear of a bad effect on the public mind. In June 1914 Conrad was eating his heart out in disappointment, bearing a private and public grudge against the man who had disgraced him and who would not engage in the war against Serbia which he himself believed necessary for his country’s salvation.

It must be realized that he was a very relentless man. He himself has told of a conversation he had with Berchtold about the unhappy German prince, William of Wied, who was sent to be King of Albania. ‘Let us hope there will be no hitch,’ said Berchtold. ‘But what shall we do if there is?’ ‘Nothing at all,’ said Conrad. ‘But what if the prince is assassinated?’ asked Berchtold. ‘Even then we can do nothing,’ said Conrad. ‘Somebody else must take the throne in his place. Anybody will suit us as long as he is not under foreign influence.’ The conversation is the more grievous when it is understood that they had just refused William of Wied’s very reasonable request that he might live on a yacht rather than lodge among his reluctant subjects.

Such enemies surrounded Franz Ferdinand; but it cannot be laid at their door that he had come to Sarajevo on June the twenty-eighth, 1914. This was a day of some personal significance to him. On that date in 1900 he had gone to the Hofburg in the presence of the Emperor and the whole court, and all holders of office, and had, in choking tones, taken the oath to renounce the royal rights of his unborn children. But it was also a day of immense significance for the South Slav people. It is the feast-day of St. Vitus, who is one of those saints who are lucky to find a place in the Christian calendar, since they started life as pagan deities; he was originally Vidd, a Finnish-Ugric deity. It is also the anniversary of the battle of Kossovo, where, five centuries before, the Serbs had lost their empire to the Turk. It had been a day of holy mourning for the Serbian people within the Serbian kingdom and the Austrian Empire, when they had confronted their disgrace and vowed to redeem it, until the year 1912, when Serbia’s victory over the Turks at Kumanovo wiped it out. But, since 1913 had still been a time of war, the St. Vitus’s Day of 1914 was the first anniversary which might have been celebrated by the Serbs in joy and pride. Franz Ferdinand must have been well aware that he was known as an enemy of Serbia. He must have known that if he went to Bosnia and conducted manoeuvres on the Serbian frontier just before St. Vitus’s Day and on the actual anniversary paid a state visit to Sarajevo, he would be understood to be mocking the South Slav world, to be telling them that though the Serbs might have freed themselves from the Turks there were still many Slavs under the Austrian’s yoke.

To pay that visit was an act so suicidal that one fumbles the pages of the history books to find if there is not some explanation of his going, if he was not subject to some compulsion. But if ever a man went anywhere of his own free will, Franz Ferdinand went so to Sarajevo. He himself ordered the manœuvres and decided to attend them. The Emperor Franz Josef, in the presence of witnesses, told him that he need not go unless he wished. Yet it appears inconceivable that he should not have known that the whole of Bosnia was seething with revolt, and that almost every schoolboy and student in the province was a member of some revolutionary society. Even if the extraordinary isolation that afflicts royal personages had previously prevented him from sharing this common knowledge, steps were taken to remove his ignorance. But here his temperament intervened on behalf of his own death. The Serbian Government—which by this single act acquitted itself of all moral blame for the assassination—sent its Minister in Vienna to warn Bilinski, the Joint Finance Minister, who was responsible for the civil administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina, that the proposed visit of Franz Ferdinand would enrage many Slavs on both sides of the frontier and might cause consequences which neither Government could control. But Bilinski was an Austrian Pole; Ferdinand loathed all his race, and had bitterly expressed his resentment that any of them were allowed to hold high office. Bilinski was also a close confidant of old Franz Josef and an advocate of a conciliatory policy in the Slav provinces. Thus it happened that, when he conscientiously went to transmit this message, his warnings were received not only with incredulity but in a way that made it both psychologically and materially impossible to repeat them.

Franz Ferdinand never informed in advance either the Austrian or the Hungarian Government of the arrangements he had made with the Army to visit Bosnia, and he seems to have worked earnestly and ingeniously, as people will to get up a bazaar, to insult the civil authorities. When he printed the programme of his journey he sent it to all the Ministries except the Joint Ministry of Finance; and he ordered that no invitations for the ball which he was to give after the manoeuvres outside Sarajevo at Ilidzhe were to be sent to any of the Finance Ministry officials. It is as if a Prince of Wales had travelled through India brutally insulting the Indian Civil Service and the India Office. There was a thoroughly Habsburg reason for this. Since the military authorities were in charge of all the arrangements, it had been easy for Franz Ferdinand to arrange that for the first time on Habsburg territory royal honours would be paid to his wife. This could not have happened without much more discussion if the civil authorities had been involved. The result was final and bloody. Bilinski could not protest against Franz Ferdinand’s visit to Sarajevo when he was not sure it was going to take place, considering the indelicate rage with which all his approaches were met. This inability to discuss the visit meant that he could not even supervise the arrangements for policing the streets. With incredible ingenuity, Franz Ferdinand had created a situation in which those whose business it was to protect him could not take one step towards his protection.

When Franz Ferdinand returned from the balcony into the reception room his face became radiant and serene, because he saw before him the final agent of his ruin, the key beater in this battue. His wife had been in an upper room of the Town Hall, meeting a number of ladies belonging to the chief Moslem families of the town, in order that she might condescendingly admire their costumes and manners, as is the habit of barbarians who have conquered an ancient culture; and she had now made the proposal that on the return journey she and her husband should alter their programme by going to the hospital to make inquiries about the officer wounded by Chabrinovitch. Nothing can ever be known about the attitude of this woman to that day’s events. She was a woman who could not communicate with her fellow-creatures. We know only of her outer appearance and behaviour. We know that she had an anaphrodisiac and pinched yet heavy face, that in a day when women were bred to look like table-birds she took this convention of amplitude and expressed it with the rigidity of the drill sergeant. We know that she impressed those who knew her as absorbed in snobbish ambitions and petty resentments, and that she had as her chief ingratiating attribute a talent for mimicry, which is often the sport of an unloving and derisive soul.

But we also know that she and Franz Ferdinand felt for each other what cannot be denied to have been a great love. Each found in the other a perpetual assurance that the meaning of life is kind; each gave the other that assurance in terms suited to their changing circumstances and with inexhaustible resourcefulness and good-will; it is believed by those who knew them best that neither of them ever fell from the heights of their relationship and reproached the other for the hardships that their marriage had brought upon them. That is to say that the boar we know as Franz Ferdinand and the small-minded fury we know as Countess Sophie Chotek are not the ultimate truth about these people. These were the pragmatic conceptions of them that those who met them had to use if they were to escape unhurt, but the whole truth about their natures must certainly have been to some degree beautiful.

Even in this field where Sophie Chotek’s beauty lay she was dangerous. Like her husband she could see no point in consistency, which is the very mortar of society. Because of her noble birth, she bitterly resented her position as a morganatic wife. It was infamous, she felt, that a Chotek should be treated in this way. It never occurred to her that Choteks had a value only because they had been accorded it by a system which, for reasons that were perfectly valid at the time, accorded the Habsburgs a greater value; and that if those reasons had ceased to be valid and the Habsburgs should no longer be treated as supreme, then the Choteks also had lost their claim to eminence.

Unfortunately she coupled with this inconsistency a severely legalistic mind. It can be done. The English bench has given us examples. She had discovered, and is said to have urged her discovery on Franz Ferdinand, that the oath he had taken to renounce the rights of succession for his children was contrary to crown law. No one can swear an oath which affects the unborn; this is, of course, perfectly just. It did not occur to her that, if the maintenance of the Habsburgs required the taking of unjust oaths, perhaps the Habsburg dynasty would fall to pieces if it were forced to live on the plane of highest justice, and that her children might find themselves again without a throne.

Countess Sophie Chotek must therefore have had her hands full of the complicated hells of the humourless legalist; it must have seemed to her that her environment was always perversely resisting the imposition of a perfect pattern, to her grave personal damage. She had, however, a more poignant personal grief. She believed Franz Ferdinand to be on the point of going mad. It is on record that she hinted to her family lawyer and explicitly informed an intimate friend that in her opinion her husband might at any moment be stricken with some form of mental disorder. This may have been merely part of that corpus of criticism which might be called ‘Any Wife to Any Husband.’ But there were current many stories which go to show that Franz Ferdinand’s violence had for some time been manifest in ways not compatible with sanity. The Czech officials in charge of the imperial train that had brought Franz Ferdinand from Berlin after a visit to the German Emperor reported to the chief of the Czech Separatist Party that when Franz Ferdinand had alighted at his destination they found the upholstery in his compartment cut to pieces by sword thrusts; and in a visit to England he struck those who met him as undisciplined in a way differing in quality and degree from the normal abnormality which comes from high rank.

This woman had therefore a host of enemies without her home, and within it an enemy more terrifying than all the rest. That she was in great distress is proven by a certain difficulty we know to have arisen in her religious life. It was one of the wise provisions of the early Church that the orthodox were not allowed the benefits of communion or confession except at rare intervals. There is obviously a sound and sensible reason for this rule. It cannot be believed that the soul is sufficiently potent to be for ever consummating its union with God, and the forgiveness of sins must lose its reality if it is sought too rapidly for judgment to pronounce soberly on guilt. Moreover limiting the approach to the sacraments prevents them from becoming magical practices, mere snatchings at amulets. By one of the innovations which divide the Roman Catholic Church from the early Church, Pope Leo X removed all these restrictions, and now a devotee can communicate and confess as often as he likes. But the Countess Sophie Chotek availed herself of this permission so extremely often that she was constantly at odds with the Bishop who guided her spiritual life. At their hotel out at Ilidzhe a room had been arranged as a chapel, and that morning she and her husband had attended mass. Not one day could go without invoking the protection of the cross against the disaster which she finally provoked by her proposal that they should visit the wounded aide-de-camp in hospital.

There was a conversation about this proposal which can never be understood. It would be comprehensible only if the speakers had been drunk or living through a long fevered night; but they were sober and, though they were facing horror, they were facing it at ten o‘clock on a June morning. Franz Ferdinand actually asked Potiorek if he thought any bombs would be thrown at them during their drive away from the Town Hall. This question is incredibly imbecile. If Potiorek had not known enough to regard the first attack as probable, there was no reason to ascribe any value whatsoever to his opinion on the probability of a second attack. There was one obvious suggestion which it would have been natural for either Franz Ferdinand or Potiorek to make. The streets were quite inadequately guarded, otherwise Chabrinovitch could not have made his attack. Therefore it was advisable that Franz Ferdinand and his wife should remain at the Town Hall until adequate numbers of the seventy thousand troops who were within no great distance of the town were sent for to line the streets. This is a plan which one would have thought would have been instantly brought to the men’s minds by the mere fact that they were responsible for the safety of a woman.

But they never suggested anything like it, and Potiorek gave to Franz Ferdinand’s astonishing question the astonishing answer that he was sure no second attack would be made. The startling element in this answer is its imprudence, for he must have known that any investigation would bring to light that he had failed to take for Franz Ferdinand any of the precautions that had been taken for Franz Josef on his visit to Sarajevo seven years before, when all strangers had been evacuated from the town, all anti-Austrians confined to their houses, and the streets lined with a double cordon of troops and peppered with detectives. It would be credible only if one knew that Potiorek had received assurances that if anything happened to Franz Ferdinand there would be no investigation afterwards that he need fear. Indeed, it would be easy to suspect that Potiorek deliberately sent Franz Ferdinand to his death, were it not that it must have looked beforehand as if that death must be shared by Potiorek, as they were both riding in the same carriage. It is of course true that Potiorek shared Conrad’s belief that a war against Serbia was a sacred necessity, and had written to him on one occasion expressing the desperate opinion that, rather than not have war, he would run the risk of provoking a world war and being defeated in it; and throughout the Bosnian manoeuvres he had been in the company of Conrad, who was still thoroughly disgruntled by his dismissal by Franz Ferdinand. It must have been quite plain to them both that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb would be a superb excuse for declaring war on Serbia. Still, it is hard to believe that Potiorek would have risked his own life to take Franz Ferdinand‘s, for he could easily have arranged for the Archduke’s assassination when he was walking in the open country. It is also extremely doubtful if any conspirators would have consented to Potiorek risking his life, for his influence and military skill would have been too useful to them to throw away.

Yet there is an incident arising out of this conversation which can only be explained by the existence of entirely relentless treachery somewhere among Franz Ferdinand’s entourage. It was agreed that the royal party should, on leaving the Town Hall, follow the route that had been originally announced for only a few hundred yards: they would drive along the quay to the second bridge, and would then follow a new route by keeping straight along the quay to the hospital, instead of turning to the right and going up a side street which led to the principal shopping centre of the town. This had the prime advantage of disappointing any other conspirators who might be waiting in the crowds, after any but the first few hundred yards of the route, and, as Potiorek had also promised that the automobiles should travel at a faster speed, it might have been thought that the Archduke and his wife had a reasonable chance of getting out of Sarajevo alive. So they might, if anybody had given orders to the chauffeur on either of these points. But either Potiorek never gave these orders to any subordinate, or the subordinate to whom he entrusted them never handed them on.

Neither hypothesis is easy to accept. Even allowing for Austrian Schlamperei, soldiers and persons in attendance on royalty do not make such mistakes. But though this negligence cannot have been accidental, the part it played in contriving the death of Franz Ferdinand cannot have been foreseen. The Archduke, his wife, and Potiorek left the Town Hall, taking no farewell whatsoever of the municipal officers who lined the staircase, and went on to the quay and got into their automobile. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie are said to have looked stunned and stiff with apprehension. Count Harrach, an Austrian general, jumped on the left running-board and crouched there with drawn sword, ready to defend the royal pair with his life. The procession was headed by an automobile containing the Deputy Mayor and a member of the Bosnian Diet; but by another incredible blunder neither these officials nor their chauffeurs were informed of the change in route. When this first automobile came to the bridge it turned to the right and went up the side street. The chauffeur of the royal car saw this and was therefore utterly bewildered when Potiorek struck him on the shoulder and shouted, ‘What are you doing? We’re going the wrong way! We must drive straight along the quay.’

Not having been told how supremely important it was to keep going, the puzzled chauffeur stopped dead athwart the corner of the side street and the quay. He came to halt exactly in front of a young Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip, who was one of the members of the same conspiracy as Chabrinovitch. He had failed to draw his revolver on the Archduke during the journey to the Town Hall, and he had come back to make another attempt. As the automobile remained stock-still Princip was able to take steady aim and shoot Franz Ferdinand in the heart. He was not a very good shot, he could never have brought down his quarry if there had not been this failure to give the chauffeur proper instructions. Harrach could do nothing; he was on the left side of the car, Princip on the right. When he saw the stout, stuffed body of the Archduke fall forward he shifted his revolver to take aim at Potiorek. He would have killed him at once had not Sophie thrown herself across the car in one last expression of her great love, and drawn Franz Ferdinand to herself with a movement that brought her across the path of the second bullet. She was already dead when Franz Ferdinand murmured to her, ‘Sophie, Sophie, live for our children’; and he died a quarter of an hour later. So was your life and my life mortally wounded, but so was not the life of the Bosnians, who were indeed restored to life by this act of death.

Leaning from the balcony, I said, ‘I shall never be able to understand how it happened.’ It is not that there are too few facts available, but that there are too many. To begin with, only one murder was committed, yet there were two murders in the story: one was the murder done by Princip, the other was the murder dreamed of by some person or persons in Franz Ferdinand’s entourage, and they were not the same. And the character of the event is not stamped with murder but with suicide. Nobody worked to ensure the murder on either side so hard as the people who were murdered. And they, though murdered, are not as pitiable as victims should be. They manifested a mixture of obstinate invocation of disaster and anguished complaint against it which is often associated with unsuccessful crime, with the petty thief in the dock. Yet they were of their time. They could not be blamed for morbidity in a society which adored death, which found joy in contemplating the death of beasts, the death of souls in a rigid social system, the death of peoples under an oppressive empire.

‘Many things happened that day,’ said the head of the tourist bureau, ‘but most clearly I remember the funny thin voice of the Archduke and his marionette strut.’ I looked down on the street below and saw one who was not as the Archduke, a tall gaunt man from the mountains with his crimson scarf about his head, walking with a long stride that was the sober dance of strength itself. I said to Constantine, ‘Did that sort of man have anything to do with the assassination?’ ‘Directly, nothing at all,’ answered Constantine, ‘though indirectly he had everything to do with it. But in fact all of the actual conspirators were peculiarly of Sarajevo, a local product. You will understand better when I have shown you where it all happened. But now we must go back to the tourist bureau, for we cannot leave this gentleman until we have drunk black coffee with him.’

As we walked out of the Town Hall the sunshine was at last warm and the plum blossom in the distant gardens shone as if it were not still wet with melted snow. ‘Though the hills rise so sharply,’ I said, ‘the contours are so soft, to be in this city is like walking inside an opening flower.’ ‘Everything here is perfect,’ said Constantine; ‘and think of it, only since I was a grown man has this been my town. Until then its beauty was a heartache and a shame to me, because I was a Serb and Sarajevo was a Slav town in captivity.’ ‘Come now, come now,’ I said, ‘by that same reckoning should not the beauty of New York and Boston be a heartache and shame to me?’ ‘Not at all, not at all,’ he said, ‘for you and the Americans are not the same people. The air of America is utterly different from the air of England, and has made Americans even of pure English blood utterly different from you, even as the air of Russia, which is not the same as Balkan air, has made our Russian brothers not at all as we are. But the air of Bosnia is the same as Serbian air, and these people are almost the same as us, except that they talk less. Besides, your relatives in America are not being governed by another race, wholly antipathetic to you both. If the Germans had taken the United States and you went over there and saw New England villages being governed on Prussian lines, then you would sigh that you and the Americans of your race should be together again.’ ‘I see that,’ I said. I was looking at the great toast-coloured barracks which the Austrians set on a ledge dominating the town. They seemed to say, ‘All is now known, we can therefore act without any further discussion’: a statement idiotic in itself, and more so when addressed to the essentially speculative Slav.

‘All, I tell you,’ said Constantine, ‘that is Austrian in Sarajevo is false to us. Look at this embankment we are walking upon. It is very nice and straight, but it is nothing like the embankment we Yugoslavs, Christian or Moslem, would make for a river. We are very fond of nature as she is, and we do not want to hold up a ruler and tell her that she must look like that and not stick forward her bosom or back her bottom. And look, here is the corner where Princip killed the Archduke, and you see how appropriate it was. For the young Bosnian came along the little street from the real Sarajevo where all the streets are narrow and many are winding and every house belongs to a person, to this esplanade which the Austrians built, which is one long line and has big houses that look alike, and seeing an Arch-Austrian he made him go away. See, there is a tablet on that corner commemorating the deed.’

I had read much abuse of this tablet as a barbarous record of satisfaction in an accomplished crime. Mr Winston Churchill remarks in his book on The Unknown War (The Eastern Front) that ‘Princip died in prison, and a monument erected in recent years by his fellow-countrymen records his infamy and their own.’ It is actually a very modest black tablet, not more than would be necessary to record the exact spot of the assassination for historical purposes, and it is placed so high above the street-level that the casual passer-by would not remark it. The inscription runs, ‘Here, in this historical place, Gavrilo Princip was the initiator of liberty, on the day of St. Vitus, the 28th of June, 1914.’ These words seem to me remarkable in their restraint, considering the bitter hatred that the rule of Austria had aroused in Bosnia. The expression ‘initiator of liberty’ is justified by its literal truth: the Bosnians and Herzegovinians were in fact enslaved until the end of the war which was provoked by the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. To be shocked at a candid statement of this hardly becomes a subject of any of the Western states who connived at the annexation of these territories by Austria.

One must let the person who wears the shoe know where it pinches. It happened that as Constantine and I were looking up at the tablet there passed by one of the most notable men in Yugoslavia, a scholar and a gentleman, known to his peers in all the great cities of Europe. He greeted us and nodded up at the tablet, ‘A bad business that.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ said Constantine warily, for they were political enemies, and he dreaded what might come. ‘We must have no more of such things, Constantine,’ said the other. ‘No, no,’ said Constantine. ‘No more assassinations, Constantine,’ the other went on. ‘No, no,’ said Constantine. ‘And no more Croats shot down because they are Croats, Constantine,’ rapped out the other. ‘But we never do that,’ wailed Constantine; ‘it is only that accidents must happen in the disorder that these people provoke!’ ‘Well, there must be no more accidents,’ said his friend. But as he turned to go he looked again at the tablet, and his eyes grew sad. ‘But God forgive us all!’ he said. ‘As for that accident, it had to happen.’

I said to Constantine, ‘Would he have known Princip, do you think?’ But Constantine answered, ‘I think not. He was ten years older, and he would only have known a man of Princip’s age if their families had been friends, but poor Princip had no family of the sort that had such rich friends. He was just a poor boy come down from the mountains to get his education here in Sarajevo, and he knew nobody but his school-fellows.’ That, indeed, is a fact which is of great significance historically: the youth and obscurity of the Sarajevo conspirators. Princip himself was the grandson of an immigrant whose exact origin is unknown, though he was certainly a Slav. This stranger appeared in a village on the borders of Bosnia and Dalmatia at a time when the Moslems of true Turkish stock had been driven out by the Bosnian insurrectionary forces, and occupied one of the houses that had been vacated by the Turks. There must have been something a little odd about this man, for he wore a curious kind of silver jacket with bells on it, which struck the villagers as strange and gorgeous and which cannot be identified by the experts as forming part of any local costume known in the Balkans. Because of this eccentric garment the villagers gave him the nickname of ‘Princip,’ which means Prince; and because of that name there sprang up after the assassination a preposterous legend that Princip’s father was the illegitimate son of the murdered Prince Rudolf. He was certainly just a peasant, who married a woman of that Homeric people, the Montenegrins, and begot a family in the depths of poverty. When Austria came in and seized Bosnia after it had been cleared of Turks by the Bosnian rebels, it was careful to leave the land tenure system exactly as it had been under the Turks, and the Bosnian peasants continued on starvation level. Of Princip’s children one son became a postman, and married a Herzegovinian who seems to have been a woman most remarkable for strength of character. In her barren mountain home she bore nine children, of whom six died, it is believed from maladies arising out of under-nourishment. The other three sons she filled with an ambition to do something in life, and sent them down into the towns to get an education and at the same time to earn money to pay for it. The first became a doctor, the second a tradesman who was chosen at an early age mayor of his town. The third was Gavrilo Princip, who started on his journey under two handicaps. He was physically fragile, and he entered a world distracted with thoughts of revolution and preparations for war.

The two most oppressive autocracies in Europe were working full time to supply themselves and all other European countries with the material of revolution. Russia was producing innumerable authors who dealt in revolutionary thought. The Austrian Empire was producing innumerable men who were capable of any revolutionary act, whether in the interests of military tyranny or popular liberty. The Russian influence came into Bosnia through several channels, some of them most unexpected. For political purposes the Russian imperial family maintained a boarding school for girls at the top of the road from Kotor, in Tsetinye, the capital of Montenegro, where many of the aristocratic families of Dalmatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and even Croatia sent their daughters to be educated. As all familiar with the perversity of youth would expect, the little dears later put to use the Russian they acquired at that institution to read Stepniak and Kropotkin and Tolstoy. This was but a narrow channel, which served only to gain tolerance among the wealthier classes for the movement which swept through practically the whole of the male youth of the Southern Slavs and set them discussing nihilism, anarchism and state socialism, and experimenting with the technique of terrorism which the advocates of those ideas had developed in Russia.

In this last and least attractive part of their activities the Bosnians show at a disadvantage compared to their Russian brothers during the period immediately before the war: they appear more criminal because they were more moral. Among the Russian revolutionaries there had been growing perplexity and disillusionment ever since 1906, when it was discovered that the people’s leader, Father Gapon, owing to the emollient effects of a visit to Monte Carlo, had sold himself to the police as a spy. In 1909 they received a further shock. It was proved that Aseff, the head of the largest and most powerful terrorist organization in Russia, had from the very beginning of his career been a police agent, and though he had successfully arranged the assassination of Plehve, the Minister of the Interior, and the Grand Duke Serge, he had committed the first crime partly because he was a Jew and disliked Plehve’s anti-Semitism, and partly because he wanted to strengthen his position in revolutionary circles in order to get a higher salary from the police, and he had committed the second to oblige persons in court circles who had wanted to get rid of the Grand Duke. This made all the sincere revolutionaries realize that their ranks were riddled with treachery, and that if they risked their lives it was probably to save the bacon of a police spy or further a palace intrigue. For this reason terrorism was practically extinct in Russia for some years before the war.

But the Southern Slavs were not traitors. It is true that there existed numbers, indeed vast numbers, of Croats and Serbs and Czechs who attempted to raise funds by selling to the Austro-Hungarian Empire forged evidence that their respective political parties were conspiring with the Serbian Government. But their proceedings were always conducted with the utmost publicity, and their forgeries were so clumsy as to be recognized as such by the most prejudiced court; they presented telegrams, which were supposed to have been delivered, on reception forms instead of transmission forms, and they put forward photographs of patriotic societies’ minutes which bore evidence that the original documents must have been over three-foot-three by thirteen inches: a nice size for reproduction but not for a society’s minutes. Neither the officials of the Empire nor the Slav nationalists ever took any serious measures against these disturbers of the peace, and they seem to have had such a privileged position of misdoing as is given in some villages to a pilferer, so long as he is sufficiently blatant and modest in his exploits so that he can be frustrated by reasonable care, and the community loses not too much when he scores a success.

But the real traitor and agent provocateur, who joined in revolutionary activities for the purpose of betraying his comrades to authority, was rare indeed among the South Slavs, and therefore terrorist organizations could function in confidence. They honeycombed the universities and the schools to an extent which seems surprising, till one remembers that, owing to the poverty of the inhabitants and the defective system of education imposed by the Austrian Empire, the age of the pupils at each stage was two or three years above that which would have been customary in a Western community.

The terrorism of these young men was given a new inspiration in 1912 and 1913 by the Balkan wars in which Serbia beat Turkey and Bulgaria. They saw themselves cutting loose from the decaying corpse of an empire and uniting with a young and triumphant democratic state; and by the multiplication of society upon society and patriotic journal upon patriotic journal they cultivated the idea of freeing themselves by acts of violence directed against their rulers. This, however, did not alter that horrible dispensation by which it is provided that those who most thirstily desire to go on the stage shall be those who have the least talent for acting. The Croats and Serbs are magnificent soldiers; they shoot well and they have hearts like lions. But they are deplorable terrorists. Much more individualist than the Russians, the idea of a secret society was more of a toy to them than a binding force. They were apt to go on long journeys to meet fellow-conspirators for the purpose of discussing an outrage, and on the way home to become interested in some other aspect of the revolutionary movement, such as Tolstoyan pacifism, and leave their bombs in the train. When they maintained their purpose, they frequently lost not their courage but their heads at the crucial moment, perhaps because the most convenient place for such attentats, to use the Continental word for a crime directed against the representative of a government, was among crowds in a town, and the young Slav was not used to crowds. He felt, as W. H. Davies put it of himself in urban conditions, ‘like a horse near fire.’ Such considerations do not operate now. The Great War hardened the nerves of a generation in the dealing out of death, and it trained the following generation with its experience plus the aid of all the money and help certain foreign nations could give them. The Croats and Macedonians trained in Italy and Hungary who killed King Alexander of Yugoslavia represented the highest point of expertise in terrorism that man has yet attained.

But in the days before the war the South Slavs were touching and ardent amateurs. Typical of them was young Zheraitch, a handsome Serb boy from a Herzegovinian village, who decided to kill the Emperor Franz Josef when he visited Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1910. With that end in mind he followed the old man from Sarajevo to Mostar, and from Mostar to Ilidzhe, revolver in hand, but never fired a shot. Then he decided to kill the Governor of Bosnia, General Vareshanin, who was specially abhorrent to the Slavs because he was a renegade Croat. He waited on a bridge for the General as he drove to open the Diet of Sarajevo. The boy fired five bullets at him, which all went wide. He kept the sixth to fire at his own forehead. It is said that General Vareshanin got out of his car and walked over to his body and savagely kicked it, a gesture which was bitterly remembered among all young South Slavs. This poor boy was typical of many of his fellows in his failure. In June 1912 another Bosnian tried to kill the Ban of Croatia in the streets of Zagreb, and killed two other people, but not him. In August 1913 a young Croat tried to kill the new Ban of Croatia, but only wounded him. In March 1914 another young Croat was caught in the Opera House at Zagreb just as he was about to shoot the Ban and the Archduke Leopold Salvator. And so on, and so on. The Balkan wars altered this state of affairs to some extent. A great many young Bosnians and Herzegovinians either swam across the river Drina into Serbia, or slipped past the frontier guards on the Montenegrin borders by night, in order to join irregular volunteer bands which served as outposts for the Serbian Army as it invaded Macedonia. All these young men acquired skill and hardihood in the use of weapons. But those who stayed at home were incurably inefficient as assassins.

Princip was not among the young Bosnians who had gone to the Balkan wars. He had soon become weary of the school life of Sarajevo, which was reduced to chaos by the general political discontent of the pupils and their particular discontents with the tendentious curriculum of the Austro-Hungarian education authorities. He took to shutting himself up in his poor room and read enormously of philosophy and politics, undermining his health and nerves by the severity of these undirected studies. Always, of course, he was short of money and ate but little. Finally he felt he had better emigrate to Serbia and start studies at a secondary school at Belgrade, and he took that step in May 1912, when he was barely seventeen. One of his brothers gave him some money, and he had saved much of what he had earned by teaching some little boys; but it must have been a starveling journey. In Belgrade he was extremely happy in his studies, and might have become a contented scholar had not the Balkan War broken out. He immediately volunteered, and was sent down to a training centre in the South of Serbia, and would have made a first-rate soldier if gallantry had been all that was needed. But his deprived body broke down, and he was discharged from the Army.

Princip’s humiliation was increased to a painful degree, it is said, because another soldier with whom he was on bad terms grinned when he saw him walking off with his discharge and said, ‘Skart,’ throw-out, bad stuff. Though he went back to Belgrade and studied hard and with great success, he was extremely distressed at his failure to render service to the Slav cause and prove his worth as a hero. It happened that in Serbia he had become a close friend of a young printer from Sarajevo called Chabrinovitch, a boy of his own age, who had been banished from Bosnia for five years for the offence of preaching anarchism. Much has been written about this youth which is not too enthusiastic, though it might be described as querulous rather than unfavourable. His companions found something disquieting and annoying about his high spirits and his garrulity, but it must be remembered that those who are very remarkable people, particularly when they are young, often repel more ordinary people by both their laughter and their grief, which seem excessive by the common measure. It is possible that what was odd about Chabrinovitch was simply incipient greatness. But he was also labouring under the handicap of an extremely hostile relationship to his father. In any case he certainly was acceptable as a friend by Princip, and this speaks well for his brains.

They had a number of Sarajevan friends in common, whom they had met at school or in the cafés. Among these was a young schoolmaster called Danilo Hitch, a neurotic and irascible and extremely unpopular ascetic. He is said to have served in the Serbian Army during the Balkan War, but only as an orderly. From the beginning of 1914 he was engaged in an attempt to form a terrorist organization for the purpose of committing a desperate deed, though nobody, least of all himself, seemed to know exactly what. Among his disciples was a young man called Pushara, who one day cut out of the newspaper a paragraph announcing the intended visit of Franz Ferdinand to Bosnia, and posted it from Sarajevo to Chabrinovitch in Belgrade. It is said by some that he meant merely to intimate that there would be trouble, not that trouble should be made. It is also to be noted that one of his family was said to be an Austrian police spy. If he or somebody connected with him had been acting as an agent provocateur they could not have hoped for better success. Chabrinovitch showed the paragraph to Princip, and they decided to return to Sarajevo and kill Franz Ferdinand.

But they needed help. Most of all they needed weapons. First they thought of applying to the Narodna Obrana, the Society of National Defence, for bombs, but their own good sense told them that was impossible. The Narodna Obrana was a respectable society acting openly under Government protection, and even these children, confused by misgovernment to complete callousness, saw that it would have been asking too much to expect it to commit itself to helping in the assassination of a foreign royalty. Moreover they both had had experience of the personalities directing the Narodna Obrana and they knew they were old-fashioned, pious, conservative Serbs of the medieval Serbian pattern, who were more than a little shocked by these Bosnian children who sat up till all hours in cafés and dabbled in free thought. When Chabrinovitch had gone to the society to ask a favour, an old Serbian captain had been gravely shocked by finding the lad in possession of Maupassant’s Bel Ami and had confiscated it.

It is unfortunate that at this point they met a Bosnian refugee called Tsiganovitch who had heard rumours of their intention and who offered to put them in the way of getting some bombs. He was a member of the secret society known as the ‘Black Hand,’ or was associated with it. This society had already played a sinister part in the history of Serbia. It was the lineal descendant of the group of officers who had killed King Alexander and Queen Draga and thus exchanged the Obrenovitch dynasty for the Karageorgevitch. The Karageorges, who had played no part in this conspiracy, and had had to accept its results passively, had never resigned themselves to the existence of the group, and were continually at odds with them. The ‘Black Hand’ was therefore definitely anti-Karageorgevitch and aimed at war with Austria and the establishment of a federated republic of Balkan Slavs. Their leader was a man of undoubted talent but far too picturesque character called Dragutin Dimitriyevitch, known as ’Apis,’ who had been for some time the head of the Intelligence Bureau of the Serbian General Staff. He had heard of Ilitch and his group through a Bosnian revolutionary living in Lausanne, Gachinovitch, a boy of twenty-two who had an extraordinary power over all his generation among the South Slavs, particularly among the Bosnians; his posthumous works were edited by Trotsky. It was by his direction that Chabrinovitch and Princip had been approached by Tsiganovitch, and were later taken in hand, together with another Bosnian boy of nineteen called Grabezh who had just joined them, by an officer called Tankositch, who had been concerned in the murder of King Alexander and Queen Draga.

Tankositch took the boys into some woods and saw how they shot—which was badly, though Princip was better than the others. Finally he fitted them out with bombs, pistols, and some prussic acid to take when their attempts had been made so that they might be sure not to break down and blab in the presence of the police. Then he sent them off to Sarajevo by what was known as the underground route, a route by which persons who might have found difficulty in crossing the frontier, whether for reasons of politics or of contraband, were helped by friendly pro-Slavs. The boys were smuggled through Bosnia by two guards who were under orders from the ‘Black Hand,’ and with the help of a number of Balkan peasants and tradesmen, who one and all were exceedingly discomfited but dared not refuse assistance to members of a revolutionary body, they got their munitions into Sarajevo.

This journey was completed only by a miracle, such was the inefficiency of the conspirators. Chabrinovitch talked too much. Several times the people on whose good-will they were dependent took fright and were in two minds to denounce the matter to the police, and take the risk of revolutionary vengeance rather than be hanged for complicity, as indeed some of them were. Hitch was even less competent. He had arranged to fetch the bombs at a certain railway junction, but he fell into a panic and did not keep the appointment. For hours the sugar-box containing the weapons lay in the public waiting-room covered with a coat. The station cat had a comfortable sleep on it. Unfortunately Hitch recovered his nerve and brought the bombs to his home, where he kept them under the sofa in his bedroom. He had swelled the ranks of those who were to use their arms by some most unsuitable additions. He had enrolled a Moslem called Mehmedbashitch, a peculiar character who had already shown a divided mind towards terrorism. In January 1913 he had gone to Toulouse with a Moslem friend and had visited the wonderful Gachinovitch, the friend of Trotsky. He had received from the leader weapons and poison for the purpose of attempting the life of General Potiorek, the Military Governor of Bosnia, but on the way he and his friend had thought better of it and dropped them out of the carriage window. Ilitch had also enrolled two schoolboys called Chubrilovitch and Popovitch, and gave them revolvers. Neither had ever fired a shot in his life. The few days before the visit of the Archduke Ilitch spent in alternately exhorting this ill-assorted group to show their patriotism by association and imploring them to forget it and disperse. He was himself at one point so overcome by terror that he got into the train and travelled all the way to the town of Brod, a hundred miles away. But he came back, though to the very end he seems at times to have urged Princip, who was living with him, to abandon the attentat,and to have expressed grave distrust of Chabrinovitch on the ground that his temperament was not suited to terrorism. It might have been supposed that Franz Ferdinand would never be more safe in his life than he would be on St. Vitus’s Day at Sarajevo.

That very nearly came to be true. On the great day Ilitch made up his mind that the assassination should take place after all, and he gave orders for the disposition of the conspirators in the street. They were so naive that it does not seem to have struck them as odd that he himself proposed to take no part in the attentat. They were told to take up their stations at various points on the embankment: first Mehmedbashitch, then Chabrinovitch, then Chubrilovitch, then Popovitch, and after that Princip, at the head of the bridge that now bears his name, with Grabezh facing him across the road. What happened might easily have been foretold. Mehmedbashitch never threw his bomb. Instead he watched the car go by and then ran to the railway station and jumped into a train that was leaving for Montenegro; there he sought the protection of one of the tribes which constituted that nation, with whom his family had friendly connexions, and the tribesmen kept him hidden in their mountain homes. Later he made his way to France, and that was not to be the end of his adventures. He was to be known to Balkan history as a figure hardly less enigmatic than the Man in the Iron Mask. The schoolboy Chubrilovitch had been told that if Mehmedbashitch threw his bomb he was to finish off the work with his revolver, but if Mehmedbashitch failed he was to throw his own bomb. He did nothing. Neither did the other schoolboy, Popovitch. It was impossible for him to use either his bomb or his revolver, for in his excitement he had taken his stand beside a policeman. Chabrinovitch threw his bomb, but high and wide. He then swallowed his dose of prussic acid and jumped off the parapet of the embankment. There, as the prussic acid had no effect on him, he suffered arrest by the police. Princip heard the noise of Chabrinovitch’s bomb and thought the work was done, so stood still. When the car went by and he saw that the royal party was still alive, he was dazed with astonishment and walked away to a café, where he sat down and had a cup of coffee and pulled himself together. Grabezh was also deceived by the explosion and let his opportunity go by. Franz Ferdinand would have gone from Sarajevo untouched had it not been for the actions of his staff, who by blunder after blunder contrived that his car should slow down and that he should be presented as a stationary target in front of Princip, the one conspirator of real and mature deliberation, who had finished his cup of coffee and was walking back through the streets, aghast at the failure of himself and his friends, which would expose the country to terrible punishment without having inflicted any loss on authority. At last the bullets had been coaxed out of the reluctant revolver to the bodies of the eager victims.

Sarajevo VI

‘Do you see,’ said Constantine, ‘the last folly of these idiots?’ There is a raw edge to the ends of the bridge, an unhemmed look to the masonry on both sides of the road. ‘They put up a statue of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, not in Vienna, where there was a good deal of expiation to be done to those two, but here, where the most pitiful amongst us could not pity them. As soon as we took the town over after the liberation they were carted away.’ They may still be standing in some backyard, intact or cut into queer sculptural joints, cast down among ironically long grass. There was never more convincing proof that we do not make our own destinies, that they are not merely the pattern traced by our characteristics on time as we rush through it, than the way that the destinies of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek continued to operate after their death. In their lives they had passed from situation to situation which invited ceremonial grandeur and had been insanely deprived of it in a gross ceremonial setting, and it was so when they were in their coffins. They were sent to Vienna, to what might have been hoped was the pure cold cancellation of the tomb. They were, however, immediately caught up and whirled about in a stately and complicated vortex of contumely and hatred that astonished the whole world, even their world, accustomed as it was to hideousness.

The Emperor Franz Josef cannot be blamed for the insolence which was wreaked on the coffins on their arrival in Vienna. A man of eighty-seven whose wife had been assassinated, whose son was either murdered or was a murderer and suicide, cannot be imagined to be other than shattered when he hears of the assassination of his heir and nephew, who was also his enemy, and his wife, who was a shame to his family. The occasion drew from Franz Josef a superb blasphemy: when he heard the news the thought of the morganatic marriage came first to his mind, and he said that God had corrected a wrong which he had been powerless to alter. But the guilt of the funeral arrangements at Vienna must rest on Prince Montenuovo, the Emperor’s Chamberlain, who had tormented Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek during their lives by the use of etiquette, and found that by the same weapon he could pursue them after their death.

Nothing but actual insanity can explain Prince Montenuovo’s perversion of the funeral arrangements. He was not only a cultured man, he had shown himself at times humane and courageous. In March 1913 he had acted for Franz Josef in his resistance to Conrad’s attempt to drag Austria into an unprovoked war with Serbia and Montenegro, and he had performed his duties with great tact and sense and principle. It would have been supposed that such a man, on finding himself charged with the duty of consigning to the grave the bodies of a husband and wife with whom he had been on contentious terms for many years, would feel compelled to a special decorum. Instead he could find no impropriety too wild for any part of the ceremony.

He arranged that the train which brought the bodies home should be delayed so that it arrived at night. It came in horribly spattered by the blood of a railwayman who had been killed at a level crossing. Montenuovo had two initial reverses. He prescribed that the new heir, the Archduke Charles, should not meet the train, but the young man insisted on doing so. He tried also to prevent Sophie Chotek’s coffin from lying beside her husband’s in the Royal Chapel during the funeral mass, but to that Franz Josef would not consent. But he had several successes. Sophie’s coffin was placed on a lower level to signify her lower rank. The full insignia of the Archduke lay on his coffin, on hers were placed the white gloves and black fan of the former lady-in-waiting. No wreath was sent by any member of the imperial family except Stephanie, the widow of the Crown Prince Rudolf, who had long been on atrocious terms with her relatives. The only flowers were a cross of white roses sent by the dead couple’s two children, and some wreaths sent by foreign sovereigns. The Emperor Franz Josef attended the service, but immediately afterwards the chapel was closed, in order that the public should have no opportunity to pay their respects to the dead.

Montenuovo attempted to separate the two in their graves. He proposed that Franz Ferdinand should be laid in the Habsburg tomb in the Capuchin church, while his wife’s body was sent to the chapel in their castle at Arstetten on the Danube. But to guard against this Franz Ferdinand had left directions that he too was to be buried at Arstetten. Montenuovo bowed to this decision, but announced that his responsibility would end when he had left the coffins at the West Terminus station. The municipal undertaker had to make all arrangements for putting them on the train for Pöchlarn, which was the station for Arstetten, and getting them across the Danube to the castle. But Montenuovo provided that their task was made difficult by holding back the procession from the chapel till late at night. As a protest a hundred members of the highest Hungarian and Austrian nobility appeared in the costumes that would have been the proper wear at an imperial funeral, thrust themselves into the procession, and walked on foot to the station.

The coffins and the mourners travelled on a train that delivered them at Pochlarn at one o‘clock in the morning. They found that the station had not been prepared for the occasion, there were no crape hangings or red carpets. This was extremely shocking to a people obsessed with etiquette and pomp. But they soon had more solid reasons for resentment. The moment when the coffins were laid on the platform was the signal for a blinding and deafening and drenching thunderstorm. The disadvantages of a nocturnal funeral became apparent. Nobody in charge of the proceedings knew the village, so the mourners could not find their way to shelter and had to pack into the little station, impeding the actual business of the funeral. It had been proposed to take the coffins to a neighbouring church for a further part of the religious services, but the hearses could not be loaded in the heavy rain, and indeed the mourners would not have known where to follow them in the darkness. So the bewildered priests consecrated the coffins in the crowded little waiting-room among the time-tables and advertisements of seaside resorts. At last the rain stopped, and a start was made for the castle. But there was still much thunder and lightning, and the sixteen horses that drew the hearses were constantly getting out of control. It was dawn when the cavalcade was brought safely to a quay on the Danube, and in the quietness the horses were coaxed on to the ferry-boat by attendants who had water running down round their feet in streams from their sodden clothing. The mourners, left on the bank to wait their turn, watched the boat with thankfulness. But when it was in the middle of the stream there was a last flash of lightning, a last drum-roll of thunder. The left pole-horse in front of the Archduke’s hearse reared, and the back wheels slipped over the edge of the ferry-boat. Till it reached the other side it was a shambles of terrified horses, of men who could hardly muster the strength to cling to the harness, and cried out in fatigue and horror as they struggled, of coffins slipping to the water’s edge.

It is strange that it was this scene which made it quite certain that the Sarajevo attentat should be followed by a European war. The funeral was witnessed by a great many soldiers and officials and men of influence, and their reaction was excited and not logical. If Franz Ferdinand had been quietly laid to rest according to the custom of his people, many Austrians would have felt sober pity for him for a day, and then remembered his many faults. They would surely have reflected that he had brought his doom on himself by the tactlessness and aggressiveness of his visit to the Serbian frontier at the time of a Serbian festival; and they might also have reflected that those qualities were characteristic not only of him but of his family. The proper sequel to the Walpurgisnacht obsequies of Franz Ferdinand would have been the dismissal of Prince Montenuovo, the drastic revision of the Austrian constitution and reduction of the influence wielded by the Habsburgs and their court, and an attempt at the moral rehabilitation of Vienna. But to take any of these steps Austria would have had to look in the mirror. She preferred instead to whip herself into a fury of loyalty to Franz Ferdinand’s memory. It was only remembered that he was the enemy of Franz Josef, who had now shown himself sacrilegious to a corpse who, being a Habsburg, must have been as sacred as an emperor who was sacred because he was a Habsburg. It was felt that if Franz Ferdinand had been at odds with this old man and his court he had probably been right. Enthusiasm flamed up for the men who had been chosen by Franz Ferdinand, for Conrad von Hötzendorf and Berchtold, and for the policy of imperialist aggression that they had jointly engendered. Again the corpse was outraged; he could not speak from the grave to say that he had cancelled those preferences, to protest when these men he had repudiated put forward the policy he had abandoned and pressed it on the plea of avenging his death. The whole of Vienna demanded that the pacifism of Franz Josef should be flouted as an old man’s folly and that Austria should declare war upon Serbia.

The excuse for this declaration of war was the allegation that the conspirators had been suborned to kill Franz Ferdinand by the Serbian Government. During the last twenty years, in the mood of lazy and cynical self-criticism which has afflicted the powers that were apparently victorious in 1918, it has been often pretended that there were grounds for that allegation. It has been definitely stated in many articles and books that the Serbian Government was aware of the murderous intentions of Princip, Chabrinovitch, and Grabezh, and itself supplied them with bombs and revolvers and sent them back to Bosnia. Sometimes it is suggested that the Russian Government joined with the Serbian Government to commit this crime.

Not one scrap of evidence exists in support of these allegations.

One of the most celebrated contemporary writers on European affairs sets down in black and white the complicity of the Serbian and Russian Governments. I have asked him for his authority. He has none. A famous modern English historian, not pro-Serb, tells me that ever since the war he has been looking for some proof of the guilt of Serbia, and has never found it, or any indication that it is to be found.

It is clear, and nothing could be clearer, that certain Serbian individuals supplied the conspirators with encouragement and arms. But this does not mean that the Serbian Government was responsible. If certain Irishmen, quite unconnected with Mr De Valera, should supply Irish-Americans with bombs for the purpose of killing President Roosevelt, and he died, the United States would not therefore declare war on Eire. A connexion between the Irishmen and their Government would have to be established before a casus belli would be recognized. But no link whatsoever has been discovered between the Serbian Government and Tsiganovitch and Tankositch, the obscure individuals who had given Princip and Chabrinovitch and Grabezh their bombs. They were, indeed, members of the ‘Black Hand,’ the secret society which was savagely hostile both to the Karageorge dynasty and the political party then in power. That this hostility was not a fiction is shown by the precautions taken against discovery by the Serbian sentries who helped the conspirators over the frontier.

There are only two reasons which would give ground for suspicion of the Serbian Government. The first is the marks on the bombs, which showed definitely that they had been issued by the Serbian State Arsenal at Kraguyevats. That looks damning, but means nothing. Bombs were distributed in large numbers both to the comitadji and regular troops during the Balkan War, and many soldiers put them by as likely to come in handy in the rough-and-tumble of civil life. A search through the outhouses of many a Serbian farm would disclose a store of them. Tankositch would have had no difficulty in acquiring as many as he liked, without any need for application to the authorities. The other suspicious circumstance is the refusal of several Serbian officials to disclaim responsibility for the crime, and the assumption by others of a certain fore-knowledge of the crime which was first cousin to actual responsibility for it. This can be discounted in view of the peculiar atmosphere of Balkan politics. A century ago no political leader could come forward among the Slavs unless he had distinguished himself in guerrilla warfare against the Turks, warfare which often involved what would be hard to tell from assassination. For this reason politicians of peasant origin, bred in the full Balkan tradition, such as the Serbian Prime Minister, Mr Pashitch, could not feel the same embarrassment at being suspected of complicity in the murder of a national enemy that would have been felt by his English contemporaries, say Mr Balfour or Mr Asquith. After all, an Irish politician would not find a very pressing need to exculpate himself from a charge of having been concerned in the murder of Sir Henry Wilson, so far as the good-will of his constituents was concerned. But no hint of any actual meeting or correspondence by which Mr Pashitch established any contact, however remote, with the conspirators has ever been given; and as any such contact would have involved a reconciliation with those who before and after were his enemies, there must have been go-betweens, but these, in spite of the loquacity of the race, have never declared themselves. There was a Mr Liuba Yovanovitch, Minister of Education under Mr Pashitch, who could not stop writing articles in which he boasted that he and his friends in Belgrade had known for weeks ahead that the conspiracy was hatching in Sarajevo. But unkind researchers have discovered that seven years before he put in exactly the same claim concerning the murder of King Alexander and Queen Draga, and that members of that conspiracy had indignantly brought forward proof that they had nothing to do with him. Mr Yovanovitch, in fact, was the Balkan equivalent of the sort of Englishman who wears an Old Etonian tie without cause.

On the other hand there were overwhelming reasons why the Serbian Government should not have supported this or any other conspiracy. It cannot have wanted war at that particular moment. The Karageorges must have been especially anxious to avoid it. King Peter had just been obliged by chronic ill-health to appoint his son Alexander as his regent and it had not escaped the attention of the Republican Party that the King had had to pass over his eldest son, George, because he was hopelessly insane. Mr Pashitch and his Government can hardly have been more anxious for a war, as their machine was temporarily disorganized by preparations for a general election. Both alike, the royal family and the Ministers, held disquieting knowledge about the Serbian military situation. Their country had emerged from the two Balkan wars victorious but exhausted, without money, transport, or munitions, and with a peasant army that was thoroughly sick of fighting. They can have known no facts to offset those, for none existed. Theoretically they could only rely on the support of France and Russia, and possibly Great Britain, but obviously geography would forbid any of these powers giving her practical aid in the case of an Austrian invasion.

In fact, the Karageorges and the Government knew perfectly well that, if there should be war, they must look forward to an immediate defeat of the most painful sort, for which they could receive compensation only should their allies, whoever they might be, at some uncertain time win a definite victory. But if there should be peace, then the Karageorges and the Government could consolidate the victories they had won in the Balkan wars, develop their conquered territory, and organize their neglected resources. Admittedly Serbia aimed at the ultimate absorption of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and the South Slav provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But this was not the suitable moment. If she attained her aims by this method she would have to pay too heavy a price, as, in fact, she did. No country would choose to realize any ideal at the cost of the destruction of one-third of her population. That she did not so choose is shown by much negative evidence. At the time the murder was committed she had just let her reservists return home after their annual training, her Commander-in-chief was taking a cure at an Austrian spa, and none of the Austrian Slavs who had fought in the Balkan War and returned home were warned to come across the frontier. But the positive evidence is even stronger. When Austria sent her ultimatum to Serbia, which curtly demanded not only the punishment of the Serbians who were connected with the Sarajevo attentat, but the installation of Austrian and Hungarian officers in Serbia for the purpose of suppressing Pan-Slavism, Mr Pashitch bowed to all the demands save for a few gross details, and begged that the exceptions he had made should not be treated as refusals but should be referred for arbitration to The Hague Tribunal. There was not one trace of bellicosity in the attitude of Serbia at this point. If she had promoted the Sarajevo attentat in order to make war possible, she was very near to throwing her advantage away.

The innocence of the Serbian Government must be admitted by all but the most prejudiced. But guilt lies very heavy on the ‘Black Hand.’ There is, however, yet another twist in the story here. It seems fairly certain that that guilt was not sustained of full intent. We may doubt that when ‘Apis’ sent these young men to Bosnia he believed for one moment that they would succeed in their plan of killing Franz Ferdinand. He was just as well aware as the authorities of the military and economic difficulties of his country, and probably wanted war as little as they did. But even if he had been of another mind he would hardly have chosen such agents. The conspirators, when they first attracted his attention, numbered only two weakly boys of nineteen, Princip and Chabrinovitch. He had learned that their only revolutionary connexions in Sarajevo were through Ilitch; and as this information came from Gachinovitch, the exile who knew everything about the unrest in Bosnia, he must have learned at the same time how inexperienced in terrorism Hitch was. ’Apis’ must also have known from his officers that Princip was only a fair shot, and that Chabrinovitch and the third boy who joined them later, Grabezh, could not hit a wall. He must have realized that in such inexpert hands the revolvers would be nearly useless, and the bombs would be no better, for they were not the sort used by the Russian terrorists, which exploded at contact, but the kind used in trench warfare, which had to be hit against a hard object before they were thrown, and then took some seconds to go off. They were extremely difficult to throw in a crowd; any soldier could have guessed that Chabrinovitch would never be able to aim one straight.

Yet ‘Apis’ could have got any munitions that he wanted by taking a little trouble, and, what is more, he could have got any number of patriotic Bosnians who had been through the Balkan wars and could shoot and throw bombs with professional skill. I myself know a Herzegovinian, a remarkable shot and a seasoned soldier, who placed himself at the disposition of the ’Black Hand’ to assassinate any oppressor of the Slav people. ‘Dans ces jours-la,’ he says, ‘nous étions tous fous.’ His offer was never accepted. It is to be wondered whether ‘Apis’ was quite the character his contemporaries believed. Much is made of his thirst for blood, and he was certainly involved, though not in any major capacity, in the murder of King Alexander and Queen Draga. But the rest of his reputation is based on his self-confessed participation in plots to murder King Nicholas of Montenegro, King Constantine of Greece, the last German Kaiser, and King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. The first three of these monarchs, however, died in their beds, and the last one is still with us. It is possible that ’Apis’ was obsessed by a fantasy of bloodshed and treachery, which he shrunk from translating into fact, partly out of a poetic preference for fantasy over fact, partly out of a very sensible regard for his own skin.

There is, indeed, one circumstance which tells us that the ‘Black Hand’ took Princip and his friends very lightly indeed. Over and over again we read in the records of these times about boys who took out revolvers or bombs with the intention of killing this or that instrument of Austrian tyranny, but lost heart and returned home without incident. There must have been many more such abortive attempts than are recorded. The ’Black Hand’ was the natural body to which such boys would turn with a request for arms; it would be interesting to know how often they had handed out munitions which had never been used. Repetition had, it seems, bred carelessness in classification. For when Princip and Chabrinovitch took the prussic acid which Tsiganovitch and Tankositch had given them, it had no effect on either. It is said vaguely that it had ‘gone bad,’ but prussic acid is not subject to any such misfortune. In the only form which is easy to obtain, it does not even evaporate quickly. What Tsiganovitch and Tankositch had given the boys was plain water, or something equally innocuous. They would not have made this substitution if they had believed in the effectiveness of the conspiracy. They must have known that if the boys succeeded and were tortured and talked they would have reason for the gravest fears: which, indeed, were realized. ‘Apis’ was executed by the Serbian Government three years later, after a mysterious trial which is one of the most baffling incidents in Balkan history; nothing is clear about it save that the real offence for which he was punished was his connexion with the Sarajevo attentat. Tankositch and Tsiganovitch also paid a heavy price in their obscurer way.

Only one person involved in this business did what he meant to do: Princip believed he ought to kill Franz Ferdinand, and he shot him dead. But everybody else acted contrary to his own will. The dead pair, who had dreamed of empire stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, surrendered the small primary power to breathe. If the generals about them had had any hope of procuring victory and the rule of the sword they were to fail to the extraordinary degree of annihilating not only their own army but their own nation. The conspirators wanted to throw their bombs, and could not. Hitch, whose flesh quailed at the conspirator’s lot, was compelled to it by the values of his society, distracted as it was by oppression. In Vienna Montenuovo raised a defence of criminal insolence round the sacred Habsburg stock, and uprooted it from Austrian soil, to lie on the rubbish-heap of exile. There was an exquisite appropriateness in this common fate which fell on all those connected with the events of that St. Vitus’s Day; for those who are victims of what is known as St. Vitus’s disease suffer an uncontrollable disposition to involuntary motions.

Sarajevo VII

‘You must come up to the Orthodox cemetery and see the graves of these poor boys,’ said Constantine. ‘It is very touching, for a reason that will appear when you see it.’ Two days later we made this expedition, with the judge and the banker to guide us. But Constantine could not keep back his dramatic climax until we got there. He felt he had to tell us when we had driven only half-way up the hillside. ‘What is so terrible,’ he said, ‘is that they are there in that grave, the poor little ones, Princip, Chabrinovitch, Grabezh, and three other little ones who were taken with them. They could not be hanged, the law forbade it. Nobody could be hanged in the Austrian Empire under twenty-one. Yet I tell you they are all there, and they certainly did not have time to die of old age, for they were all dead before the end of the war.’

This, indeed, is the worst part of the story. It explains why it has been difficult to establish humane penal methods in countries which formed part of the Austrian Empire, and why minor officials in those succession states often take it for granted that violence is a part of the technique of administration. The sequel to the attentat shows how little Bosnians had to congratulate themselves for exchanging Austrian domination for Turkish.

When the Serbian prussic acid failed, both Princip and Chabrinovitch made other attempts at suicide which were frustrated. Princip put his revolver to his temple, and had it snatched away by a busybody. Chabrinovitch jumped into the river and was fished out by the police. He made at that point a remark which has drawn on him much heavy-footed derision from German writers owing to a misunderstanding over a Serb word. A policeman who arrested him said in his evidence at the trial, ‘I hit him with my fist, and I said, “Why don’t you come on? You are a Serb, aren’t you?” ’ He said that Chabrinovitch answered him in a phrase that has been too literally translated, ‘Yes, I am a Serbian hero.’ This has been taken by foreign commentators as proof of Chabrinovitch’s exalted folly and the inflamed character of Serbian nationalism. But the word ‘Yunak’ has a primary meaning of hero and a secondary meaning of militant nationalist. The words the policeman intended to put into Chabrinovitch’s mouth were simply ’Yes, I am a Serbian nationalist,‘ so that he could say that he had then asked, ’Where did you get your gun?‘ and that he had been answered, ’From our society.‘ Chabrinovitch gave a convincing denial that the conversation, even in this form, ever took place. Thus is the face of history thickly veiled.

The two youths, beaten to unconsciousness, were taken to prison; which on the morrow of St. Vitus’s Day was as good a place to be as any in Sarajevo. For there broke out an anti-Slav riot which in its first impulse destroyed the best hotel in Sarajevo and the office of a Serb newspaper, and the next day merged into an organized pogrom of the Serb inhabitants of Sarajevo. There was, of course, some spontaneous feeling against them. Many Moslems grieved over the loss of their protector, and a number of devoutly Catholic Croats regretted their coreligionist for his piety; it is known that some of these, notably a few Croat clerical students, joined in the rioting. But General Potiorek had had to contrive the rest. The bulk of the demonstrators consisted of very poor Catholics, Jews, and Moslems, many of whom had come to town to work in the new factories and had fallen into a pitiful slough of misery. Those unhappy wretches were told by police agents that if they wanted to burn and loot authority would hold its hand, and, more than that, that they had better burn and loot good and hard, lest a misfortune should fall on the town.

This warning was more heavily impressed on the people by the thousands of troops that had been brought into the town now that Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek were dead and beyond need of protection. There were enough of them to line three-deep the long route by which the coffins passed from the Cathedral to the railway station. Many of them were Croat and Austrian, and afterwards they walked about with fixed bayonets, singing anti-Serb songs. They did not interfere with the rioters. Rather were they apt to deal harshly with those who were not taking a sufficiently active part in the riot. It was doubtless easy to take the hint and enjoy the licence. Human nature is not very nice.

But the full blame for the riot cannot be laid on these helpless victims of coercion. The leading Serb in Sarajevo owned a house, a hotel, a café, warehouses, and stables, in different parts of the town. All were visited, and all were methodically sacked from cellar to roof. Street fighters do not work with such system. Then those who appeared with pickaxes and slowly and conscientiously razed to the foundations houses belonging to the Serbs were not stopped by the authorities. In this way material damage was inflicted on the town to the amount of two hundred thousand pounds. So little was the rioting spontaneous that many Croats and Jews and Moslems risked their lives by giving shelter to Serbs; but so many lives were lost that the figures were suppressed.

Not a single rioter was jailed nor a single official, military or civil, degraded for failure to keep order. It is not surprising that like riots broke out during the next few days in every provincial town and sizable village where the Croats and Moslems outnumbered the Serbs. This is said to have been a device of General Potiorek to placate the authorities and dissuade them from punishing him for his failure to protect Franz Ferdinand. But it is doubtful if he had any reason to fear punishment, for he was promoted immediately afterwards. Meantime hundreds of schoolboys and students were thrown into prison, and were joined by all eminent Serbs, whether teachers or priests or members of religious or even temperance societies. As soon as war broke out there were appalling massacres; in such a small place as Pali, the winter sports village above Sarajevo, sixty men and women were killed. Wholesale arrests filled the fortresses of Hungary with prisoners, of whom more than half were to die in their dungeons.

The Austrian excuse for this war was self-defence; but it is hard to extend it to cover the riots at Sarajevo. It is carrying self-defence too far to use a pickaxe and demolish the house of the man whom one regards, surely by that time only in theory, as an aggressor. Moreover, already the arrested youths had been interrogated and it must have been suspected by the authorities that the conspiracy might consist of a few isolated people of no importance. Before the provincial riots that suspicion must have become a certainty. For the prisoners had talked quite a lot. They, and those friends of theirs who had been arrested later, had been put to torture. Princip was tied to an oak beam so that he stood tiptoe on the ground. Grabezh was made to kneel on a rolling barrel, so that he continually fell off in a stifling cloud of dust, and was put in a strait-jacket that was pulled in again and again; and shepherd dogs, of the sort that are often terribly strong and savage in Bosnia and Serbia, were let loose in his cell when he was faint with pain and lack of sleep. Chabrinovitch apparently escaped such tortures, because the garrulity of which his friends complained came in useful; from the very beginning he told the police a great deal, and they did not find out till the end of the trial that it was not true. He concocted a very clever story that the Freemasons had ordered the murder of Franz Ferdinand because he was so militant a Catholic, which diverted suspicion from Belgrade. But Hitch was also arrested, and the threat of torture was enough to make him tell everything. Let him who is without fear cast the first stone; but it meant that all the peasants and tradesmen who had reluctantly helped in the journey from the frontier, all the schoolboys who had chattered with him about revolt at the pastrycook‘s, joined the conspirators in jail. Some of them, however, would have been arrested in any case, for the Austrian Army had by now crossed the Serbian frontier and seized the customs records, which made them able to trace the route. The conspirators passed a time of waiting before the trial which would have been unutterably terrible to Western prisoners, but which these strange, passionate, yet philosophical children seem to have in a fashion enjoyed, though at one time hope deferred must have made their hearts sicken. In their cells they heard the guns of the Serbian Army as it crossed the Drina, and they expected to be rescued. But the sound of the firing guns grew fainter and died away, and later Serbian prisoners of war were brought into the prison.

On the twelfth of October the trial began. It is typical of the insanity of our world that, ten weeks before this, Austria had declared war on Serbia because of her responsibility for the attentat, although these were the first proceedings which made it possible to judge whether that responsibility existed. The trial was for long veiled from common knowledge. Only certain highly official German and Austrian newspapers were allowed to send correspondents. Chabrinovitch, in the course of one of his very intelligent interventions in the trial, talked of the secret sittings of the court, and when the president asked him what he meant, he pointed out that no representatives of the opposition press were present. To this the president made the reply, which is curiously like what we have heard from the Nazis very often since, ‘What! According to your ideas, is a court open only when the representatives of the opposition are allowed to come in?’ There were naturally no English or French correspondents at that time; and there were apparently no American journalists. None could follow Serbo-Croat, so they took their material from their German colleagues. The most dramatic event of our time was thus completely hidden from us at the time when it most affected us; and it has only been gradually and partially revealed. The official reports were sent to Vienna and there they disappeared. Not till the early twenties was a carbon copy found in Sarajevo. This can be read in a French translation; care should be taken in consulting a German version, for one at least abounds in interpolations and perversions devised in the interest of upholding Chabrinovitch’s fabrications about Freemasonry. The only account of it in English is contained in Mr Stephen Graham’s admirable novel St. Vitus’ Day.

It is perhaps for this reason that there are many false ideas abroad today concerning the conspiracy. It is imagined to have been far more formidable than it was. People say, ‘You know Franz Ferdinand had no chance, there were seven men in the street to shoot him if Princip failed.’ This is what the Moslems in the Town Hall thought, but it is not true. Princip was not the first but the last in the line of assassins, and all the rest had proved themselves unfitted for their job. It is also held that the conspirators were dangerous fanatics of maniacal or at least degenerate type. But actually their behaviour in court was not only completely sane but cheerful and dignified, and their evidence and speeches showed both individual ability and a very high level of culture. Even those who hate violence and narrow passions must admit that the records of the trial open a world which is not displeasing.

It is, of course, disordered. As a schoolboy goes into the dock he is asked according to form whether he has any previous convictions. Yes, he has served a fortnight in prison for having struck a teacher in a political disturbance in a class-room. One peasant, charged with helping the conspirators to dispose of the bombs, wept perpetually. It was the fate of his simple law-abiding sort to be ground between the upper and the nether millstones of an oppressive government and revolutionary societies so desperate that they dared to be almost as oppressive. When they asked him why he had not denounced the party to the police when he saw the bombs, he said, ‘But with us one cannot do a thing like that without the permission of the head of the family.’ He was sentenced to be hanged, and though his sentence was reduced to twenty years’ imprisonment, he died in prison. Other prisoners showed the essential unity of the Slav race by talking like Dostoievsky characters, by falling out of a procession that marched briskly to a temporal measure and settling down to discuss spiritual matters, no more quickly than the slow pulse of eternity. When the president of the court said to one of the schoolboys, ‘But you say you’re religious . . . that you’re a member of the Orthodox Church. Don’t you realize that your religion forbids the killing of a man? Is your faith serious or is it on the surface?’ the boy thoughtfully answered, ‘Yes, it is on the surface.’ Another expounded the mysticism of Pan-Slavism, claiming that his nationalism was part of his religion, and his religion was part of his nationalism. How poorly Austria was qualified to bring order into these gifted people’s lives—and there was no reason for her presence if she could not—is shown by the shocking muddle of the court procedure. Dates were hardly ever mentioned and topics were brought up as they came into the heads of the lawyers rather than according to any logical programme.

Nobody made any recriminations against Ilitch, though it was apparent he had behaved far from well. Some of the prisoners fought for their lives, but with a certain dignity, and on the whole without sacrifice of their convictions. It is very clear, however, that Princip was in a class apart. Throughout the trial he was always selfless and tranquil, alert to defend and define his ideas but indifferent to personal attacks. He never made a remark throughout the trial that was not sensible and broadminded. It is interesting to note that he declared he had committed his crime as a peasant who resented the poverty the Austrians had brought on his kind.

Chabrinovitch, however, was a very good second, in spite of the unfavourable impression he often made. That impression one can quite understand after one has read the records. At one point he held up the proceedings to make a clever and obscure joke that did not quite come off, of the sort that infuriates stupid people; but it is also clear that he was extremely able. He kept his Freemasonry myth going with remarkable skill; and Princip carried on a debate which the left-wing youth of England and France came to only much later. Chabrinovitch had in the past been a pacifist. Indeed, though a passionate Pan-Serb, he had dissuaded many of his fellow-students from enlisting in Serbia’s ranks during the Balkan wars. He was still so much of a pacifist that he was not sure whether his act in attempting the life of Franz Ferdinand had been morally defensible. It was, if it were ever right to use force; but of that he was never fully persuaded. In his speech to the court before it pronounced judgment this point of view was very apparent. He did not ask for mercy, and he quite rightly laid the blame for his crime on the poisoned atmosphere of the oppressed provinces, where every honest man was turned into a rebel, and assassination became a display of virtue. But Princip had always been of the opinion that this was not the time for Bosnians to delve into first principles. He had never been a pacifist, and as a boy had argued coldly and destructively with the Tolstoyan group in Sarajevo. He simply said: ‘Anyone who says that the inspiration for this attentat came from outside our group is playing with the truth. We originated the idea, and we carried it out. We loved the people. I have nothing to say in my defence.’

The trial went as might have been expected. Consideration of the speeches of the counsel for the defence show that it was very nearly as difficult in Austria for a prisoner charged by the Government to find a lawyer to put his case as it is in Nazi Germany. The Croat lawyer who was defending one prisoner showed the utmost reluctance to plead his cause at all. He began his speech by saying, ‘Illustrious tribunal, after all we have heard, it is peculiarly painful for me, as a Croat, to conduct the defence of a Serb.’ But there was one counsel, Dr Rudolf Zistler, who bore himself as a hero. With an intrepidity that was doubly admirable considering it was war-time, he pointed out that the continual succession of trials for high treason in the Slav provinces could only be explained by misgovernment; and he raised a vital point, so vital that it is curious he was allowed to finish his speech, by claiming that it was absurd to charge the prisoners with conspiracy to detach Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Austrian Empire, because the legal basis of the annexation of these provinces was unsatisfactory, and in any case the annexation had never been properly ratified. Apparently the first proposition can be disputed, but the second is sound enough. Neither the Austrian nor the Hungarian Parliament ever voted on the necessary Act of Annexation. It was only a technicality, just another piece of Schlamperei; but it adds yet one more fantastic touch to the event that Princip had had a legal right to be where he was in Sarajevo, and that Franz Ferdinand had had none.

Nothing, of course, was of any avail. Hitch, together with a schoolmaster, a retired bioscope exhibitor, the peasant who wept, and one more stoical, who had all played a part in harbouring and transporting the munitions, was sentenced to the gallows, and the first three of them were hanged in Sarajevo four months later. The last two were reprieved and sentenced to imprisonment for twenty years and for life, respectively. Princip, Chabrinovitch, and Grabezh would have been hanged had they not been under twenty-one. As it was they received sentences of twenty years’ imprisonment, one day of fast each month, and twenty-four hours in a dungeon on every anniversary of the twenty-eighth of June. The rest of the conspirators were sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from life down to three years. These were not excessive sentences. In England Princip would have very rightly been sent to the gallows. Nevertheless, the sequel is not such as can be contemplated without horror and pity. Thirteen conspirators were sent to Austrian prisons. Before the end of the war, which came three and a half years later, nine of them had died in their cells.

How this slow murder was contrived in the case of Princip is known to us, through Slav guards and doctors. He was taken to an eighteenth-century fortress at Theresienstadt between Prague and Dresden. The Austrians would not leave him in Sarajevo because they already saw that the war was not going as they had hoped, and they feared that Bosnia might fall into Serbian hands. He was put in an underground cell filled with the stench of the surrounding marshes, which received the fortress sewage. He was in irons. There was no heating. He had nothing to read. On St Vitus’s Day he had sustained a broken rib and a crushed arm which were never given proper medical attention. At Theresienstadt the arm became tuberculous and suppurated, and he contracted a fungoid infection on the body. Three times he tried to commit suicide, but in his cell there lacked the means either of life or of death. In 1917 his forearm became so septic that it had to be amputated. By this time Chabrinovitch and Grabezh were both dead, it is said of tuberculosis. Grabezh at any rate had been a perfectly healthy boy till his arrest. Princip never rallied after his operation. He had been put in a windowless cell, and though he could no longer be handcuffed, since the removal of his arm, his legs were hobbled with heavy chains. In the spring of 1918 he died. He was buried at night, and immense precautions were taken to conceal the spot. But the Austrian Empire had yet to make the last demonstration of Schlamperei in connexion with the Sarajevo attentat. One of the soldiers who dug the grave was a Slav, and he took careful note of its position; he came forward after the peace and gave his information to the Serbs. They were able to identify the body by its mutilations.

Princip appears to have suffered greatly under his imprisonment, though with courage. In his death, as in everything we hear reported of his life, there was a certain noble integrity of experience. He offered himself wholly to each event in order that he might learn in full what revelation it had to make about the nature of the universe. How little of a demented fanatic he was, what qualities of restraint and deliberation he brought to his part in the attentat, is revealed by the testimony of the Czech doctor who befriended him in prison. From the.court records one would suppose him to be without personal ties, to be perhaps an orphan, at any rate to be wholly absorbed in politics. Yet to the Czech doctor he spoke perpetually of his dear mother, of his brothers and their children, and of a girl whom he had loved and whom he had hoped to marry, though he had never kissed her.

Chabrinovitch took his punishment differently, and almost certainly a little more happily. It chanced that in prison he had momentary contact with Franz Werfel, the greatest of post-war Austrian writers, who was working there as hospital orderly. In an essay Werfel has recorded his surprise at finding that the Slav assassin, whom he had imagined as wolfish and demented, should turn out to be this delicate and gentle boy, smiling faintly in his distress. It can be recognized from his account that Chabrinovitch used in prison that quality which annoyed his less-gifted friends, which was the antithesis, or perhaps the supplement, of Princip’s single-mindedness. He took all experience that came his way and played with it, discussed it, overstated it, understated it, moaned over it, joked about it, tried out all its intellectual and emotional potentialities. What these youths did was abominable, precisely as abominable as the tyranny they destroyed. Yet it need not be denied that they might have grown to be good men, and perhaps great men, if the Austrian Empire had not crashed down on them in its collapse. But the monstrous frailty of empire involves such losses.

At the cemetery we forgot for a moment why we were there, so beautifully does it lie in the tilted bowl of the town. It is always so in Sarajevo. Because of the intricate contours of its hills it is for ever presenting a new picture, and the mind runs away from life to its setting. And when we had passed the cemetery gates, we forgot again for another reason. Not far away among the tombs there was a new grave, a raw wound in the grass. A wooden cross was at its head, and burning candles were stuck in the broken clay. At the foot of it stood a young officer, his face the colour of tallow. He rocked backwards in his grief, though very slightly, and his mouth worked with prayer. His uniform was extremely neat. Yet once, while we stared at him in shocked distress, he tore open his skirted coat as if he were about to strip; but instantly his hand did up the buttons as if he were a nurse coolly tending his own delirium.

This was a Slav, this is what it is to be a Slav. He was offering himself wholly to his sorrow, he was learning the meaning of death and was not refusing any part of the knowledge; for he knew that experience is the cross man must take up and carry. Not for anything would he have chosen to feel one shade less pain; and if it had been joy he was feeling, he would have permitted himself to feel all possible delight. He knew only that in suffering or rejoicing he must not lose that control of the body which enabled him to be a good soldier and to defend himself and his people, so that they would endure experience along their own path and acquire their own revelation of the universe.

There is no other way of living which promises that man shall ever understand his destiny better than he does, and live less familiarly with evil. Yet to numberless people all over Europe, to numberless people in Great Britain, this man would be loathsome as a leper. It is not pleasant to feel pain, it is the act of a madman to bare the breast to agony. It is not pleasant to admit that we know almost nothing, so little that, for lack of knowledge, our actions are wild and foolish. It is not pleasant to be bound to the task of learning all our days, to be under the obligation to go on learning even though it involves making acquaintance with pain, although we know that we must die still in ignorance. To do these things it is necessary to have faith in what is entirely hidden and unknown, to cast away all the acquisitions and certainties which would ensure a comfortable existence lest they should impede us on a journey which may never be accomplished, which never even offers comfort. Therefore the multitudes in Europe who are not hungry for truth would say: ‘Let us kill these Slavs with their dedication to insanity, let us enslave them lest they make all wealth worthless and introduce us at the end to God, who may not be pleasant to meet.’

The judge and the banker said, ‘Look, they are here.’ Close to the palings of the cemetery, under three stone slabs, lie the conspirators of Sarajevo, those who were hanged and five of those who died in prison; and to them has been joined Zheraitch, the boy who tried to kill the Bosnian Governor General Vareshanin and was kicked as he lay on the ground. The slab in the middle is raised. Underneath it lies the body of Princip. To the left and the right lie the others, the boys on one side and the men on the other, for in this country it is recognized that the difference between old and young is almost as great as that between men and women. The grave is not impressive. It is as if a casual hand had swept them into a stone drawer. There was a battered wreath laid askew on the slabs, and candles flickered in rusty lanterns. This untidiness means nothing. It is the Moslem habit to be truthful about death, to admit that what it leaves of our kind might just as well be abandoned to the process of the earth. Only to those associated with a permanent system, who were holy men or governors or great soldiers, do Moslems raise tombs that are in any sense monuments, and they are more careful to revere these than to keep them in order. After all, a stone with a green stain of weed on it commemorates death more appropriately than polished marble. This attitude is so reasonable that it has spread from the Moslems to the Christians in all territories where they are found side by side. It does not imply insensibility. The officer swaying in front of the cross on the new grave might never be wholly free of his grief till he died, but this did not mean that he would derive any satisfaction at all in making the grave look like part of a garden. And as we stood by the shabby monument an old woman passing along the road outside the cemetery paused, pressed her face against the railings, looked down on the stone slab, and retreated into prayer. Later a young man who was passing by with a cart loaded with vegetables stopped and joined her, his eyes also set in wonder on the grave, his hand also making the sign of the cross on brow and breast, his lips also moving.

On their faces there was none of the bright acclaiming look which shines in the eyes of those who talk of, say, Andreas Hofer. They seemed to be contemplating a mystery, and so they were; for the Sarajevo attentat is mysterious as history is mysterious, as life is mysterious. Of all the men swept into this great drawer only one, Princip, had conceived what they were doing as a complete deed. To Chabrinovitch it had been a hypothesis to be used as a basis for experiment; his vision of it came from the brain only, and not from the blood. To some of the others it had been an event interesting to imagine, which would certainly not be allowed to happen by the inertia we all feel in the universe, the resistance life puts up against the human will, particularly if that is making any special effort. To the rest, to the unhappy peasants and tradesmen who found themselves quite involuntarily helping the boys in their journey from the Serbian frontier, it must have seemed as if the troubles of their land had fused into a mindless catastrophe, like plague or famine. But the deed as Princip conceived it never took place. It was entangled from its first minute with another deed, a murder which seems to have been fully conceived by none at all, but which had a terrible existence as a fantasy, because it was dreamed of by men whose whole claim to respect rested on their realistic quality, and who abandoned all restraint when they strayed into the sphere of fantasy. Of these two deeds there was made one so potent that it killed its millions and left all living things in our civilization to some degree disabled. I write of a mystery. For that is the way the deed appears to me, and to all Westerners. But to those who look at it on the soil where it was committed, and to the lands east of that, it seems a holy act of liberation; and among such people are those whom the West would have to admit are wise and civilized.

This event, this Sarajevo attentat, was in these inconsistencies an apt symbol of life: which is loose and purposeless, which weaves a close pattern and doggedly pursues its ends, which is unpredictable and illogical, which follows a straight line from cause to effect, which is bad, which is good. It shows that human will can do anything, it shows that accident does everything. It shows that man throws away his peace for a vain cause if he insists on acquiring knowledge, for the more one knows about the attentat the more incomprehensible it becomes. It shows also that moral judgment sets itself an impossible task. The soul should choose life. But when the Bosnians chose life, and murdered Franz Ferdinand, they chose death for the French and Germans and English, and if the French and Germans and English had been able to choose life they would have chosen death for the Bosnians. The sum will not add up. It is madness to rack our brains over this sum. But there is nothing else we can do except try to add up this sum. We are nothing but arithmetical functions which exist for that purpose . . . We went out by the new grave where the young officer was trying to add up the sum in the Slav way. A sudden burst of sunshine made the candle-flames sadder than darkness. He swayed so far forward that he had to stay himself by clutching at the cross. His discipline raised him and set him swinging back to his heels again.

Ilidzhe

We were going to see the village outside Sarajevo where the Austrians built a racecourse and where Franz Ferdinand stayed the night before he died. The road was so extravagantly bad that we bounced like balls, and Constantine had a star of mud on his forehead as he told us, ‘Sarajevo has a soul like a village, though it is a town. Now, why has a village the sort of soul that it has? Because it is irrigated, because there flow through it rivers of water and rivers of air. If there is water running through a city it is no longer water, it is not clear, it might evoke demonstrations of fastidiousness from a camel; if there is air blowing through the city it cannot be called wind, it loses its force among the houses. So it is with movements in the mind, they become polluted and effete. Religion instead of being an ecstasy and a cosmology becomes ethical, philosophical, penitential. But in Sarajevo,’ he continued, as the car lifted itself out of a rut with a movement not to be expected from a machine, credible only in a tiger leaping out of a pit, ‘there is a vivifying conception which irrigates the city and makes it fresh like a village. Here Slavs, and a very fine kind of Slav, endowed with great powers of perception and speculation, were confronted with the Turkish Empire at its most magnificent, which is to say Islam at its most magnificent, which is to say Persia at its most magnificent. Its luxury we took, its militarism and its pride, and above all its conception of love. The luxury has gone. The militarism has gone. You saw at the railway station the other morning what had happened to the pride. But the conception of love is still in the city, and it is a wonderful conception, it refreshes and revivifies, it is clean water and strong wind.’

‘What is peculiar about this conception of love?’ asked my husband, who had just been thrown on his knees to the floor of the car. ‘It is,’ said Constantine, failing to remove his stomach from the small of my back, ‘the conception of love which made us as small boys read the Arabian Nightswith such attention, so that Grandmamma always said, “How he reads and reads, we must make a priest of him.” Is it not extraordinary, by the way, that all over Europe, even in the pudic nurseries of your own country, this should be regarded as a children’s book? It is as if our civilization felt fear that it had carried too far its experiment of bringing up children in innocence, but would not admit it, and called in another race to administer all that knowledge which had been suppressed, in an exotic and disguised form, so that it could be passed off as an Eastern talisman engraved with characters which naturally cannot be read, though they are to be admired aesthetically.’ ‘About this conception of love,’ said my husband, struggling up to a seated position and wiping the mud off his glasses, ‘you mean the old crones arriving with messages and the beautiful women in darkened rooms, and the hiding in jars?’ ‘Yes, that is it,’ said Constantine, ‘the old crones, very discreet, the pursuit of the occasion that demanded faith, the flash of eye below a veil lifted for only a second, the wave of a scarf from a lattice, which was at once a promise of beauty and a challenge to cunning and courage, for there might be a witty ambush hiding in jars and there might be death from a eunuch’s sword. It is too beautiful.

‘Too beautiful!’ he repeated, beaming as one cradled in content though at the moment he was actually suspended in the air. ‘It is a conception of love which demands that it should be sudden and secret and dangerous. You from the West have no such conception of love. It seems to you that love must be as slow as the growth of a plant: a man and woman must come throughout many months to a full understanding of each other’s natures and take serious vows to fulfil each other’s needs. You think also that a man insults a woman if he wishes to make love to her without delay, and that a woman is worthless if she gives herself to a man before they have killed a great part of the calendar. In this there is much truth. I remember that when I was a young man in Paris, it sometimes happened that though I had two mistresses there were times when I went out into the street and took the first woman I met, and it was because I am in part a barbarian and so I could not wait. That was nothing. But love can be sudden and quite different from that. It can be so ecstatic that it can come into full being at a single encounter, that it needs only that encounter to satisfy the lovers.

‘If you offered them a lifetime together you could not offer them more than the night that follows when the old crone has opened the door. No, the car is not going to turn over. And when you come back next year the road will be better. We are a young country, and we will do all, but we have not yet had the time. Such love could properly be engendered by a single glance from the eyes. Indeed it could not claim to be this kind of love, this ultimate affinity, if the most infinitesimal contact was not enough to declare it. That is why it must be sudden.

‘It must be secret because jealousy is a part of both this sudden love and the other, slow-moving kind. A man who performs the miracle of keeping a woman happy for forty years cannot bear it that on one night during those forty years another man should be necessary for her happiness; and a man who meets a woman once and makes that meeting as fabulous in her memory as a night spent in the moon cannot bear it that he should not be the father of the eleven children whose noses she wipes. Hence these men must not know of each other. We roar like bulls about our honour, but so it is.

‘Also this love must be dangerous, or it would not be itself. That is not to say that one does not value a thing unless one has paid a great price for it—that is vulgar. But if a woman did not know that to lift her veil before a stranger was perhaps to die, she might perhaps lift it when she had received no intimation of this great and sudden love: when she was merely barbarian. And indeed neither she nor her lover could fully consummate this kind of love without a sense of peril. They would not shut the eyes of reason and precipitate themselves into the abyss of passion, unless they knew this might be their last chance to experience it or, indeed, anything else.

‘It is a more marvellous conception of love, I think, than anything other nations know. The French make love for the sake of life; and so, like living, it often falls to something less than itself, to a little trivial round. The Germans make love for the sake of death; as they like to put off civilian clothes and put on uniform, because there is more chance of being killed, so they like to step out of the safe casual relations of society and let loose the destructive forces of sex. So it was with Werther and Elective Affinities, and so it was in the years after the war, when they were so promiscuous that sex meant nothing at all. And this is not to speak ill of the French and Germans, for the love of life and the love of death are both necessary things. But this conception unites love of life and death in a single experience. Such lovers are conscious at once of the extremity of danger and that which makes danger most terrible and at the same time most worth challenging.’

‘But that is the essence of all adventure,’ said my husband, ‘and indeed it is the essence of——’ ‘Yes, yes, what you say is very true,’ said Constantine, as he always does when he intends that the person who is talking to him shall talk no more. ‘It is this conception of love which gives life to the city of Sarajevo. How far this tradition exists today I cannot tell. But I think that even now old women are sometimes sent with messages that must be read by only one person, and I think that the plum trees would not blossom so freely round those little restaurants on the hillside above the town if some god or goddess had not been placated by sacrifice.’ ‘You think,’ said my husband, ‘the rose never grows one-half so red.’ ‘But I am sure,’ continued Constantine, ‘that the conception gives the town a special elegance. The men and women in it have another dimension given to their lives, because they have kept in their hearts the capacity for this second kind of love. They are not mutilated by its suppression, and they have hope. All of them may yet have this revelation, and some of them have actually had it. I think that is why so many of the women here have lips and eyes that shine like children’s, and why the men are not bitter or grudging or hurried. A sensuality that is also a mysticism,‘ he cried, ’what can a race invent better for itself ? But here is Ilidzhe, here is our marvellous Ilidzhe!‘ He leaped in one second from well-buttered reverie to shaking indignation. ’Ilidzhe, our Potemkin village! They built it to show the foreign visitors how well they had imposed civilization on our barbarism, just as Potemkin built villages on the steppes to impress the foreign ambassadors with Russian prosperity, hollow villages that were built the day before and were pulled down the day after. Come, look at their civilization, at our barbarity!‘

The spa waited for us behind the scrubby, half-forested edge of a park, and indeed it was not pleasing. In earlier days it had certainly been better kept; it now looked like any of the other Yugoslavian spas, which are patronized by the peasants and small shopkeepers, and showed a certain homely untidiness, though nothing worse. But the place was unengaging in its architectural essence. A string of shapeless hotels was joined by a covered corridor to a central restaurant and pump-room, a pudding of a place. Every building was smothered in heavy porches and balustrades and balconies of craftless but elaborate woodwork. The hotels were all closed at the moment, they did not open till the heat brought people out of the city; and we strolled about looking for the proprietor of the Hotel Bosnia, the largest of the hotels, at which Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek had spent their last night. ‘I think that they have kept the chapel that was made for their coming,’ said Constantine, ‘and I know they keep their room as it was, for I have seen it. It was the suite reserved always for the royal family and for the governor, and it was altogether Moslem, but a terrible Moslem. It was like a place I have seen in your London, when I was there for five days during the war, called the Kardomah Café: all little inlaid tables and a clutter of many things, whereas, as you have seen, the chief furniture of a Moslem house is the light. Also I would like you to meet my friend who is the director of the spa, he has a very beautiful wife and her sister, who would like to talk to you about Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. They read nothing else, they would be Enid and Guinevere.’ He waved his arms as if he were wearing long flowing sleeves, and pulled out his neck to its most swanlike. ‘But here is a man with keys.’

They fitted, however, only the door of a little shop in the Hotel Bosnia’s arcade; but the man was glad to have a talk. ‘He says,’ said Constantine, ‘that they do their best to keep the place neat, but that there is not enough money to do much. Many people come here in summer, but they are not rich, like the nobles who used to come here from Austria and Germany and England to see how beautifully Bosnia was being governed by the Austrian Empire. But he would not have it different, though he has been here since a child and loves the place, for he is a very patriotic Yugoslav. But really it is disgusting, this Ilidzhe. They did nothing for the country, but they built these hotels and the racecourse which I am going to show you presently, and all the grand people came and looked at it and said, “Ah, it is so in Bosnia, all weeded gravel paths and new houses and good beer, it is too good for these cattle of Slavs.” ’ He mimicked the tone of a fine lady, turning his face from side to side and twirling an imaginary open parasol.

The man with the keys had been watching. He suddenly threw down his keys on to the pavement and began to shout straight past us to the horizon: like the young man at Trsat, like the young man on the boat whose soup was cold, like the hotel manager from Hvar. ‘Yes, yes,’ he cried, ‘and they had our men and women brought in to dance the kolo to them, we were for them the natives, the savages, and we had to dance for them as if we were bears at a fair.’ He bent and picked up the keys, then remembered something and threw them down again. ‘And what they did to us as soldiers! They made us become soldiers, and when a man goes into battle he may be called before his God, and they made us Christians wear the fez! Yes, the fez of the accursed Turks was the headgear of all our four Bosnian regiments!’

He picked up his keys for the second time and led us along the corridor to the railway station, which indeed was very grand, in the manner of Baden-Baden or Marienbad. ‘I find this grotesquely unpleasing,’ I said. ‘I did not bring you here to please you,’ said Constantine, ‘when I take you to see things that were left by the Turks and the Austrians it is not to please you, it is so that you shall understand. And now, will you please look where I tell you? This station is very untidy, is it not? The paint has gone and there are no flowers growing in wire cages. Will you please look at the chestnut tree that stands in the middle of this piece of gravel outside the station? Do you see that there are growing round it many weeds? Now, I apply a test. If you are saved, if you know what the soul is and what a people is, you will be able to see that that tree is better now, standing among weeds, than it was when it was spick and span; for these weeds are the best we can do, they are all the order we can yet attain in Bosnia, and the spickness and spanness came from another people, and were therefore nothingness, they could not exist here, because they were not part of the national process.’ ‘There I cannot agree,’ I said. ‘I do not believe that it was wrong of the English to drain India and abolish suttee, I do not believe that the Pères Blancs did wrong in medicining the sicknesses of Africa.’ ‘Do I not know such things must be done?’ said Constantine. ‘We Yugoslavs are stamping out malaria in Macedonia and we are raising up peasants that have been trodden into the mud by the Turks. But it should be done by one’s people, never by strangers.’ ‘Rats,’ said my husband; ‘if a people have wholly gone under, without a fringe that has kept its independence and its own folk-ways, strangers must butt in and help it get on its feet again. The trouble is that the kind of stranger who likes helping unfortunate people usually does not get leave to set about it unless other members of his group see a military or commercial advantage to be got out of it. But if you mean that the Bosnians had enough force and enough remnants of the old Slav culture to look after themselves once they got the Turks off their necks, and that the Austrians had nothing to give them and had no business here, then I’m with you.’ ‘Ah, you have said something true and so untidy,’ complained Constantine, ‘and what I said was not quite true, but so beautifully neat.’

But it was where the racecourse drew its white diagram on the gardeny plains that the irrelevance of the Austrian intervention appeared most apparent. The scene was now enchanting. All over the course sheep and cattle were grazing on the turf, ringing faint little bells as they were pressed on by comfortable, slow-moving greed, or met the active air, not quite a wind, which flowed quietly down the great tawny valley that led back to Sarajevo. Where there was not grass the earth showed red; and the poplars stood like jets of chill green-gold light. Scattered on the plains were the rough white farms and cottages of Christians; and on every slope which promised a fine view there stood a Moslem villa, smoothly and solidly white among the white clouds of its orchard. One such villa stood on a little hill close by the racecourse, as compact a delight as if an enormous deal of spring had been boiled down till it would fill just a little pot, according to the method of making rose-leaf jam.

And the white rails, of course, recalled another delight. I saw a string of horses going like a line of good poetry, under a cloudless morning on Lambourn Downs. I remembered what the author of the Book of Job had said about the horse: ‘The glory of his nostrils is terrible. He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength.... He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting. . . .’ A pleasure, undoubtedly, but how irrelevant to the starving Bosnian peasant, and how irrelevant, how insolent to Sarajevo. The scenery before me was distressing in its evocation of Austrian society as it was in the time of Franz Josef, as Metternich had foreseen it must become if the Empire was not allowed some measure of freedom. Banality rose from the tomb and stood chattering about the lawns: women with heavy chins and lively untender eyes and blonde frizzes of hair under straw boaters, wearing light blouses and long skirts and broad waistbands, men with the strongly marked expressions of ventriloquists’ dummies, with sloping shoulders and ramrod backs. They chattered loudly, with the exaggerated positiveness of those who live in a negative world. They were Catholics who could nourish among them a ‘Los von Rom’ movement, they were cosmopolitans who lived by provincial standards, they were bound by etiquette and recognized no discipline, they were the descendants of connoisseurs yet neither produced nor appreciated great art, they sacrificed all civil interests to a military caste that proved as soon as war broke out to be wholly civilian in everything but its splendid and suicidal valour.

These people had come to govern, to change, to civilize such men and women as we had seen in Sarajevo: the Jews with their tradition of fine manners and learning; the Moslems with their houses full of light and their blossoming gardens and dedication to peaceful nature; the old women we had seen in the market-place, whose souls had attained to wit; the men whose long strides were endurance itself, who would know, like our friend with the keys, that an honest man must not dance before tyrants nor go to his God in the fez. These women in blouses and skirts had come as examples of the fashion to those who had worn Persian brocades since West was on visiting terms with East; the ramrod men had come to command such as the officer who had stood swaying by the new grave. The builders of these horrible hotels, of the little covered corridor that looked as if one end of it might have led to the old Druce’s Bazaar in Baker Street, had come to Sarajevo, the town of a hundred mosques, to teach and not to learn.

Treboviche

Later that afternoon we drove out of Sarajevo by the road that leads to Treboviche, the mountain which rises too near the town and too steeply to be seen from it. The craned neck can see only its foothills. Half-way up we stopped the automobile and stood on a grassy ledge to see the orchards and villas lying beneath us, all little pots of spring jam, like the villa by the racecourse. On a ledge above us were standing some gipsies, eight or nine girls in jackets and trousers of printed curtain stuffs, and two men who were jumping and gesticulating in front of them, the upturned toes of their leather sandals looking like cockspurs. Something about the gestures of Constantine’s plump little arms as he showed us the city brought them tumbling about us. A good many people of the lettered sort recognized Constantine from his caricatures in the papers; but the unlettered see him for what he is with astonishing quickness. He has only to swing an eloquent hand at a street-corner and there are men and women about us looking at him with an expression which sums up the twofold attitude of ordinary folk to the poet: a mixture of amused indulgence, as of a grown-up watching a child at play, and ecstatic expectation, as of a child waiting for a grown-up to tell it a fairy-story. These gipsies ran down the grassy slope and stood about us giggling in a circle of crimson and plum and blue and green and lemon and cinnabar, the wind blowing out their full trousers and making them hug their shawls under the chin. They bring a lovely element into a community which allows them to exist without sinking into squalor. It is as if one could go out and make love to a flower, or have foxes and hares to play music at one’s parties.

The higher rocks above the road were pale green with hellebores, and there were primroses and cowslips and cyclamen, and at last the faded mauve flames of crocus. Then we came to the snow, lying thinly on scars and under pinewoods. Where it deepened we left the car and walked past a house which might have been a Swiss chalet, had it not been for the music that someone within was plucking from the strings of a gusla, to a peak shoulder crusted in ice and deep with snow where there was a shadowed seam. About us were the smouldering Bosnian uplands, their heathy heights red with last year’s autumn, though in some valleys the first touch of spring had given a spinney or an alp a hard mineral viridity. These heights and valleys run neither north nor south nor west nor east, but in all ways for a mile at a time, so that the landscape turns like a merry-go-round. Beyond these broken and burning highlands lay a wall of amber cloud, and above this rose two unknown ranges, one reflecting on its snows the brightness of an afternoon that was for us already dimmed, the other crimson with an evening that had not yet reached us. Sarajevo we could not see: the valley that runs down from it was a vast couch for a white river, until it twisted and broke and broadened and couched several rivers, which in winding spread their whiteness in mist. Over all the nearer highlands was cast a web of paths joining the villages across the tawny distance; and from some of them, though they were a mile or two away, came sounds of playing children and barking dogs.

Cold, we went back to the chalet and drank warming coffee under the pictures of the boy King and his mother and his murdered father. They are found in every public place in Yugoslavia, even Croatia. I think they are present in anti-Serb territory because they are sold by some charitable society which nobody wishes to refuse, but in other parts, where there lingers the medieval conception of the king as a priest of the people, they have nearly the status of holy pictures. At the back of the room sat a handsome young man playing the gusla and singing, apparently the proprietor, and two very pretty young women, all with that characteristically Slav look which comes from the pulling of the flesh down from the flat cheekbones by the tense pursing of the mouth. On the face of the murdered King there was the same expression, hardened to woodenness by the fear of death coming from assassination without or tuberculosis within.

Constantine drank his coffee, pushed away his cup, and said, ‘When you look at things, try to remember them wholly because you have soon to go home to England. I think of a story I heard from a monk of how King Alexander came to see the frescoes in his monastery which contained portraits of our Serbian kings of our old Empire, in the thirteenth century, which are real portraits, mind you. Before one he stood for three-quarters of an hour, looking terribly, as one would look on one’s father if he came back from the dead, sucking him with the eyes. The monk asked him if he had a special cult for this king, and he said, “No. For all kings of Serbia must I have a cult. All kings I must understand, in order that the new dynasty be grafted on the old. And this king I must make a special effort to understand, since nothing that is written of him makes him quite clear to me.” You see, he was a mystic, and because the channel of his mysticism was Yugoslavia, nobody outside Yugoslavia can understand him.’

He put his elbows on the table and rumpled his little black curls. ‘Nobody outside Yugoslavia understands us,’ he complained. ‘We have a very bad press, particularly with the high-minded people, who hate us because we are mystics and not just intelligent, as they are. Ach! that Madame Geneviève Tabouis, how she writes of us in her Paris newspaper! She suspects us of being anti-democratic in our natures, when we Serbs are nothing but democratic, but cannot be because the Italians and the Germans are watching us to say, “Ah, here is Bolshevism, we must come in and save you from it.” And really she is not being high-minded when she makes this mistake, she makes it because she hates the Prime Minister, Mr Stoyadinovitch; and it is not that she hates him because he is a bad man, she hates him just because they are opposites. She is little and thin and fine, he is a great big man with a strong chest and much flesh that all comes with him when he moves; she finds all relationships difficult, and all men and women follow him as if he were a great horse; she is noble when she loves her country, and when he loves his country it is as natural as when he sweats; and en somme he likes wine and can drink it, all sorts of wine, red wine, white wine, champagne, little wines of our country and great wines of France, and she must drink only a little drop of mineral water from a special spa, and of that she has a special source. So they hate each other, and since she is idealistic and is therefore ashamed that she should hate people for the kind of marrow they have in their spines, she pretends to herself she hates Yugoslavia. And yet she is great in her way. But not so great, my pardon to your wife, my dear sir, who I know is a lady writer also, as Mr Stoyadinovitch.’

I never heard anybody else in Yugoslavia speak well of Stoyadinovitch except Constantine; but Constantine was sincere. He laid his cheek on the table, and drew his folded hands back and forward across his forehead. ‘There is something,’ I said, ‘which has been worrying me ever since I stood by the tomb of the attentateurs, and what you said at Ilidzhe this morning has intensified my perplexity. Listen. The predominantly German character of the Habsburg monarchy, and the concessions it had to make to the Hungarians, meant that the Austro-Hungarian Empire oppressed its Slavs and feared the kingdom of Serbia as a dangerous potential ally to these discontented subjects. At the same time there were economic conditions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire which meant that there must be sooner or later a revolt, in which these discontented Slavs would be specially likely to bear the brunt of the fighting. Therefore precisely this war that happened in 1914 was bound to happen sooner or later.’ ‘But certainly,’ said Constantine, ‘it had nearly happened in 1912, when Franz Ferdinand’s friends all but succeeded in starting a preventive war over Albania.’ ‘Then it mattered not at all what happened in Sarajevo on June twenty-eighth, 1914,’ I said. Constantine was silent for a minute. The man behind us stopped playing his gusla, as if he understood what had been said. Constantine said, ‘In a sense you are right. The little ones need not have died. And of the two big ones the poor angry one could have gone on shooting his beasts, and the poor striving one could have continued to strive after the little things the other poor ones did not want her to have. We should have had the World War just the same.’ ‘What a waste!’ I said. ‘Well, Sarajevo is the one town I know that could bear with equanimity the discovery that her great moment was a delusion, a folly, a simple extravagance,’ said Constantine. ‘She would walk by her river, she would sit under the fruit tree in her courtyard, and she would not weep.’ But after a pause he added, ‘But she is not an imbecile. If she would not weep it is because of her knowledge that we are wrong. By the attentat she took the war and made it a private possession of the South Slavs. Behind the veil of our incomprehensible language and behind the veil of lies the Austrians and Hungarians have told about us and our wrongs, the cause of the war—more than that, the reason for the war—is eternally a mystery to the vast majority of the people who took part in it and were martyrized by it. Perhaps that is something for us South Slavs, to know a secret that is hidden from everybody else. I do not know. How I wish,’ he said, standing up, ‘that we could stay here tonight. There are such honest little rooms upstairs, with coarse clean sheets, and it is so quiet. That is to say there are many noises, but, they all have a meaning, it is this bird that cries or that, whereas the noises in a city mean nothing. But if we are going to Yaitse tomorrow we must go down to the town.’

It was not yet dark. As we came down we could still see the cyclamen and the primroses and the cowslips on the banks of the road, looking sweetly melancholy as flowers do when seen by other than full light. When we were half-way down the dusk was deep blue, and we stopped the car when we came to the knoll where we had stood beside the gipsies, in order to look down on the scattered lights of Sarajevo. But our chauffeur called out to us from the car, pointing at the city. ‘He is asking you to listen to the bells,’ said Constantine. ‘They are sounding all over the city, and it is a great thing for him because when the Turks were here there might be no church bells. This man’s father, or his grandfather, told him of the time, sixty years ago, when they were not allowed, and he feels proud that they are there now.’

Travnik

On our way out of Sarajevo the next morning we stopped to buy oranges, and I filled my lap with white violets and cowslips and marigolds; and so we started on a morning’s drive through valleys which might have been landscaped by Capability Brown, so prettily were the terraces set and planted, so neat was the line the climbing woodlands drew against the hilltop moor. This is in part due to geological accident, but it is also true that hereabouts man has the neatest of hands. He is extremely poor, but he can work miracles with his restricted materials. We came presently to a little spa called Kiselyak, a very old spa, which was popular, particularly among the Jews, in the Turkish times. I suppose that in the last twenty-five years the mass of people who had stayed there were on the same financial level as those in America who have an income of forty dollars a week or under. The place was as pretty as a musical-comedy set. In the main street there was a long low Park Hotel, plastered white as snow, with a brightly striped mattress taking the air at every window, which it seemed could not have been put there in answer to mere necessity, so gay was the pattern.

To admire it, we left the car, and crossed a little stream to a pinewood where there stood an artlessly built bath-house and drinking-fountains. On the bridge there was an elderly Moslem contemplating the running water. Always, in this part of the world, where there is running water, there is an elderly Moslem contemplating it. He joined our party without intrusiveness, and pointed out to us a café near by, a wooden summerhouse built over the stream in a thicket of willows which he rightly thought particularly pleasing, and then he took us over to the drinking-booths and found a Christian gardener who unlocked them and gave us cups of water. It had a fortifying taste of metal. We strolled along a path through the pinewood and came on a black marble monument from which a gold inscription had been savagely excised. The Moslem and the gardener, who had been following us at a few paces’ distance, came forward to tell us that it had been put up to commemorate a victory of the Austrian Army over the Bosnian insurgents. ‘Would you rather have things as they are now?’ said Constantine. They agreed that they would, and we all sat down on a bench, while I finished my cup of water.

‘I want to stay here, I do not want to go on,’ I said. ‘It is the Moslem who is making you feel like that,’ said Constantine, ‘that is the great art of the Moslem; and mind you, that is very interesting, for, look at him, he is a Slav like the gardener, who has it not. It is the Turks and his religion that have taught him to sit and do nothing so very nicely. He would be content to sit here all day, just as we are doing now; and indeed it would be most pleasant, for we would listen to the stream and watch the clouds above the tree-tops, and we would smoke and sometimes we would exchange polite remarks.’ We stayed there, just as he said, for nearly half an hour. The feeling was as in one of the delightful households to be found in Bath, where there are beautiful manners and beautiful furniture and a complete sense of detachment from modern agitation. But there was not the anxiety about income tax which usually mars such interiors. The Moslem was as poor as can be, even here: he was in neatly mended rags, his leather sandals were tied up with string.

On our way again, such poverty was all about us. The mosques were no longer built of stone and bricks, but were roughly plastered like farm buildings, with tiled roofs and rickety wooden minarets. But they had still a trace of elegance in their design; and there were fine embroideries on the boleros the women wore over their white linen blouses and dark full trousers, and on the shirts of the black-browed men. With some of these people we could not get on friendly terms. If they were in charge of horses they looked at us with hatred, because the horses invariably began to bolt at the sight of the automobile, however much we slowed down. We sent two hay-carts flying into the ditch. So rarely had these people seen automobiles that they looked at us with dignified rebuke, as at vulgarians who insisted on using an eccentric mode of conveyance which put other travellers to inconvenience. But the people who had no horses to manage looked at us with peculiar respect, since automobiles passed so rarely that it seemed to them certain that my husband and Constantine must be important officials from Belgrade. With a stylized look of sternness the men saluted and stood to attention while we passed. ‘Look at their faces,’ said Constantine; ‘they think that all the time they must die for Yugoslavia, and they cannot understand why we do not ask them to do that, but that now we ask another thing, that they should live and be happy.’

The road climbed to a wide valley, where spring winds were hurrying across wet emerald pastures, and through woods sharply green where winter had left them, and bronze where it still dawdled. Little pink pigs and red foals ran helter-skelter before our coming, and men and women in gorgeous clothes, more richly coloured than in the lower valleys, chased after them, but paused to laugh and greet us. In the distance loomed mountains, holding on their ledges huge blocks of monastic buildings. These are among the few relics of the Austrian occupation other than barracks; it was here that the Empire made the headquarters of their attempt to Catholicize the Bosnians who belonged to the Orthodox Church. The Dominicans and the Franciscans, who had been here for seven hundred years, were reinforced, not altogether to their own pleasure, by the Jesuits.

At the base of these mountains we touched it, the town which for good reason was called by the Turks Travnik, or Grassy-town. Narrow houses with tall and shapely slanting tiled roofs sit gracefully, like cats on their haunches, among the green gardens of a garden-like valley. Here, in this well-composed littleness, which lies snug in the field of the eye, can be enjoyed to perfection the Moslem counterpoint of the soft horizontal whiteness of fruit blossom and the hard vertical whiteness of minarets. This town was the capital of Bosnia for two centuries under the Turks, the seat of the Pasha from the time that Sarajevo would not have him, and it has a definite urban distinction, yet it is countrified as junket. ‘This is where the Moslem at Kiselyak would like to have a house,’ said my husband, ‘if he ever let himself want anything he did not have.’

We had been invited to luncheon with the father and mother of the lovely Jewess in Sarajevo whom we called the Bulbul, and we found their home in an apartment house looking over the blossoming trench of the valley from the main road, under a hill crowned with a fortress built by the old Bosnian kings. We found it, and breathed in our nostrils the odour of another civilization. Our appearance there caused cries of regret. The father stood in the shadow of the doorway, a handsome man in his late fifties, whose likeness I had seen often enough in the Persian miniatures, gazelle-eyed and full-bodied. In the delicious voice of the Sephardim, honey-sweet but not cloying, he told us that he was ashamed to let us in, for we would find nothing worthy of us. He had thought we meant to call at his factory, which was a couple of miles outside the town, so he had ordered a real meal, a meal appropriate to us, to be cooked there, and he had left an explanation that he could not be with us, as his wife had broken her ankle and till she was well he would eat all his meals with her. He bowed with shame that he should have blundered so. But a voice, lovely as his own but a woman‘s, cried from the darkened room beyond and bade him bring the strangers in. It was at once maternal, warm with the desire to do what could be done to comfort our foreignness, and childlike, breathless with a desire to handle the new toy.

She lay on a sofa, fluttering up against the downward pull of her injury, as hurt birds do; and she was astonishing in the force of her beauty. She was at least in her late forties, and she was not one of those prodigies unmarked by time, but she was as beautiful, to judge by her effect on the beholder, as the Bulbul. That could not really be so, of course. As a general rule Horace must be right, for reasons connected with the fatty deposits under the skin and the working of the ductless glands, when he writes, ‘O matre pulchra filia pulchrior.’ Yet in this case he would have been wrong. He should have ignored his metre and written of ‘mater pulchrior pulcherrimoe filioe,’ for there was the more beautiful mother of the most beautiful daughter. The Bulbul was the most perfect example conceivable of the shining Jewish type, but so long as one looked on this woman she seemed lovelier than all other women. Her age was unimportant because it did not mean to her what it means to most Western women: she had never been frustrated, she had always been rewarded for her beautiful body and her beautiful conduct by beautiful gratitude.

My husband and I sat down beside her, smiling as at an unexpected present; and she apologized to us for the poor meal she would have to improvise, and cried over our heads directions to her cook in a voice that floated rather than carried, and then settled to ask us questions which were by Western standards personal, which were extremely sensible if she wished to be able to like us quickly before we left her house. In a painted cage a canary suddenly raised fine-drawn but frantic cheers for the universe, and they checked it with gentle laughter that could not have hurt its feelings. The canary, it seemed, her husband had brought home to divert her while she must lie on the sofa. The room was littered with gifts he had fetched her for that purpose: a carved flute, a piece of brocade, an eighteenth-century book of Italian travel with coloured illustrations, an amber box—a trifle, I should say, for each day she had been kept in the house. Their household rocked gently on a tide of giving and receiving.

They watched us sadly while we ate, uttering coos of regret for the meal that was really worthy of us, waiting uneaten in the factory. But we were not discontented. We were given home-made spaghetti, those eggs called ‘Spanish eggs’ which are boiled for three days in oil and come out greaseless and silky to the palate, lamb chops from small ethereal lambs who probably had wings, sheep’s cheese, pure white and delicately sharp, peaches and quinces foundered in syrup that kept all their summer flavour, and raki, the colourless brandy loved by Slavs. As we ate we told them of our meetings with their daughter in Sarajevo, and they stretched like cats in pride and pleasure, owning that all we said of her was true, and reciting some of her accomplishments that they thought we might not have had the chance to observe. Nothing could have been less like the uneasy smile, the deprecating mumble, which is evoked in an Englishman by praise of his family.

But this was a long way from England. Constantine went on to tell the gossip he had picked up in Sarajevo, and the more ambassadorial gossip he had brought from Belgrade, and while they rewarded his perfect story-telling by perfect listening, I looked about the room. It was certainly provincial; anything that had reached the room from Vienna, Berlin, Paris, or London had taken so long to get there and had been so much modified by the thought of the alien taste for which it was destined that it would be antiquated and bizarre. But built into this room, and inherent in every word and gesture of its owners, was a tradition more limited in its scope than the traditions of Vienna, Berlin, Paris, or London, but within its limits just as ancient and sure and competent. Whatever event these people met they could outface; the witness to that was their deep serenity. They would meet it with a formula compounded of Islam and Judaism. Their whole beings breathed the love of pleasure which is the inspiration of Sarajevo, which was perhaps the great contribution the Turks had to make to culture. But it was stabilized, its object was made other than running water, by the Jewish care for the continuity of the race. It was a fusion that would infuriate the Western moralist, who not only believes but prefers that one should not be able to eat one’s cake and have it. I went later to comb my hair and wash my hands in these people’s bathroom. A printed frieze of naked nymphs dancing in a forest ran from wall to wall, and several pictures bared the breasts and thighs of obsoletely creamy beauties. Naively it was revealed that these people thought of the bath as the uncovering of nakedness, and of nakedness as an instrument of infinite delight. It was the seraglio spirit in its purity; and it was made chaste as snow by the consideration that these people would have offered this flesh of which they so perfectly understood the potentialities to burn like tallow in flame if thereby they might save their dearer flesh, their child.

So one can have it, as the vulgar say, both ways. Indeed one can have a great deal more than one has supposed one could, if only one lives, as these people did, in a constant and loyal state of preference for the agreeable over the disagreeable. It might be thought that nothing could be easier, but that is not the case. We in the West find it almost impossible, and are caught unawares when we meet it in practice. That was brought home to me by this woman’s tender gesture of farewell. First she took all the lilacs from a vase beside her sofa and gave them to me, but then felt this was not a sufficient civility. She made me lay down the flowers, and took a scent-bottle from her table and sprinkled my hands with the scent, gently rubbing it into my skin. It was the most gracious farewell imaginable, and the Western world in which I was born would not have approved.

There sounded in my mind’s ear the probable comment of a Western woman: ‘My dear, it was too ghastly, she seized me by the hands and simply drenched them with some most frightful scent. I couldn’t get rid of it for days.’ Their fastidiousness would, of course, have been bogus, for the scent was exquisite, a rich yet light derivative from Bulgarian attar of roses. These people were infallible in their judgment on such matters, having been tutored for centuries by their part in the luxury trade between Bosnia and Tsarigrad, as they named Constantinople; and she had assumed that persons of our kind would have a like education and would recognize that this scent was of the first order. She had also assumed that I would like to receive a gift which showed that somebody who had not known me two hours before now liked me. She assumed, in fact, that I too preferred the agreeable to the disagreeable. Remembering the grey ice that forms on an Englishman’s face as he is introduced to a stranger, I reflected that she was too audacious in her assumption.

Before we left the town her husband took us for a stroll. A lane wound among the mosques and villas through gardens that held much plum blossom and lilac and irises and, here and there, among the shrubs, the innocent playfulness of witch-balls. Travnik had changed its aspect now, as a town does after one has eaten salt in one of its houses. It is no longer something painted on one’s retina, it is third-dimensional, it is a being and a friend or an enemy. We climbed up to the old castle, which is a fortress now, and were met by very grave young soldiers. Slav soldiers look devout and dedicated even when they are drunk; these sober boys, guarding their white town and pale-green valley, were as nuns. There had been an intention of calling on the commandant, but the young soldiers said he was asleep. They looked at us for some time before they told us this, and spoke sadly and with an air of pronouncing judgment; and I think that perhaps they thought that their commandant was a sacred being, and that it would be a profanation to disturb him for the sake of three men not in uniform and a woman no longer young. They bade us good-bye with a worried air, as if they wished they were sure they had done right. All to them was still of great moment.

We followed a little path down a grassy hill, miraculously untainted as glades are on the edge of Moslem towns, to a big pool lying among trees. It was fed by three springs, each bursting from the mauve shelter of a clump of cyclamen. It was dammed by a steep stone wall, broken at one end by a channel through which the waters burst in a grooved sliver that looked to be as solid as crystal. We admired it for a long time as if it were a matter of great importance; and then we went down to the main road and found a café which had settled itself in snug melancholy at the corner of a Moslem graveyard, near by the pompous canopied tombs of a couple of pashas.

There we sat and drank black coffee and ate Turkish delight on toothpicks, while a gentle wind stirred the flowering trees that met above the table, and set the grasses waving round a prostrate pillar which had fallen by one of the pashas’ tombs. There strolled up and sat down some of those mysterious impoverished and dignified Moslems who seem to have no visible means of support, but some quite effective invisible means. They watched us without embarrassment; we were unembarrassed; and the men talked of country pastimes. Here, the Bulbul’s father said, was real game for shooting in winter.

There is deep snow here in winter-time, it seems; and the beasts come down from the heights and loiter hungrily on the outskirts of the town. A friend of his had sauntered a few yards out of his garden, his gun loaded with pellets. He paused to look at a black bush that had miraculously escaped the snow. It stood up and was a bear, a lurch away. His friend raised his gun and shot. The pellets found the bear’s brain through the eye, he staggered, charged blindly, and fell dead. He himself had been driving down to his factory one November afternoon when he saw a pack of wolves rushing down the mountain on a herd of goats. He stopped his car and watched. They came straight down like the water we had seen rushing down by the dam. They leaped on the goats and ate what they wanted. He had heard the goats’ bones cracking, as loud, he said, as gunshots. When the wolves had eaten their fill they rushed up the mountain again, dragging what was left of the goats. It took only five minutes, he thought, from the time he first saw them till they passed out of sight.

He pointed up to the mountains. ‘It is only in winter you see them,’ he said, ‘but all the same they are up there, waiting for us and the goats.’ We looked in wonder at the heights that professed the stark innocence of stone, that was honeycombed with the stumbling weighty hostility of bears, the incorporated rapacity of wolves. And as we lowered our eyes we saw that we were ourselves being regarded with as much wonder by other eyes, which also were speculating what the sterile order of our appearance might conceal. A gaunt peasant woman with hair light and straight and stiff as hay and a mouth wide as a door had stopped in the roadway at the sight of us. She was so grand, so acidulated, so utterly at a disadvantage before almost anyone in the civilized world, and so utterly unaware of being at a disadvantage at all, that I made Constantine ask her to let herself be photographed. She whinnied with delight, and arranged herself before the camera with her chin forward, her arms crossed, her weight on her heels, acting a man’s pride; I think nothing in her life had ever suggested to her that there is a woman’s kind of pride.

She was poor. Dear God, she was poor. She was poor as the people in Rab. Her sleeveless white serge coat, her linen blouse, the coarse kerchief she had twisted round her head, were stained with age. The wool of the embroidery on her coat was broken so that here and there the pattern was a mere fuzz. Garments of this sort have a long life. To be in this state they must have been worn by more than one generation. She had probably never had new clothes in all her days. This was not the most important aspect of her. There were others which were triumphant. It could be seen that she was a wit, a stoic, a heroine. But for all that it was painful to look at her, because she was deformed by the slavery of her ancestors as she might have been by rheumatism. The deep pits round her eyes and behind her nostrils, the bluish grooves running down her neck, spoke of an accumulated deprivation, an amassed poverty, handed down like her ruined clothes from those who were called rayas, the ransomed ones, the Christian serfs who had to buy the right to live. To some in Bosnia the East gave, from some it took away.

Yaitse (Jajce) I

Beyond Travnik the road rose through slashing rain to a high pass, beset before and behind with violet clouds, rent and repaired in the same instant by the scissors of lightning. The open faces of the primroses were pulpy under the storm, the green bells of the hellebore were flattened against the rocks. In the valley beyond we ran into a high blue cave of stillness and sunshine, and came on a tumbledown village, shabby and muddy and paintless and charming, called Vakuf. ‘Vakuf’ is a Turkish word meaning religious property; I have never heard anything that made me more positively anxious not to study Turkish than the news that the plural of this word is ’Evkaf.‘ It is called by that name because the land hereabouts was given by pious Moslems to provide for the maintenance of mosques and charitable institutions, and some hundreds of the labourers that tilled it lived in this village. Under the Austro-Hungarian Empire these properties were specially nursed, and the labourers given preferential treatment. They were, indeed, the only agricultural workers whose position was in any way better under the Austrians than it had been under the Turks. Nowadays the property is well looked after by the Moslem Political Party, but the village has fallen into that state of gentle disorder rather than actual squalor, which is characteristic of Ottoman remains in Bosnia.

The violent rains had set the main street awash with mud, and we saw nobody but an old man with the white twist in his turban that denotes the Moslem priest, tiptoeing across the morass, with the air of a disgusted cat, to a rickety wooden mosque. He looked agreeable; but the town was irritating to the female eye, with its projecting upper stories where the rotting latticed harem windows are ready to fall out of their rotten casements. It is impudent of men to keep women as luxuries unless they have the power to guarantee them the framework of luxury. If men ask women to give up for their sake the life of the market-place they must promise that they will bring to the harem all that is best in the market-place; that, as all intelligent Moslems have admitted, is the only understanding on which the harem can be anything but a field of male sexual gluttony and cantankerousness. But if they fail to keep that ambitious promise, which there was indeed no obligation to make, they should surrender the system and let women go back to freedom and get what they can. A harem window with a hole boarded up and a lattice tied by a rag to its casement is a sign of the shabby failure that has broken faith with others, like a stranded touring company.

After Vakuf we passed through a valley that was like a Chinese landscape, with woods leaning to one another across deep vertical abysses; and suddenly we found ourselves at the waterfall which is the chief glory of Yaitse. That town stands on a hill, divided by a deep trench from a wide mountain covered by forests and villages, and a river rushes down from the town and leaps a hundred feet into a river that runs along the trench. The chauffeur and Constantine ran about the brink uttering cries. All South Slavs regard water as a sacred substance, and a waterfall is half-way to the incarnation of a god. My husband and I went a stroll, hobbling over the slippery stones, to see the smooth lap and the foaming skirts of the waters from a distance, and when we looked back we saw that Constantine had taken a seat on a rock; and by the waving of his little short arms and the rolling of his curly black bullet head we knew that near him a bird was fluttering over the falls, exulting in the coolness, in the blows the spray struck on its almost weightless body, in the challenge that was made to its wing-courage. From the turn of his plump wrists and the circles described by his short neck, we knew it beyond a doubt. His hands and his head told us too when the wind swung out the fall from the cliff and it floated like a blown scarf, and what delicious fear was felt by the bird. Constantine is a true poet. He knows all about things he knows nothing about.

We heard laughter. On the mountainside beyond the river three peasant girls were taking a walk, in bright dresses which showed a trace of Turkish elegance, which recalled that the word used for ‘well-to-do’ in this district means literally ’velvet-clad,‘ and Constantine’s bird-ballet had caught their eye. They had huddled into a giggling group and watched him for some minutes, then burst into teasing cries, and waved their arms and rolled their heads in parody. Then when Constantine stood up and roared at them in mock rage, they squealed in mock fear, and fled along the path, across a flowery field, into a glade, and again across a field. In alarm the birds that had been fluttering through the spray flew out into the void of the abyss and divided to the right and left. The three girls took hands and laughed over their shoulders, louder than ever, with their heads thrown back, and entered a deep wood, and were not seen again. Constantine slumped forward, his head on his knees, and seemed to sleep.

When it grew cold we roused him, and walked slowly towards the town under flowering trees. The word ‘Yaitse’ (or ’Jajce‘) means either little egg or, in poetry, groin, or testicle. I am unable to say what sort of poetry. The town is extravagantly beautiful. It stands on an oval hill that is like an egg stuck on the plateau above the river, and its houses and gardens mount over the rounded slope to a gigantic fortress; and it has the shining and easy look of a land where there is enough water. There is a royal look to it, which is natural enough, for it was the seat of the Bosnian kings, and an obstinacy about the wholemeal masonry of the city walls and the fortifications which is also natural enough, for it resisted the Turks for a painful century and in 1878 met the Austrians with dogged, suicidal opposition. Now it has a look of well-being, which is partly a bequest from the colony of wealthy Turkish merchants who settled here, and partly a sign that, what with pigs and plums and a bit of carpet-weaving and leather-working, things here are not going so badly nowadays.

The Austrians tried to direct their tourist traffic here, and that is why Yaitse owns an immense old-fashioned hotel with a Tirolean air. When I saw the high bed with gleaming sheets, so suggestive of ice-axes and early rising, I would willingly have lain down and gone to sleep, but already Constantine, who is never tired, had found a guide. This was a pale and emaciated lad, probably phthisical, for tuberculosis is the scourge of this land. All day long one sees peasants sitting on the ground, even shortly after rain, yet they rarely have rheumatism; but tuberculosis is as murderous as it is in the Western Isles. It seems to be the stuffy nights in the overcrowded houses that do it. The lad was the worse off for being a Christian; he had not that air of being sustained in his poverty by secret spiritual funds that is so noticeable in the poverty-stricken Moslem. Coughing, he led us through the white streets, in front of a fan of children that stared but never begged, to a gardenish patch, where steps led down into the ground.

We found ourselves walking through black corridors and halls, cold with the wet breath of the living rock. Black vaults soared above us, in hard mystery. From a black throne a sacrifice had been decreed, on a black altar it had been offered, in a black sepulchre it had been laid by; and throne and altar and sepulchre were marked with black crescent moons and stars. ‘These are the catacombs of the Bogomils,’ said the guide. That I believe is not certain; they are probably the funeral crypt of some noble Bosnian family, stripped of its skeletons by the Turks. But they revealed the imaginative bent which would find hermetic belief attractive. This subterranean palace came as near as matter could to realizing the fantasy, dear to childhood and never quite forgotten, of a temple excavated from the ebony night, where priests swathed and silent, though putatively basso profundo, inducted the neophyte by torchlight, through vast pillared galleries dominated by monolithic gods, to the inmost and blackest sanctuary, where, by bodiless whisper or by magic rite brightly enacted against the darkness, The Secret was revealed.

I felt agreeably stimulated. ‘This ought to be a setting for a wonderful play,’ I thought; but it would not develop past the image of the pale and powerful Master of Mysteries, sitting on his black throne and thundering his awful judgment. I could think of no event that would seem adequate as cause for pallor extreme enough to equal the blackness of the living rock, and I was forced to ask myself why, if this Master of Mysteries was so powerful, he had to do his work downstairs. I remembered that when Mozart wrote The Magic Flute in exploitation of our love for the crypto-cavern and the solemn symbol, he and his librettist had finally to turn their backs on the unresolved plot and go home whistling with their hands in their pockets. I remembered, too, that this strand of fancy had at first been identified with Christianity, but swung loose when Christianity became respectable and a church was as much a state building as a mint or a law-court. Then it identified itself with heresy; and, when religious tolerance had spread over Europe and heresy became dissent, it adopted political unrest and revolution as its field. Thus it happened that the secret societies of Europe, particularly those which had been formed in the universities, were responsible for ‘48. Now I was faced with a material expression of this fantasy, and realized my own inability to use it as a stepping-stone to any new imaginative position; I could see how it was that ’48 led merely to ‘49, and to ’50, and to all the other flat and doleful years; and how it was that left-wing movements, which are so often tinged with romanticism, fade away after the initial drama of their seizure of power.

‘Come,’ said Constantine, ‘there are so many things to be seen in Yaitse, you cannot wait. There are two friends of mine who run a chemical factory here, you shall meet them tomorrow, and they have uncovered an altar of Mithras near here on the hillside, which I think you should see.’ As we came out of the crypt we saw that the afternoon had nearly become evening. There was a grape-bloom on the light, and the little children who were waiting for us cast their giants of shadows on the cobbles. We went on through the lanes till we found an orchard, opened a gate in the palings, and followed a path to the shed. Inside it was quite dark, and the guide gave us candles. We raised them, and the light met the god of light.

It was the standard sculptured altar of Mithras. A winged young man, wearing a Phrygian helmet, his cloak blown out by the wind, sits on the back of a foundering bull, his left knee on its croup, his right leg stretched down by its flank so that his booted foot presses down on its hoof. With his left hand he grips its nostrils and pulls its head back, and with his right he is plunging a knife into its neck just above the shoulder. Mithras is not an Apollo, but a stocky divine butcher, and his divinity lies solely in his competence, which outdoes that of ordinary butchers. This is the supreme moment in his career. He so causes the earth. From the blood and marrow that ran forth from the bull’s wound was engendered the vine and the wheat, the seed emitted by him in his agony was illuminated by the moon and yeasted into the several sorts of animal, while his soul was headed off by Mithras’s dog, who had hunted down his body, and was brought into the after-world to be guardian god of the herds, and give his kind the safety he himself had lost.

The bas-relief is enormously impressive. It explains why this religion exerted such influence that it is often said to have just barely failed to supplant Christianity. That is an over-statement. It had no following among the common people, its shrines are never found save where there were stationed the soldiers and functionaries of the Roman Empire, and it generally excluded women from its worship. But it was the cherished cult of the official classes, that is to say the only stable and happy people in the dying state; and it must have had some of the dynamic force of Christianity, because it had so much of its content. The Christians hated it not only because it offered a formidable rivalry but because this sacrificial killing of the bull was like a parody of the crucifixion; and that was not the only uncomfortable resemblance between the two faiths. Tertullian says that ‘the devil, whose work it is to pervert the truth, invents idolatrous mysteries to imitate the realities of the divine sacraments.... If my memory does not fail me he marks his own soldiers with the sign of Mithras on their foreheads, commemorates an offering of bread, introduces a mock resurrection, and with the sword opens the way to the crown.’ He was also annoyed because virginity was practised by certain followers of Mithras. There is no pleasing some people.

But Mithraism has its own and individual attraction. Power, which is perhaps the most immediately attractive concept we know, is its subject matter. Mithras is the Lord of Hosts, the God of Victory, he who sends down on kings and princes the radiance that means success. This slaughter of the bull is a fantasy of the power that never runs to waste, that can convert defeat itself to an extreme refreshment. Mithras conquers the bull, which is to say, the power of mind and body conquers the power of the body alone. But it is not tolerable that any power of whatever sort should be wasted, particularly in the primitive and satisfying image of the bull, so there is invented a magic that makes him the source of all vegetable and animal life at a moment which it then becomes trivial to consider as his death. He even destroys death as he dies, for as the guardian god of the herds he guarantees the continued existence of his powerful species. Power rushes through this legend like the waterfall of Yaitse, falling from a high place but rising victoriously unhurt, to irrigate and give life.

It was so dark that even by candlelight one could see little: but the best way to see sculpture is not with the eyes but with the finger-tips. I mounted on the plinth and ran my hands over the god and the bull. Strength welled out of the carving. The grip of the god’s legs on the bull recalled all the pleasure to be derived from balance, riding and rock-climbing and skiing; the hilt of the dagger all but tingled, the bull’s throat was tense with the emerging life. My hands passed on from the central tableau. Right and left were the torch-bearers, one holding his torch uplifted, as symbol of dawn and spring and birth, the other letting it droop, as symbol of dusk and winter and death. How did this faith alter the morning? How did it improve the evening? What explanation of birth could it furnish, what mitigation of death? My finger-tips could not find the answer.

The central tableau showed that power was glorious and the cause of all; but all must be caused by power, for power is the name given to what causes all. That is to say, the central tableau proves that x = x = x. There are no other terms involved which can be added or subtracted or multiplied. The imagination came to a dead stop, as it had done in the crypt which we had just left. I remembered that there had been tacked on to the Asiatic elements in Mithraism a system something like Freemasonry, which put the faithful through initiatory ceremonies and made them in succession Ravens, Occults, Soldiers, Lions, Persians, Runners of the Sun, and Fathers. Each rank had its sacred mask, legacy from the tradition of more primitive cults. But when one had put on one’s Lion’s Head and walked about in procession, what did one do? One went home. So Mithraism waned, defended by martyrs who died as nobly as any Christians, and Christianity triumphed, by virtue of its complexity, which gives the imagination unlimited material.

We went through the fruit trees, their blossom rosy now with evening, and climbed to the heights of the town, between high houses with steep tiled roofs, new churches, and old mosques. Women, often veiled, leaned over balconies, out of suddenly opened casements; little dogs, harlequined with the indications of a dozen breeds, ran out of neat little gardens and bade us draw and deliver. We came at last to the fortress that lifts a broad breast of wall and two hunched shoulders of strong towers on the summit of the hill. This was built by the Bosnian kings, who were warmed by a reflection of Byzantine culture, and it was occupied for centuries by the Turks; but, with the irrelevance scenery sometimes displays, its interior is a perfect expression of French romanticism. As we walked round the broad turfed battlements we looked on rough mountains that a fading scarlet and gold sunset clothed with a purple heather made of light; and from the town below came the virile and stoical cries of Slav children. But within the enceinte all was black and white and grey, grace and melancholy.

It contained a deeply sunken park, such as might have surrounded a château in France. In it there were several stone buildings fallen into stately disrepair in the manner of the ruins in a Hubert Robert picture; there was a long cypress avenue, appropriate for the parting of lovers, divided either by the knowledge that one or both must die of a decline, or by the appearance of the ghost of a nun; and there were lawns on which ballet-girls in tarlatan should have been dancing to the music of Chopin. It evoked all sorts of emotion based on absence. As the colour faded from the sky, and it became a pale vault of crystal set with stars blurred with brightness as by tears, and the woods lay dark as mourning on the grey mountains, it was as if the park beneath had carried its point and imposed its style on its surroundings. The moon was high and shed on these lawns and cypresses and ruins that white bloom, that finer frost, that comes before the moonlight. We felt an aching tenderness, which was a kind of contentment; Constantine began to speak of the days when he was a student under Bergson, as he always did when he was deeply moved.

But the mind pricked on, as in the black crypt and before the Mithraic altar, to use this scene as a point of departure for the imagination. And again I found no journey could be made. A ruin is ruined, nothing of major importance can be housed in it. If the two lovers were consumed by a fatal illness, that was the end of them. If the ghost of a nun appeared she would perhaps reveal a secret, such as the position of the grave of her child, which would be rendered completely unimportant by the fact that she was a ghost, since the existence of an after-life would make everything in this life of trifling importance; or she would disappear, which would leave matters precisely as they had been. The dancers would sometime have to stop dancing, to retreat on their slowly shuddering points into the shadow of the cypresses, until the undulating farewells of their arms were no longer moonlit. None of the component parts of this lovely vision admitted of development. Better men than I am had felt it. The romantics are always hard put to it to begin their stories, to find a reason for the solitude and woe of their characters; that is why so often they introduce the motive of incest, a crime only really popular among the feeble-minded, and open to the objection that after a few generations the race would die of boredom, each family being restricted to a single hereditary hearth. And the romantics can never finish their stories; they go bankrupt and put the plot in the hands of death, the receiver, who winds it up with a compulsory funeral.

We went back to a hotel, pausing to blink through the night at a kind of shop window in a church, a glass coffin let into the wall, where there lies the last Bosnian king, a usurper and persecutor, yet honoured because he was a Slav ruler and not a Turk. For half an hour I lay on the steep and shining bed in my room, and then came down to eat the largest dinner I have eaten since I was a little girl. There was chicken soup, and a huge bowl of little crimson crayfish, and very good trout, and a pile of palatschinken, pancakes stuffed with jam like those at Split which the waiter had tried to make me lay up against the hungers of the night, and some excellent Dalmatian wine. I said to Constantine something of what I had felt at the sights of Yaitse, and he answered: ‘Yes, it is strange that there are sensations quite delightful which are nevertheless not stimuli; that there are spectacles which make us shiver with pleasure of a quite refined and intricate sort and yet do not open any avenue along which our minds, which are like old soldiers, and like to march because that is their business, can travel. And listen, I will tell you, it is very sad, for we need more avenues. Since some of the avenues that our minds can march down very happily are bad places for us to go.

‘Let me tell you a story of Yaitse. This was a great place to the Turks. For them it was the key to Central Europe, and so for many years they would have it. For seven years it was defended by a Bosnian general, Peter Keglevitch, and at last he came to the end. He knew that if there was another attack he could not meet it. Just then he heard that the Turkish troops had left their camp and were massing in one of the ravines to make a surprise sally on the fortress with ladders. So he sent a spy over to talk with the Turks and tell them that he had seen they had gone from their camp, and had been very glad, and had told all his soldiers, ’Now you may laugh and be glad, for the enemy has gone far away, and you may sing and drink and sleep, and tomorrow, which is St. George’s Day, your women and girls may go out as usual, to the mountains in the morning according to our custom and wash their faces in the dew and dance and sing.‘ But the Turks were doubtful, and they lay in wait at dawn, and they saw all the women and girls of Yaitse come out of their houses in their most beautiful clothes, and go down the steep streets to the lawns and terraces beyond the river, yes, where those most impudent ones were this afternoon. There they washed their dear little faces in the dew, and then some struck the strings of the gusla, and others sang, and others joined their hands and danced the kolo. Poor little ones, their fingers must have been very cold, and I do not know if they sang very well, for each of them had a knife hidden in her bosom, to use if her plan miscarried.

‘Then, when the Turks heard them singing and saw them dancing they thought that what the spy had said must be true, and the fortress would be like a ripe fruit in their hands. But since they were always like wolves for women, they left their ladders and they ran down to rape the poor little ones before they started looting and killing in the town. When they were in the woodlands and marshes down by the river the Christians rose from their ambush and destroyed them. And the little ones who had been so brave went back to the city they had saved, and for a few more years they were not slaves.

‘Now, that is a story that will send the mind marching on, particularly if it belongs to a good and simple man or woman. Peter Keglevitch was a cunning man, and it is right to be cunning, that the Turks and such evil ones may be destroyed. The little ones were very brave, and to save their city and their faith they risked all; and it is right to be brave, because there is always evil. And it is all so beautiful; for the little ones were lovely as they sang and danced, and they were trusted by their Slav men, so that there must have been an honourable love between them, and the desire of the Turks makes us think of other things of which we would be ashamed and which are nevertheless very exciting and agreeable. And St. George’s Day is a most beautiful feast, and our mountains are very beautiful, and Yaitse is the most beautiful town. And so a man can give himself great pleasure in telling himself that story, and he can imagine all sorts of like happenings, with himself as Peter Keglevitch, with all the loveliest little ones being brave for his sake, and all his enemies lying dead in the marshes, with water over the face; and on that he can build up a philosophy which is very simple but is a real thing; it makes a man’s life mean more than it did before he held it. Now, will you tell me what in peace is so easy for a simple man to think about as this scene of war? So do not despise my people when they cannot settle down to freedom, when they are like those people on the road of whom I said to you, “They think all the time they must die for Yugoslavia, and they cannot understand why we do not ask them to do that but another thing, that they should live and be happy.” You have seen that all sorts of avenues our artists and thinkers have started lead nowhere at all, are not avenues but clumps of trees where it is pleasant to rest a minute or two in the heat of the day, groves into which one can go, but out of which one must come. You will find that we Serbs are not so. We are simpler, and we have not had so many artists and thinkers, but we have something of our own to think about, which is war, but a little more than war, for it is noble, which war need not necessarily be. And from it our minds can go on many adventures. But you must go to bed now, you look tired.’

Yaitse (Jajce) II

‘You must wake up at once,’ said my husband. But it was not next morning. The room was flooded with moonlight, and my watch told me that I had been in bed only half an hour. ‘Get up and dress,’ my husband urged me, ‘there is a female dentist downstairs.’ In his hand I noticed he held a glass of plum brandy. ‘She has a voice like running water,’ he continued, ‘and she says she will sing us the Bosnian songs, which in this region are particularly beautiful.’ ‘What is all this about?’ I asked coldly. ‘She is the sister of Chabrinovitch, the boy who made the first attempt on Franz Ferdinand’s life, and then threw himself into the river. She is the wife of the medical officer here and practises herself. Somebody in Sarajevo wrote and told her we were coming. Come down quickly. I must go back to her, Constantine is telephoning to his bureau in Belgrade, and she is all alone.’

He left me with such an air of extreme punctiliousness that I was not surprised when I came downstairs to find a very attractive woman. She was not young, she was not to any pyrotechnic degree beautiful, but she was an enchanting blend of robustness and sensitiveness. She possessed the usual foundation of Slav beauty, lovely head bones. Her skin was bright, her eyes answered for her before her lips had time, and she had one of those liquid and speeding voices that will never age; when she is eighty it will sound as if she were an unfatigued and hopeful girl. In pretty German she said that she had come to take us to her house, where we could drink coffee and meet her husband, and so we went out into the moonlit town.

She was a little shy of us, since Constantine was still telephoning and we had to go alone. Like a foal she ran ahead, on the excuse that she knew the way; but kindness drew her back as we were going up an alley. ‘You would like to see,’ she said, and pointed to a small window in a white wall. We had already remarked a sound of chanting, and we found that we were looking into a mosque, where about a hundred Moslems were attending their evening rite. Through the dim light we could see their arms stretch up in aspiration, and then whack down till their whole bodies were bowed and their foreheads touched the floor in an obeisance that was controlled and military, that had no tinge of private emotion about it. The sound of their worship twanged like a bow. They rose again, relaxed, and we thought the prayer must be over; but again they strained up tautly, and again they beat the floor. It looked as if it were healthy and invigorating to perform, like good physical jerks, which, indeed, the Moslem rite incorporates to a greater degree than any other liturgy of the great religions. Five times during the day a Moslem must say prayer, and during these prayers he must throw up his arms and then get down to the ground anything from seven to thirteen times. As the average man likes taking physical exercise but has to be forced into it by some external power, this routine probably accounts for part of the popularity of Islam. We watched till a fezed head turned towards us. It was strange to eavesdrop on a performance so firmly based on self-confidence of success and solidarity with the big battalion, and feel diffident, not because one was on the side of failure and the beaten battalion, but because the final issue of the battle had been not as was expected. We went on to an apartment house that stood several stories high in the shadow of the fortress, and were taken into a home that recorded a triumph, which perhaps belonged truly to yesterday, but had certainly not been completely annulled by today.

It was a room that could be found anywhere in Europe. It had light distempered walls and a polished floor laid with simple rugs; it was hung with pictures in the modern style, bright with strong colours; the furniture was of good wood, squarely cut by living hands; there was a bowl of fruit on the sideboard; there were many books on the shelves and tables, by such writers as Shaw and Wells, Aldous Huxley and Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann and Romain Rolland and Gorky. This sort of room means the same sort of thing wherever it is, in London or Paris, Madrid or Vienna, Oslo or Florence. It implies a need that has been much blown upon since the last war ended and reaction got its chance; but it certifies that its owners possess honourable attributes. They have a passion for cleanliness, a strong sense of duty, a tenderness for little children that counter-balances the threat made to young life by the growth of the town, a distaste for violence, a courageous readiness to criticize authority if it is abusing its function. Such a room implies, of course, certain faults in its owners. They are apt to be doctrinaire, to believe that life is far simpler than it is, and that it can be immediately reduced to order by the application of certain liberal principles, which assume that man is really amenable to reason, even in matters relating to sex and race. They are also inclined to be sceptical about the past and credulous towards the present; they will believe any fool who tells them to fill themselves with some contorted form of cereal and despise the ancient word that recommends wine and flesh. These are, however, slight faults, easily corrected by experience, compared to the dirt and irresponsibility, violence and carelessness towards children, cowardice and slavishness, on which these people wage war.

Only the malign bigot hates such rooms. Even those who believe that there is more in life than such people grant must admit that these rooms are worthy temples to subsidiary gods. There are those who sourly remark that Bolshevism was made in such rooms. It is not true. The Russian exiles who were responsible for that sat on unmade beds in flats as untidy as Versailles or any medieval castle. They were the powerful people who never tidy up, who only happened for the moment to be out of power. But those who live in these swept and garnished rooms wish only to serve. In the hereafter they shall be saved when all the rest of us are damned.

It could be seen that the doctor husband was of salvation, like his wife: his handsome face spoke of kindliness, discipline, and hope. They gave us coffee, and we told them of the beauty of our journey, and they told us how homesick they had been when they had to leave Bosnia to take their training at the University in Belgrade, and how happy they had been to come back and practise here. They spoke of their work with a sternness which seemed strange in people who are in their own country, which we hear only from colonists and missionaries in Africa or Asia. But they were in the position of colonists and missionaries, because Austria left Bosnians in the position of Africans or Asiatics. ‘They did nothing for us,’ said the doctor, ‘nothing, in all the thirty-six years they were here. You can test it. Look for the buildings they left behind them. You will find a great many barracks, some tourist hotels, and a few—pitifully few—schools. No hospitals. No reservoirs. No houses for the people.’ They told us that when they had left Bosnia after the war to study in Serbia they had been astonished at the superior lot of the Serbian peasant. His country had been sacked and invaded, but nevertheless he was better fed and better clad than his Bosnian brother. ‘Liberation meant to us,’ said the dentist, ‘release from being robbed.’ I thought grimly of the many books written by English travellers between 1805 and 1914 which stoutly maintained that the Bosnians and Herzegovinians were so much better off, first under Turkey and then under Austria, than the free Serbs. It would be pleasant if this could be proved quite unconnected with the circumstance that the Turks and the Austrians knew how to entertain a Western visitor, while the free Serbs lacked the money and experience.

At length Constantine came in, and they greeted him affectionately. After we had drunk the ceremonial round of coffee that was brought in for him, he spoke to the dentist in Serb and she turned to us with a face suddenly flushed, the eyes and mouth happy and desperate, as in a memory of a love-affair that had been unfortunate but glorious. ‘Constantine says I am to tell you about my brother,’ she said. ‘But the story is so long, and it is so difficult for foreigners to realize. This will help you to understand some of it.’ She took from the book-case an album of photographs of the attentat that had been sent to her after the war by the Chief of Police at Sarajevo, and spread it out before us, and then walked up and down, her hands over her face, quivering in that lovely nervousness which, save when her sense of duty was organizing her, governed her being. Most of the photographs we had seen before; they showed the streets of Sarajevo, with the two poor stuffed and swollen victims being pushed on to their deaths, and the frail and maladroit assassins laying hold of the lightning for one minute, and then falling into the power of the people in the streets, who on this day looked so much more robust and autonomous than either the victims or the assassins that they might have belonged to a different race. But there were in addition some ghastly pictures of the terror that followed the assassination, when, long before any inquiry into the crime, hundreds of Bosnian peasants who had barely heard of it were put to death. There were some particularly ghastly pictures of men who had never known anything but injustice, misgovernment by the Turks and Austrians, poverty, and this undeserved death, and were now saying in grim pride with their wry necks and stretched bodies, ‘Nevertheless I am I.’ There were also pictures of some peasant women who hung from the gallows-tree rigid as saints on icons among their many skirts. There were several photographs of the fields round the barracks at various towns where these mass-executions took place, each showing the summer day thronged as if there were a garden-party going on, with the difference that every single face was marked with the extremity of agony or brutality. The interest and strangeness of the pictures were so great that I swung loose from what I was and for a moment looked about me, lost as one is sometimes when one wakes in a train or in an unfamiliar hotel; it might have been that we were all dead and that I was looking at some records of the death-struggle of our race.

Coming close to me, the dentist cried, in that voice which was delicious even when what she said was acutely painful, ‘But we have no record of the worst part, of what happened to him in prison. That should be known, for if such things happen it is not right that they should not be known. But it is dreadful to me to wonder what he did suffer, for you cannot think how delicate and fragile he was, my little brother. He was so—fine. If it had not been for the oppression never would he have done anything violent. So it was easy for them to kill him in prison.’ I asked, ‘Is it true, what they say, that he was bound to die, because before he went into prison he had tuberculosis?’ ‘No, no, no,’ she protested, ‘never did he have anything of the sort before they got hold of him, never!’ Then, correcting her impulsiveness by a lovely effort of self-discipline, she explained, ‘I have asked myself again and again, in the light of my medical training, if he suffered from anything of the sort, and quite honestly I do not think so, I cannot remember any definite symptoms at all. He was not robust, and he had a tendency to catarrh and bronchitis, but really there was nothing more than that. But it is the habit of our people to say when they see a boy or girl who is thin and weakly, “He looks consumptive,” and the Austrians took advantage of that to excuse themselves.’

It has always interested me to know what happens after the great moments in history to the women associated by natural ties to the actors. I would like to know what St. Monica had to do after her son, St Augustine, heard the child in the garden say, ‘Tolle lege, tolle lege,’ and was converted to Christianity; how she treated with the family of the little heiress whom St. Augustine was then obliged to jilt, how she dismissed the concubine with whom he had been passing the difficult time of his engagement, how she gave up the lease of the house in Milan. These are the things you are never told. I said to the dentist, ‘Tell me what happened to you and your mother after the attentat.’ She said, ‘You cannot think how terrible it was for my poor mother. She knew nothing of politics, she had been married when she was a young girl, she had had many children, my father was a very stern man who would hardly let her speak and never spoke to her save to order her and scold her, she was quite dazed. Then suddenly this happened! Her eldest child tried to kill the Archduke and his wife—apart from anything else, she felt it was too grand for us, it could not happen. Then, that same evening, they came and arrested my father, and it was as if the end of the world had come, she had not known what it was to be without a man, without her father or her husband. I was no use to her. I was a girl, and indeed I was only fifteen. She was like a terrified animal. But then the next morning a neighbour climbed into her back garden and said, “Come, you must escape, a mob is coming to kill you,” and she and I had to take the five children that were younger than me and my brother, and get them down the back garden and out through another house into the street beyond where another friend sheltered us. As we got clear we heard the mob wrecking our home. Then she was very brave. But for long she simply could not understand what had happened. Nothing in her life had prepared her for it.

‘Later on, before she died, she saw that my brother had been very brave and had done something that history demanded, but at first it was only a disgrace and a disaster. You see, for long she was stunned by the terrible things that happened to us. We were taken with many other Bosnians to an internment camp in Hungary, and she and I had to earn money by working all day as laundresses, but even so my little brother and sisters were always hungry, and so were we, and many people died all round us. It was like Hell, and we grieved for my poor brother Nedyelyko, for we did not know what had happened to him, and even now, beyond the fact that he is dead, we do not know. Then at the end of the war it was still terrible, for one day they simply came to us and turned us loose, drove us out of the camp with no money and nowhere to go, and no clear idea of what had happened, and we were so weak and foolish and confused with suffering. That was a nightmare. Then, when we had found my father, we settled down again and all lived together in the same house. But it was not for long, she was a dying woman, and she lived only a year or two. I will show you a photo that we had taken of her on her deathbed only a few days before she died.’

The dentist rose to fetch it, and Constantine said to me, prepared to hate me if I was unsympathetic, ‘It is the habit of our people to take photographs of their beloveds not only at weddings and at christenings, but in death too, we do not reject them in their pain.’ It marked a real division between our kinds. I could not imagine any English person I knew having had this photograph taken, or preserving it if by chance it had been taken, or showing it to a stranger. The mother’s face was propped up against pillows, emaciated and twisted by her disease, which I imagine must have been cancer, like the petal of a flower that is about to die; her eyes reviewed her life and these circumstances that were bringing it to an end, and were amazed by them. The children’s faces, pressing in about her sharp shoulders and her shrunken bosom, mirrored on their health the image of their mother’s disease and were amazed by her amazement. But no part of their grief was being rejected by them, it was running through them in a powerful tide, it was adding to their power. Constantine need not have been alarmed, I felt this difference between his people and mine as a proof of our inferiority. To be afraid of sorrow is to be afraid of joy also; since we do not take photographs of our deathbeds, it is hardly worth the trouble to take photographs of our weddings and christenings. ‘Think of it,’ said the dentist, ‘there is such a sad and funny thing I remember about that photograph! We sent for the photographer and gathered round the bed; and afterwards we found that my father was hurt because we had not told him that the photographer was coming and he could not be included in the picture. It did not occur to him that to us he was the instrument of her martyrdom, that we would have thought it as odd to have him in a picture of her agony as it would be for the wife of a shepherd who has been fatally mauled by a wolf to include the animal in a last photograph of him. It showed how innocent he was in his severity, how it was all part of a role he had chosen and stuck to because he had not the sensitiveness to realize the consequences.’

‘This is what he was like,’ said the doctor, who had been turning over the portfolio out of which his wife had taken her mother’s picture. He handed us a photograph of a man in peasant costume, with a face as completely ‘made-up’ by an aggressive expression as Mussolini’s, standing in a defiant pose in front of some banners bearing Serbian inscriptions of a patriotic nature. ‘He was a very stern Bosnian patriotic man,’ said Constantine; ‘see, these are the banners of his secret nationalist society. Es musste mit ihm immer trotzen sein, immer trotzen.’ The dentist picked it up, looked at it for a minute as intently as if she had never seen it before, shook her head and put it down. ‘In the house, never a gentle word,’ she said. She buried her face in her hands, but began to laugh ‘I can think of things that seemed terrible to me at the time, but now they seem funny. There was the time when I was chosen to recite for my class at the school prize-giving.’ ‘Yes,’ said the doctor, ‘tell them that, it always makes me laugh!’ ‘Yes, please do,’ we said.

‘It was when we still lived at Trebinye,’ said the dentist, ‘and already my brother and I were very ambitious, we meant to be educated, so I worked very hard, and I was top of my class. Therefore I was chosen to say a recitation at the prize-giving which was a great affair, all the functionaries came to it and even some of the officers and their wives, to say nothing of all the townspeople. But, of course, I was miserable when I heard that I was chosen, because I knew that all the other little girls who were chosen to recite for their class would have pretty new dresses and light shoes and stockings for the occasion, and I knew I would have nothing. We had nothing, none of us, never. We had only to ask for something and Father immediately felt that made it a duty to refuse it, lest we become spoilt and self-indulgent. It was no good asking our mother to speak for us. That would make it doubly certain we should not get what we wanted, he would then want to prove that he was master in his own house.

‘But I began to see he was proud I had been chosen. I found out that he was taking about with him the local newspaper in which the choice of pupils was announced and showing it to his friends. So very, very timidly I approached him. I was not honest. Usually I was honest with him, however much he beat me. But this time—ah, I wanted so much a little soft, fine dress! So I went and I told him how I wanted a new dress and new shoes, and I thought I should have them, because the Austrians and Hungarians would be there and they would sneer at me as a Serb, if I was in my old clothes. And that impressed him. “Yes,” he said, “I see it, you must have a new dress, and new shoes, and new stockings. It must be done.” I shall never forget how my heart leaped up when I heard him say this.

‘But I had not reckoned it was still my father who said I could have these things, and therefore it followed that they could not possibly be the things which I wanted and which would give me pleasure. The poor dear man began to think of these shoes and these stockings and this dress as expressions of his Weltanschauung. He became very smiling and mysterious, he treated me as if he were about to confer some benefit on me which I was not old enough to understand as yet, but which would astonish me when I came to full knowledge of it. Then at last a day came, just before the prize-giving, when he took me out to see what he had been preparing for me. We went to a bootmaker who had already made for me a pair of boots, immensely large for me so that I should not grow out of them, made so strongly that if I had walked through a flood I should have come out with dry feet, cut out of leather so tough and thick that it might have been from an elephant or a rhinoceros. For weeks he had been inquiring which cobbler in Trebinye made the stoutest footwear, used the most invincible leather. I put them on, saying in my heart, “This cannot be true.”

‘Then he took me to a tailor who tried on me a dress that was as incredibly horrible as my boots. For weeks the poor man had been going about the drapers’ shops, in search of material that was strongest, that would never wear out. He had found out something with which one could build a battleship, I cannot tell you what it was like. It hardly went into folds. This had been made into a dress for me by a tailor, who had been chosen because he was an old man who made no concessions to modern taste and cut clothes as the people in the hill villages wore them, more like the cloths you put on horses and cattle. By the instructions of my father he had made my dress far too big for me, so that I should not grow out of it for years, and it even had deep hems, that felt like planks, so that the skirt would be long enough for me when I was a grown woman. It had even great insets in the bodice, for the days when my bosom should develop, that stuck out like capes.

‘I cannot tell you what I felt like as I had this horror tried on me. But it was only a day or two before the prize-giving; and if there had been weeks and months before it happened, I still could have done nothing. For never had I seen my father in such a good humour, and this terrified me. I felt that interference in this state would lead to something so horrible that it could not be faced. My brother was very kind to me about it and I wept in his arms, but my mother was no use to me, because she was so dazed by my father, she said nothing but “Hush, hush, you must not anger him!” So on the day of the prize-giving I crept into my school weeping. All my teachers and my school-fellows were very kind to me; they understood at once, for my father was well known for his severity. But the time came for me to speak my recitation, and then I had to stump on the platform in these horrible new boots that would have been suitable for a peasant working in one of our flooded valleys. I was scarlet, and with reason, for I must have been the most ridiculous sight in the world, less like a little girl than a fortress. But I stood there, and it seemed to me that this was just another battle in the endless war that I would have to carry on with my father all my life if I wanted to do anything, so I began my recitation as well as I could.

‘I believe the audience was very kind. But I really knew nothing of what was happening, for I was caught up into an extraordinary state. I felt as if my mind was gagged, as if there was a bar preventing my feelings flowing in the natural direction, which was of course, for a child in such a situation, hatred. What was holding me back was the sight of my father in the audience. He was sitting far back, of course, because naturally as a patriotic Serb he would not sit in front where the Austrian and Hungarian functionaries would sit, but he sat in the front of the seats where the townspeople were, because he was much respected. So I could see him distinctly, and I could see that his face was alight as I had never seen it before, with a sense that at last, just for once in his troubled life, everything was going well, his daughter had wanted something sensible, and he had granted her desire, and added more to it, so that from then on he might be sure of getting more of that gratitude and obedience he craved. I could not love him, but I could not hate him. Oh, the poor dear, the poor dear!’

She burst into distressed and loving laughter; and her fingers, as if without her own knowledge, turned over the photograph of her mother, laying it with its face down, as if to protect the dead woman from the ancient enemy whose personality was being evoked by these memories. ‘My father had so many funny ways,’ she went on. ‘You have perhaps noticed how greatly our people, however poor they are, love to be photographed. It was so with him also. Whenever things seemed to be going well he wanted to take us all to the photographer’s and be photographed in the midst of his children. But then when he quarrelled with any of us he would go round the house cutting our photographs out of the groups. But he would never destroy them; perhaps he was too much of a peasant, with primitive ideas of magic, and to burn the images of his children or to throw them into a waste-paper basket would have seemed too much like killing them. He kept them in a box, and when he took us back into favour he would paste them back into the group, so that some of our photographs presented a most extraordinary appearance. I would see one day that my little sister had gone, and then she would be back, and then she would be pasted in again—oh dear, oh dear, the poor man!’

Again she laughed into her hands; and again her husband said, a smile on his sane and handsome face, ‘It was extraordinary how it had never occurred to him that family life might be conducted agreeably. Once in Belgrade, long after the war, he came in and found me sitting in the cafe we frequented, and he asked me where my wife was. I said, ’I had an appointment to meet her here at six and she has not come yet.‘ He said, ’But it is already half-past. Tonight you must box her ears for this.‘ Then I said, ’But I married your daughter precisely because I know that she would never keep me waiting except for a very good reason, and in any case I am quite happy sitting here reading my papers and drinking my coffee, and furthermore I do not like striking women, particularly when I love them. So why should I give your daughter a box on the ears?‘ That horrified him. If I had said something really nasty, something really cruel and base, I could not have upset him more. He felt I was striking at the foundations of society.’

‘Yet, do you know,’ said the dentist, ‘in his last years he accepted everything. He used to talk of my whole life, of my profession, and even of my marriage as if it were something for which he had worked and planned.’ ‘Yes, indeed,’ said the doctor, ‘some months before he died we went out and had a meal alone together as my wife was away, and he said to me, “Well, you know you have reason to thank me. I have brought my daughter up so that she is a good sensible girl, not just interested in foolishness as so many women are, and now you have a wife with a professional standing you can be proud of, whom you can treat as an equal.”’ ‘Now what do you think of that?’ said the dentist happily. But her face changed. She held up her forefinger. ‘Is not that one of my little ones?’ ‘Yes,’ said the doctor, ‘I believe I heard a cry a minute ago, but I was not sure.’ ‘You might have told me,’ said the dentist, in a tone that was a little sister to reproach. ‘Would you care to see our babies?’ she asked me, and as we went along the passage she explained to me, ‘They are not really our babies. My sister, the very lovely one who has her head against my mother’s shoulder in that photograph I showed you, married and had four children, and recently died. So, as her husband has to live in the town and has to work very, very hard, we have adopted them.’

The children were lying in two beds in a large room, with their four bright heads pointing to the four quarters of the compass. The little one had her feet right up on the pillow and her head down on her sister’s stomach. They stirred and fretted a little as the dentist turned on the light, but they had the more than animal, the almost vegetable serenity, of well-kept children, which Tennyson described when he wrote of ‘babes like tumbled fruit in grass.’ As the dentist put them right way up and tucked them in, she laughed; and she said, after she put out the light and we were tiptoeing along the passage, ‘It is such a joke, you know, to have a ready-made family like this. To have the four children, that is grave and wonderful, but to have all of a sudden four little toothbrushes, and four little pairs of bedroom slippers and four little dressing-gowns, it is all like a fairy-story.’ She came back into the living-room much more placid than when she had left it. ‘Now you will hear some Bosnian songs,’ she said, her voice soaring as if it were glad that her mind were giving it liberty to sing.

Yaitse (Jajce) III

When I awoke and saw the sun a pale-green blaze in the tree-tops below our windows, my husband was already awake and pensive, lying with his knees up and his hands clasped behind his head. ‘That was interesting last night,’ he said. ‘She loved her brother, but still to her the important person was the brow-beating father. She had to talk of him because he seemed to her the prime cause of everything in the house, and even the Sarajevo attentat seemed to her simply a consequence of him.’ ‘I remember there is an odd passage in the trial which shows that her brother was of the same opinion. Here, pass it, it is lying on the chair.’ I saw, for we had taken with us Mousset’s French translation of the court proceedings. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is right at the end. The father makes a few dreary contentious appearances in the evidence of other people, bullying, raging, having his son shut up in the police station because he had offended a pro-Austrian servant in their house and had refused to apologize, and so on. Then at the end they read a deposition made by the father, notably certain passages significant as regarding the father’s opinion of the son. He complained of his children’s ingratitude, and he expressed the hope that they in their turn might be treated in the same way by their own children.’ I thought of the plump children I had seen the night before, deep in their contented sleep in the airy bedroom, and shuddered on behalf of the dead. ‘The president of the court asked Chabrinovitch, “Do you see what an ungrateful son you are?” and Chabrinovitch made rather an astonishing answer. He said, “I do not wish to accuse my father, but if I had been better brought up, I would not be seated on this bench.” It was an odd thing for a man to say whose case it was that, granted the annexation of Bosnia, it was inevitable that he and his friends should murder the Archduke. It is the fashion now to sneer at Freud, but nobody else could have predicted that in the mind of Chabrinovitch his revolt against his father and his revolt against the representative of the Habsburgs would seem one and the same, so that when a question was put to him in court that associated the two revolts, he answered not with the reason of an adult, but with the excuse of a defiant child. How exactly this bears out the psychoanalytic theory that they who attack the heads of states are not acting as a result of impersonal political theory so much as out of the desire to resolve emotional disturbances set up by childish resentment against their parents!’

‘But wait a minute, wait a minute,’ said my husband. ‘I have just thought of something very curious. It has just occurred to me, does not Seton-Watson say in his book Sarajevo that Chabrinovitch was the son of a Bosnian Serb who was a spy in the service of the Austro-Hungarian Government?’ ‘Why, so he did!’ I exclaimed. ‘And now I come to think of it, Stephen Graham says so, too, in St. Vitus’ Day.’ ‘This is most extraordinary,’ said my husband, ‘for Seton-Watson is never wrong, he is in himself a standard for Greenwich time.’ ‘And Stephen Graham may slip now and then, but in all essential matters he is in his own vague way precise,’ I said. ‘Yet all the same this cannot be true,’ said my husband; ‘this girl was talking under the influence of a memory so intense that it was acting on her like a hypnotic drug, I do not think she could have lied even if she had wanted to do so. And she never mentioned it; on the contrary she mentioned several things that were inconsistent with it, and she showed us that photograph of her father standing among the banners of a Serb patriotic society, which if he were a police spy would be a piece of Judas treachery such as the sister of Chabrinovitch could not bear to keep in her home, much less show to strangers.’

‘No, indeed,’ I said, ‘I do not believe that if she had known him to be a police spy she would have mentioned him to us. But there’s something else than that. Chabrinovitch was a youth without reticence, and in the court at Sarajevo he did not care what he said against the Government. If his father had been a Government agent I believe he would have denounced him to the world, just as a young Communist would have denounced his father as a counter-revolutionary. Yet never once in all the pages of Chabrinovitch’s evidence, and in any of the countless comments he made on the evidence of other witnesses, did he say, “My father was a traitor to the Slav cause!” He says that he complained that his father hoisted both the Serbian and Austrian flags on his house, but that was not an individual act on the part of his father, it was a matter of conforming to a police regulation, which we know most people in Sarajevo obeyed. But there is no other act of his father’s that is denounced by Chabrinovitch.’ ‘Could they perhaps not have known?’ proceeded my husband. ‘The dentist at least must have considered the question,’ I said, ‘for if Seton-Watson and Stephen Graham spread this story it must be because they have heard it on good authority and from several sources. It must have come before her notice some time.’ ‘It is a mystery,’ said my husband; ‘but let us get up, once we get downstairs we will find Constantine and probably he will be able to clear up the mystery.’

We found Constantine downstairs having a breakfast which was as admirable as the dinner. ‘You have stumbled upon something very intriguing, and very disgusting, and very frightening,’ said Constantine, ‘and lovely too, because it is the instrument of the martyrdom of a saint. But may I ask you, do you not find the coffee and the bread excellent?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ we said. ‘My people know how to live,’ he purred, and continued. ‘It unfortunately happened that after the war we were all running hither and thither, and we had many other things to do besides write down what we had been doing. So the writing of the history of what happened at Sarajevo fell into the hands of a few who were clever enough to look to the future. Now, because there were no papers, because the reports of the trial were then lost to us, there was nothing for serious historians to work upon, and the field was free to anybody who had been in Bosnia at the time of the attentat and had come in contact with the conspirators. One of these was a young man who had certainly known the attentateurs, and who had himself been involved in the revolutionary movements of the students. It cannot be denied he has studied the subject very fully, and all foreigners who are writing about the attentat come and consult him. But unfortunately it happened that soon after the war this young man met Chabrinovitch’s sister and fell madly in love with her. Many men have felt so about her; it is her voice, that makes one feel as if she was a vila,’ (the Serbian fairy, a kind of wood nymph) ‘and would dance with one for ever in the glades. But she could not love him, already she would marry with the doctor whom you saw last night. Long, long this other young man tried to change her heart for him, but it could not be done. So he went away, and then it appeared to him that the whole family of Chabrinovitch was not so wonderful, and he wished to destroy them with his scorn. So in everything he writes and tells, Chabrinovitch seems not such a hero after all. Just a little shade of scorn here, just a little touch of impatience there, and he spoils Chabrinovitch.’

‘I recognize that you are telling the truth,’ I exclaimed. ‘I can see that the descriptions of a jerky, fretful, loquacious, hysterical Chabrinovitch might be a jaundiced view of a vivacious, temperamental, and fluent personality such as his sister.’ ‘Yes,’ said Constantine, ‘there has been nothing grossly untrue said about Chabrinovitch, but it has all been made a little nasty and puny, and to this same cause I put down the story that Chabrinovitch’s father was a police spy. I do not believe it, for I know that his daughter has heard it, and I know that she is such a good and true woman that she would not deny it unless she had investigated it and found it baseless, and if she had not found it baseless she would never have spoken his name again.’

‘What a cruel lie!’ I exclaimed. ‘Oh, it will not be exactly a lie,’ said Constantine. ‘I do not think that this man would deliberately tell a lie. But he loved this woman, and because she does not love him he wants to prove that she and everything about her is worthless, and in this state of mind he thinks that facts bear a significance which he would certainly not see in them had he gained what he wanted. Here, I imagine, he has simply misinterpreted some incident, or rather given it greater weight than it merits. Think of Chabrinovitch’s father. He was a monstrous egotist, ein Subjektivistwithout limit or restraint; it appeared to him that every part of the universe which was not him had shown the basest treachery by separating itself. We have seen how his children, who as you see from this specimen I have shown you (as I will show you all, all in my country) were really extremely serious, seemed to him ungrateful and unnatural. It is not to be imagined that when he was in a patriotic society, his comrades would not sometimes, and perhaps often, seem to be conspiring against him and their common cause, simply because they disagreed with him on some minute point of policy. It might quite well then happen that as a threat to his comrades he declared that he might leave the whole of them in the lurch and go off, and inform against them at the local police office. This threat may have been taken in earnest by some simple people, who might be misled by subsequent happenings into believing that he had carried it out, though he never did so. Other people, not simple but malevolent, may have spread stories that he had done so; for it cannot be expected that such a man would not make many bitter enemies. Moreover, it may have happened, perhaps just on one occasion, that Chabrinovitch’s father may have denounced to the police some man in the Bosnian revolutionary movement whom he thought a danger to it. This is a method that was very often used by the revolutionaries in Russia under the Tsardom, to rid themselves of comrades whom they considered undesirable, on account of indiscretion or some form of indiscipline. Here amongst our people it was very rarely used; but remember this man was an exception, he was a law unto himself, it is just possible that he may have done it. Still, that he practised any sort of conscious treachery against his fellow-Serbs, and that he was in receipt of payment from the Austro-Hungarian authorities, that I do not believe.’ ‘What a shame that such a story should be told!’ I said. ‘No, not a shame,’ said Constantine, ‘it is something that could not be helped. For if a woman does not do a man the little favour of handing him over her body and her soul, regardless of whether she likes him, it appears to him the unvarnished truth that she is a leper, that her father is a hunchback who sold his country, that her mother was a cripple who nevertheless was a whore. Besides, I think between this man and Chabrinovitch there was to start with a little bit of dislike. I think he either gave evidence or made a deposition, and that Chabrinovitch commented on it in a way that makes one feel there had been a lack of sympathy —’

But at this point our table was approached by one of those pale persons in subfusc Western clothes, closely resembling the minor characters in a Maeterlinck drama, who carry messages in the Balkan countries. He said something to Constantine which made him burst into happy exclamations, and gave him a note. ‘Drink up your coffee, you English people are always eating,’ cried Constantine. He had been oddly showing his delight at the note by tearing it up into small pieces. ‘My two very good friends who are chemical manufacturers here are eager to see me, and they ask us to go down to the Temple of Mithras, so that they may show it to you more properly, but of course it is me they want to see, for we were very great friends when we were young in Russia.’ He hurried us out to our car and to the chemical factory, which stood among the grass and orchards on the outskirts of the town, incongruously urban, built with a gratuitous solidity that was considered appropriate to industrial architecture in Central Europe during the nineteenth century. But the two managers were not there, and Constantine stood, in an ecstasy of disappointment, crying, ‘But they told me to come here,’ and searching in his pockets for the note he had received. ‘You tore the note up at the hotel,’ I said. ‘You English are fantastic,’ said Constantine. ‘Why should I have done that?’ By good fortune there drove up at the moment a large car, out of which there bounded, almost vertically, two huge men who fell upon Constantine and kissed him and smacked his bottom and cried out lovingly with voices such as loving bears might have. They paid no attention to my husband and me for some time, so delighted were they with this reunion with one whom they had evidently looked on as a little brother, as a fighting cock, and as a magician. They turned to us and cried, ‘Such a comrade he was, in Russia! Ah, the good little poet!’

But after a time Constantine told them that we must be moving on soon, and they became flushed with the prospect of half an hour’s abandonment to their secret passion, which was archaeology in general, and the Mithraic temple in particular, and with great loping strides they led us along a lane and down a field to the orchard. They came from the most Western Slav territories; one was a Croat, and the other, the taller, came from Slavonia, which used to be in Hungary; but both looked extremely and primitively Slav, as we think Russians ought to be. The taller, indeed, belonged to that order of Russian which looks like a gigantic full-bodied Chinaman. When we got to the orchard it was found that the key to the gate had been left at the factory, but they lifted up their voices and roared like bears in pain, and there came running up the hillside a workman in a beautiful braided plum-coloured peasant costume. When he had learned what was the matter he went away and returned with an axe and proceeded to break down a portion of the wooden fence round the orchard, which was of quite respectable solidity. While he was cutting, there approached us an extremely handsome and venerable old Moslem priest, well suited by the twist of white in his turban that announced his office, who, after greeting the men in our party, joined us, for no comprehensible reason, since he showed a profound indifference to both us and to what we were doing. When the gap was made we all filed through it, except for the Moslem priest. To him the sight of a statue representing the human form was forbidden, so he sat down with his back to the temple on a tree-trunk under a cloud of plum blossom.

It was too plain, the Mithraic mystery, this morning. The night before I had seen with my eyes the outlines and felt with my finger-tips the planes that made a massy hieroglyphic meaning strength. Now I could see the emotional overtones of the design, and its details. The god’s face was empty of all but resolution, and resolution is not enough to fill a face; and that the bull’s sexual organs were excessive in size would hardly be denied, even by another bull, and the scorpion that attacked them was as gargantuan. Grossness was being grossly murdered, with gross incidentals. No wonder women were not admitted to this worship, for it was distinctively masculine. All women believe that some day something supremely agreeable will happen, and that afterwards the whole of life will be agreeable. All men believe that some day they will do something supremely disagreeable, and that afterwards life will move on so exalted a plane that all considerations of the agreeable and disagreeable will prove petty and superfluous. The female creed has the defect of passivity, but it is surely preferable. There is a certain logic behind it. If a supremely agreeable event occurs it is probable that the human beings within its scope will be sweetened, and that therefore life will be by that much more harmonious. But there is no reason to suppose that a supremely disagreeable event will do anything, except strain and exhaust those who take part in it. It is not true that the vine and the wheat spring from the blood and marrow of a dying bull, the beasts from its sperm. The blood and marrow and sperm of the dead clot and corrupt, and are a stench.

The two giants exhibited this lunatic altar respectfully, because they too were male. But suddenly they caught sight of Constantine, who had climbed on an upturned basket, nosing in the side lines for additional symbols, and at the sight of his Pan-like plumpness they cried out, ‘Ah, the good Constantine, he is just the same as ever!’ They spread out their arms and called to him, and he came down and let them smack and embrace him all over again. All three began to cry out, ‘Do you remember? Do you remember?’ I was listening, and was quite unable to profit by it, to a passage of history that is, so far as I know, uncommemorated in Western history, yet is of considerable interest. After the Serbian Army had been driven out of its own country by the German and Austrian invaders and had reached the Adriatic by the famous retreat through Albania, a number of the survivors were sent to Russia. When the Revolution broke out some of these Serbians joined the Whites, and some the Reds. A number who had been in touch with Russian revolutionary propaganda at home played quite conspicuous roles in the Kerensky party. When the Bolsheviks seized power some were killed, and others followed Lenin; but they too were for the most part killed in the next few years. Only a few survive, and those whom one meets have escaped only by luck and preternatural daring.

The three survivors under my eyes were laughing so much that they had to lean against each other to keep on their feet. They felt they owed us an explanation, and the Croat wheezed out between his guffaws, ‘Nous étions ensemble tous les trois dans la fortresse de St. Paul et de St. Pierre à Petrogard.’⁵ ‘Oui, Madame,’ added the taller one, the Slavonian, ‘moi et notre bon petit Constantin, nous étions enfermés dans la même cellule. Et après nous étions condamnés à mort, tous les deux.’⁶ At this point Constantine remembered a joke so rich that he staggered about and caught his breath while he tried to tell it to us. Pointing at the Slavonian, he gasped, ‘Figurez-vous, il était deux fois condamné à mort. Deux fois! Deux fois!’⁷ At the thought of it they collapsed and sat down on the ground at the foot of the altar, crying with laughter. At last the Slavonian pulled himself together and said to us apologetically, wiping his eyes, ‘Ah, que voulez-vous, Madame? On etait jeune.’⁸

Yezero

That morning we followed the river of the waterfall some miles towards its source. It filled the trough of a broad and handsome valley, and interrupted itself every half-mile or so with shallow cascades, handsomely laid out in bays and scallops, and shaded by willow-gardens. In the lower reaches of the valley there are strung across these cascades lines of four or five mills, little wooden huts on piles, with a contraption working underneath which is a primitive form of the turbine. ‘It is here among my people,’ said Constantine in his fat, contented voice, ‘that the principle of the turbine was invented, hundreds of years ago.’ But the mills stand very high-shouldered nowadays, for some years ago Yaitse was shaken with twenty-three earth tremors, and a landslide altered the course of the river. To please Constantine we stopped the car and went into one of the mills, but lost heart, because there was a beautiful young man lying on the floor under a blanket, who woke up only to give a smile dazzling in its suggestion that we were all accomplices, and closed his eyes again. So we went on our way by the river, widened now into a lake, which held on its rain-grey mirror a bright yet blurred image of the pastoral slopes that rose to the dark upland forest, and which seemed, like so much of Bosnia, almost too carefully landscape-gardened. At the end it split with a flourish into two streams, which were linked together by a village set with flowering trees, its minaret as nicely placed as the flowers on those trees.

Some of its houses spoke, by lovely broken woodwork and tiled roofs fistulated with neglect, of a vital tradition of elegance strangled by poverty; and this was still alive in certain houses which in their decent proportions and their unpretentious ornament, kept trim by cleanliness and new plaster, recalled, strangely enough, some of the more modest and countrified dwellings in Jane Austen’s Bath. There were lilacs everywhere, and some tulips. There was nobody about except some lovely children. From the latticed upper story of one of the houses that were rotting among their lilacs there sounded a woman’s voice, a deep voice that was not the less wise because it was permeated with the knowledge of pleasure, singing a Bosnian song, full of weariness at some beautiful thing not thoroughly achieved. They became credible, all those Oriental stories of men who faced death for the sake of a woman whom they knew only as a voice singing behind a harem window. Later, standing on a bridge, watching water clear as air comb straight the green weeds on the piers, we heard another such voice coming from a trim Christian house, divided from a wooden mosque by a line of poplars. This was more placid and less young, but was still urgent, urgent in its desire to bring out beauty from the throat, urgent to state a problem in music. Both these women made exquisite, exciting use of a certain feature peculiar to these Balkan songs. Between each musical sentence there is a long, long pause. It is as if the speaker put her point, and then the universe confronted her with its silence, with the reality she wants to alter by proving her point. Are you quite sure, it asks, that you are right? Are you quite sure it is not worth while being right about this thing? Then the melodic line gathers itself up and tries again to convert the inert mass of the silence by the intensity of its argument.

In an inn by the river we drank coffee. A gendarme came to see who the strangers might be, a huge old soldier with one eye missing and fierce grey moustaches. ‘Well, how goes it, old moustachioed one?’ asked Constantine, laying his arm about the old man’s shoulders. Something in the turn of his words gave credit to the old man as a soldier and a rebel and a descendant of the Haiduks, and he blushed and laughed with pleasure. The innkeeper’s son, a pleasant boy in his teens, made himself agreeable by showing us the brown trout and the big crayfish wriggling in the floating box of their reserve. On the opposite bank was a prosperous Moslem house, bright as a Christmas present just off the tree, with a garden where the plants grew with a decorative precision we expect only from cut flowers in a florist’s vase. It possessed a pavilion on the water’s edge, and I was reminded, for the second time, of Jane Austen’s Bath. Such little seemly shelters for those who love coolness and shade and the power to look out and not be looked at may be found on the banks of the Avon and on the park walls of great houses, where the traffic goes by. Indeed Bath and the surrounding country, with its towns that may be small but could not be taken for bumpkinish villages, and its enjoyment of private yet not greedy delights, such as walled gardens, is the most Moslem part of England that I know.

A veiled woman had flitted in, her puny shoulders rounded by the weight of something she carried under her overall. There was a murmuring with the innkeeper’s wife in a corner, the veiled woman flitted off again, carrying herself straighter. There had been left for our inspection three boleros which a woman in the village, of a fine family now poverty-stricken, wished to sell. We laid them out on a bench and were abashed to see the value, for the price was a pound. All were of velvet, dark rose, soft scarlet, purple, and they were sewn so thickly with gold braid that the velvet appeared only as a steady factor behind the design which sprung and thrust and never lost its vital purpose in mere incrustation. Into the purple jacket some woman had put great cunning. Purple and gold are heavy matters, so she had placed here and there, by threes and sixes, tiny buttons of lavender and rose, always in a manner that lightened the burden on the eye, sometimes together, sometimes apart. ‘The woman who did this might still be alive in the village,’ I said. ‘I see they are old, but perhaps she sewed the jacket when she was very young.’ But I was wrong, for it was lined with an early nineteenth-century chintz. ‘How maddening that a person like that should have been swept away by time,’ I said; ‘but her work I shall save, I shall take that home and show it to people, and they will all like it, and I will leave it in my will to someone who will like it, and so it will be rescued from the past.’ ‘Of that you cannot be sure,’ said Constantine, ‘the past takes enormous mouthfuls. There may come a day when nobody will think that bolero beautiful, when it will seem simply tedious, or ludicrous, or even evil to those who lift it from the rag-bag.

‘You are thinking that there are standards which do not change. But I will tell you a story of the town we have just left, of Yaitse, which will prove to you that objects which are beautiful and even sacred in the eyes of a whole people may lose their value in quite a few generations. When Bosnia fell to the Turks many of the Franciscan monks stayed where they were, but one house in Yaitse fled to the coast and set sail for Venice. They fled in order to save the dear treasure of their church, which was the body of St Luke. It had been given to them by a daughter of George Brankovitch, the despot of Serbia, who had redeemed it for thirty thousand ducats from the Turks when they had seized it in Epirus. But when the poor Franciscans came to Venice, all was not well for them, and they were attacked as if they were pagans and had brought with them a false god. For there was already another body of St Luke in Italy; some Benedictines at Padua had him already, and had had him for three hundred years, and he was the object of an impassioned cult of the people.

‘The Yaitsean Franciscans had to defend their title at a trial before the Papal Legate at Venice which lasted three months. At the end the Papal Legate said, “It is right what you say, your treasure is the true St Luke.” But always the Franciscans were kept very poor and very unhappy, for the Paduans tried again and again to get the judgment reversed. At that I cannot wonder, for they had a strong point in their favour. Their body was headless, the Yaitsean Luke was whole, he had all; but about 580 the Emperor Tiberius had given St. Gregory the head of St. Luke, which was still in the Vatican, and which was still shown to the people as his true head even after the Papal Legate had pronounced that the whole body from Yaitse was the true St. Luke. No doubt he was in a position where he found it difficult to be logical, for another church in Rome had long been curing the sick by an arm of St. Luke, which was now certainly the third.

‘There is nobody today to whom that story would not seem absurd, except very simple people, too simple people, idiots. Those who believe in the power of relics and who are solemn will beg you not to talk of such things, not to recall how the stupidities of our ancestors made foolish a beautiful thing. But most people, whether they are believing or not, will only laugh. But the people of five hundred years ago did not see anything ridiculous in a dead man with two heads and three arms, all working miracles; and they did not feel suspicious because many monks made much money out of such dead men. They saw something else, which made them add a head and a head and make it one head, and two arms and one arm, and make it two arms, and we do not know what that something was. For me, I hate it when I read history and I see that now there is nothing where once there was something. It shows me that man has been eating food which has done him no good, which has passed out of him undigested.’

ROAD

A man fishing from a boat in the middle of the lake stood up and with wide sleeves waved what looked like a greeting; but he must have been a supernatural being in control of the elements, and very disagreeable in disposition, for at that moment a rage of rains broke on us. We saw nothing of our road till, at Vakuf, Christian women wearing woven aprons of bright winy colours, Moslem men with fezes, Moslem women with black muzzles, stood in mud during a moment’s sunshine, marketing tiny piles of vegetables, lean and hungry livestock. Then it rained again, and we saw as little of the new road we took when we turned aside at Vakuf, save once when we left the car and stood by a thicket of blackthorn that climbed over great tombs resting on stone platforms. They are said to house the Bogomil dead, and they have the massive and severe quality which belongs to all manifestations of their heresy. But the blackthorn, polished silver in a sudden outpouring of sunshine, redeemed them. Then we came on a town that lay on the flat of a plain with the tedium of a military station which strategy has dumped where natural man would never halt. ‘This,’ said Constantine, ‘was an important garrison in Austrian days.’

It was time for the midday meal, and we stopped at the hotel, which was quite big. We went into a dining-room where a surprisingly large number of people, including a good many military officers, were sitting at a small table and eating in a silence broken only by furtive whispers. I thought that they had perhaps come to the town to attend the funeral of some great personage, and after we sat down I asked Constantine if this could be the case, but he answered as softly, ‘No, I think there must be some generals here.’ And it was so. Presently four officers, of whom two were generals, rose from a table and went out; as soon as they had passed through the door conversation soared and filled the upper air, noisy as a flock of London pigeons. Our wine was given us long before our food, and proved to be very palatable, red and sweetish, not like any French wine but quite good. We were wondering where it came from, for its name gave no indication, when we received a visit by the landlady. I found her suddenly, leaning over the back of my chair, an elderly Jewess, with a chestnut wig, rapidly undulant in her cringing. We asked her about the wine, and she answered, ‘It is from Hungary.’ ‘What?’ said Constantine. ‘But it cannot be from Hungary, it is too cheap; it cannot have had any duty paid on it, it must be from Yugoslavia.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘it is from Hungary, it is from the Voivodina.’

Somebody called her away, and she left, with a gait so conditioned by continual cringing that even between tables she bowed from right to left and pressed her clasped hands forward in objectless obeisances. Constantine said, ‘But why does she call the Voivodina Hungary? It has been ours since the war, it is the centre of Banat. She must have some reason to hold to the old Austrian days.’ We then thought for some time of nothing but our food, which was excellent, not in the Balkan but in the Central European way. There was vegetable soup without paprika, lamb stew of a Viennese type, and superb Apfelstrudel. But while we were eating it the Jewess came back and wavered about us, and my husband said to her, ‘What beautiful German cooking you are giving us, and what beautiful German you speak. May I ask where you learned your German?’ ‘It is my native language,’ she said, and explained that she had been born in a certain town on the borders of Austria and Hungary. ‘But I have been here for fifty-two years. Fifty-two years, my dear,’ she repeated coquettishly, and slowly drew her hand down my arm with the rancid tenderness of the procuress. There could be felt the iron hand in the dirty velvet glove. It was sickening to reflect how often in those fifty-two years she must have brought to the exigencies of brothel life all they needed. One could see her wiping up the vomit of drunkenness, striking some soft white body into the required posture and conducting some forcible examination in search of venereal disease, jerking a frightened child by the arm and telling her not to whimper, carrying basins and perhaps performing direct services in the matter of hopeless and murderous abortions. ‘I am glad you drink my poor wine. I am glad you eat my little bit of an Apfelstrudel,’ she carnied, and bowed backwards to the door. ‘Yes,’ said Constantine, ‘you are perfectly right. I expect she came here when she was a little girl of sixteen or so, to be with the officers. I think she must have been very beautiful. And then as she got older she managed a house. So the Austrians spread culture among us barbaric Slavs. So she would hunger always for her dear Austrians, and say that the Voivodina is in Hungary.’

As he spoke the old woman came back, followed by an elderly man, a middle-aged man, and two women in their late thirties or early forties, who sat down at a table near us. We had come late, and by this time the dining-room was nearly empty, so she and her family were having their meal. The elderly man was evidently her brother and the others her children, but they were malevolent parodies of her. In the stock that had produced her vigour some poison had been working which had spared only herself. Her features, which in her heyday must have had a Semiramic richness and decision, were in these others splayed into Oriental rubbish. Heaps of bone, they carried long stooping bodies on uncertain feet that turned out at obtuse angles. It was apparent when the meal was brought to them that the parody had been carried to a cruel height. They could not eat properly. Often the soup missed their mouths and ran down their chins into their plates. As the landlady sat at the head of the table, lifting the good soup she had made to her lips with a steady hand, looking on them with weary and tender eyes, and occasionally indicating some dropped food with a word or a proffered napkin, it appeared that to herself her life might seem like the triumphant bearing of a cross, a moral victory of which she might be proud. It was a point not to be denied too hastily. Nevertheless, she was cruelty; she was filth.

Sarajevo VIII

We were at a party at the Bulbul’s. She had a house on the quay by the river, not far from the corner where Franz Ferdinand was killed, a modern house which owed its handsomeness to the Turkish tradition, for it was full of light and clear of unnecessary furniture, and in the large reception room on the first floor there was a raised dais by the windows, running right across the floor, which is a common and charming feature of Moslem houses. What furniture there was was the best obtainable of its kind, but that kind is not good. There is no fine European furniture in the Balkans except a few baroque pieces in Croatia and Dalmatia. It is a contrast with the North of Europe, where the wealthy Danish and Swedish merchants and Russian landowners spread the knowledge of Chippendale and Sheraton right across the Baltic. The Turkish domination cut the Balkans off from that or any other European artistic tradition; and when the Balkan peoples came in contact with it, it was through the intervention of Central Europe, where there has never been any good furniture except the baroque and the Biedermeier, which were based entirely on fantasy rather than on sound principles of design and thus could found no school of cabinet-making. Taste degenerated more rapidly in Austria during the nineteenth century than in any other country, with the possible exception of Russia, so she imposed on the Balkans a corrupt fashion in these matters. A bookcase and a sideboard made by a man who knows nothing of what the masters of his craft have discovered in the past are apt to be merely large boxes; and if that man believes that quantity can be a substitute for quality, those boxes are apt to be very big and clumsy indeed.

But the little Bulbul had bought the best furniture that this dispensation produces, and her carpets and hangings were all beautiful in the Oriental style; and there was in every clean and sunlit square inch of the house a sense of housewifery that was conscientious yet leisurely, inspired not by irritable dislike of dirt but through sensuous preference for cleanliness. She herself was unhurried, in a crisp dress that made her edible beauty cool without chill, like the flesh of a melon. Her husband was gracious and sculptural, gentle, even soft, and yet immovable, imperishable, as a granite monolith might be that was carved in the likeness of a tender and amiable god. They had other guests, his sister and her son, who was studying science at Zagreb; in each of them giant liquid eyes and a purposeful scimitar slimness transmitted the Sarajevo tradition of prodigious good looks. It is the misfortune of the Jews that there are kinds of Jews who repel by their ugliness, and the repulsion these cause is not counterbalanced by the other kinds who are beautiful, because they are too beautiful, because their glorious beauty disconcerts the mean and puny element in the Gentile nature, at its worst among the English, which cannot stand up to anything abundant or generous, which thinks duck too rich and Chambertin too heavy, and goes to ugly places for its holidays and wears drab clothes. Many Gentiles, very many English, might have come out of this room hating the people inside for no other reason than their physical perfection.

The talk, also, might have been too good for a Western visitor. The artist among these people so far as talking was concerned was Constantine, who could exploit his own brilliance with the ancient cunning of the Oriental story-teller; but everybody in the room knew how to support the star; they not only understood what he was saying, they knew the play, they could give him his cues. Such conversation demanded attention, discrimination, appreciation, all forms of expenditure which we Westerners, being mean, are apt to grudge. But, indeed, the main objection an English person might have felt against this gathering was its accomplishment and its lack of shame at showing it. When we rose from the table we went into the sunlit room with the dais, and drank coffee which had had an egg beaten into it so that its black bitterness should be mitigated more subtly than by milk, and then, as the saying goes, we had a little music. A little music!

The Bulbul took up her gusla and, in a voice exquisitely and deliberately moderate, she sang many Bosnian songs. She did not sing them like the women in Yezero, for she was not Slav and she had not made that acceptance of tragedy that is the basis of Slav life. It was as if she were repeating in a garden what she had heard the wild Slavs wailing outside the walls. Mischievously she sang a love-song with her eyes fixed on my husband’s face, because it is the custom of the country to sing such songs looking steadfastly into the beloved’s face. Everybody laughed because it was understood that an Englishman would find this embarrassing, but he acquitted himself gallantly, and they clapped him on the back and told him they thought him a good fellow. This too recalled Jane Austen’s Bath; such a pleasantry might have enlivened a drawing-room in the Crescent.

Presently the Bulbul put her gusla in her husband’s hands and said, ‘Now you,’ and with adoring eyes she turned to her guests and explained, ‘I sing and sing well, but he not only sings, he has a voice.’ It was true. He had a voice like drowsy thunder, forged by a god only half awake. He sang a Serbian song, longer than most, about the pasha of the town where Constantine was born, Shabats. He was a drunkard and a gambler: the song suggests a mind dazed, as one has seen people in the modern world, at casinos and over card-tables, by a certain amount of alcohol and the ecstatic contemplation of number, divided from any substance. He had played away his fortune; he sat penniless in the shell of his splendour. He suffered like a morphinomaniac deprived of his drug because he could not gamble, so with the leisurely heartlessness of the drunkard he ordered that his mother be taken down to the slave-market and sold as a servant. But his wife, who was young and beautiful and noble, came and, with the even greater leisureliness of the heart-broken, told him that she must be sent to the slave-market and sold instead of his mother; for there is disgrace and there is disgrace, and one must choose the lesser. The song presents ruin in a framework of decorum, it takes up the melancholy of drunkenness and the coldness of long-standing vice and examines them as if they were curiously coloured flowers.

But in a later song he paused, smiled, repeated the last phrase, and sang a phrase from a song by Schumann which was like a translation of the other into its different idiom. The science student ran to the piano, and everybody joined in snatches of Schumann’s songs. They went on well with ‘The Two Grenadiers,’ with Constantine in the middle of the room, acting it as well as singing it, until he spread out his arms and thundered, ‘Mein Kaiser, mein Kaiser gefangen,’ and the foolish little white dog which was the Bulbul’s only apparent weakness woke up in its basket and leapt forward barking, anxious to lend any help that was needed. They laughed; they were not ashamed to laugh, laughter is agreeable, and they had come here to enjoy agreeable things together. Then they began to sing again, but this time in mockery, pursuing German romanticism from lyric to lyric, passing from ‘Myrtillen und Rosen’ to ’Poor Peter.‘ Constantine, very stout and very red with lunch and happiness, and still accompanied by the kindly and questioning dog, enacted poor Peter. (’Der arme Peter wankt vorbei, Gar langsam, leichenblass und scheu.‘)⁹ In spite of all their clowning they were singing their four parts exquisitely, and their parody was a serious criticism of the romantic spirit. But Constantine put up a prohibitory hand and said, ‘Enough. Now let us restore ourselves by contact with the genius of the great Nordic One. Are we not all Aryans?’ And they passed into a compost of scenes from the Ring, which went very well considering that Constantine was singing the character of Carmen. Why Carmen? They knew. It was because Nietzsche in a famous passage expressed a belief that what Wagner needed was an infusion of the spirit of Bizet. Therefore in this performance of the Ring Siegfried and Brünhilde were sustained through their troubles by the companionship of the gipsy, and ‘Yo-ho-eo’ mingled with the ’Habanera.‘ Such musical virtuosity and such rich literary allusiveness is, in my experience, rarely the sequel of English lunch-parties.

There came into the room as we applauded, quiet-footed and with his perpetual air of gentle cheerfulness about all particular issues and melancholy about our general state, our friend the banker, whom we had not seen for some days. The Bulbul detached herself from the singers for a moment and came to have her hand kissed, and stood by us for a little till they haled her back, and she left us with the prettiest smile of real regret thrown over her shoulder, though she was glad to sing again. I think her idea of perfect happiness would have been to find herself simultaneously feeding every mouth in the universe with sugar plums. The banker watched his friends with a smile for a moment or two, and then asked us how we had enjoyed our trip through Bosnia. I said, ‘It was beautiful beyond anything. Travnik was lovely and Yaitse better still. But best of all I liked the sister of Chabrinovitch.’ ‘You are like the dwarf in the fairy-tale who declared, “Dearer to me than any treasure is something human,”’ he said. ‘I am sure you are right, you will not see better than her in any journey. She is truly noble.’ I spoke also of Yezero and the jackets, of Vakuf and the women with the wine-coloured aprons, and lastly of the terrible old woman at the inn where we had eaten. ‘You are quite right,’ he said, ‘she would be what you suppose. Indeed, I think I have heard of this woman. I will speak to you now of things that you will not read about in any of the books that were written by English travellers who visited Bosnia while the Austrians were here.’ ‘Which, if I may say so, were not very intelligent,’ I agreed. I had that morning been reading one which I thought imbecile. The author had circulated in fatuous ecstasy among the Austrian and Hungarian officials, congratulating them on having introduced the mulberry tree, which had been a most prominent feature of the Bosnian landscape under the Turk, and congratulating the Governor’s wife, ‘called, not unjustly, the “Queen of Bosnia,”’ on teaching handicrafts to such women as had made the purple bolero at Yezero. ‘You see, we were not an easy people to govern any time in the occupation before or after the annexation. The soldiers were all paid as if they were on active service, and the functionaries also were given specially high salaries. This meant that a great many camp-followers came down to our country to batten on these men who had plenty of money and no natural ways of spending it. It had something of the atmosphere of the Klondike rush. And there were many, many prostitutes among these, and of these many were Hungarians, not that they are a people lacking in virtue, but that the land system left many of the peasants so poor that they had to send their daughters out to service in the world or see them starve. So it happens that for us Hungarian is the language of gallantry, even as French is in London.’

He paused. The singers had stopped their opera, and were singing old favourites. ‘Let us sing “Wow—wow—wow—,’” said Constantine, and nobody could for a moment fail to realize that he meant ‘Ay, ay, ay.’ ‘The fault,’ continued the banker, ‘is not with these women, who are often exceedingly kind and good, and achieve every kind of moral victory that they are permitted, but with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which, although pretentiously Roman Catholic, violated all Catholic counsels of chastity by itself organizing a system of brothels in our country, which could not be excused on the grounds of the necessities of the troops. Certainly the brothels they opened in Sarajevo were far in excess of the requirements of the garrison and the functionaries. There were five very large expensive ones, which were known as The Red Star, The Blue Star, The Green Star, and so on, and two for the common soldiers, The Five Matches and The Last Groschen. It was a wicked thing to do to our town, for before that we had not such things. We Jews have our traditional morality, which was then undisturbed. The Serbs and Croats are a chaste, patriarchal people; where a man will kill any other man who has taken the virtue of his wife or daughter there must be a harsh kind of purity. All cases where our codes broke down were met by the gipsies, whose part it is alone among the nations of the world to exorcise dishonour. But we had never known prostitution, and there is something extremely exciting to a young man in the knowledge that he can acquire the enjoyment of a beautiful girl by payment of a small sum. To many of us, also, the furniture of the brothels was a revelation of Western luxury. Those who did not belong to families who had been wealthy for a long time had never seen big mirrors before, or gold chairs covered with red velvet, and they were profoundly impressed. I am afraid that his Catholic Majesty the Emperor Franz Josef did not sin only against purity when he organized these brothels; he committed also the sin of conspiring for the souls of others. For I am sure the intention was to corrupt all the young men of Sarajevo so that our nationalist spirit should be killed and Bosnia should be easy to govern. But this would not be only a political move; the thought of the corruption would in itself be delicious, for the Austrian hates the Slav, every German hates the Slav, with an appetite that simple death, simple oppression cannot satisfy.’

He added, ‘But I wonder if you can understand how mighty hatred can be. I think you English do not, for you have long been so fortunate that nobody else’s hatred could touch you, and you had yourselves no reason to hate anybody. Let me point out to you that in your journey to Travnik and Yaitse there was one thing you did not see. You saw nothing of the kingdom of Bosnia. You saw a few fortresses, and perhaps a church or two, and probably the funeral vaults of the Vakchitch family. There is nothing else to see. Yet once the Doge of Venice wrote to the Pope, “Under our eyes the richest kingdom of the world is burning!” and he meant Bosnia. Conquest can swallow all. The Turks consumed Bosnia. The Austrians did what they could to consume that little which remained, but they then had weak mouths. But sometimes I fear lest some of their blood have grown strong jaws like the Turks.’