by Rebecca West
After a pause Gerda asked, ‘Were there mostly Germans here or mostly Bulgarians?’ He answered, ‘Mostly Bulgarians.’ ‘Ah, now I understand!’ she explained exultantly. ‘That explains it all. It was treachery. The Bulgarians betrayed the Germans to you Serbs.’ ‘I think it was not so,’ said Constantine wearily, ‘the Bulgarians hated us then and for long after.’ ‘Nonsense!’ said Gerda. ‘You were all Slavs, you would combine against our German blood. It was treachery. The Bulgarians betrayed the Germans to you. Of course people could not climb up a mountain if other people were shooting down on them, and the answer simply is that they did not shoot. But in any case, how did the Serbs come to be here? I thought they had been driven out through Albania to the sea. How did they manage to get back here again?’ ‘They came through Greece,’ Constantine replied. ‘Oh, through Greece, did they!’ creid Gerda. ‘And yet you dare complain of the Germans for going through Belgium into France!’ ‘But Belgium was neutral and Greece was our ally!’ squealed Constantine. ‘I suppose to you and the English that makes a great difference,’ said Gerda ironically.
But now the high mountains took us into their peace. We left the automobile on the bare highlands just below the snow, where there was a village of chalets, sightless with their shuttered windows. The nomads who come here in the summer and make cheese had not yet dared come up, so late was the spring. We trod on turf drab with the long hardship of ill weather, but starred with the hard blue light of glory-of-the-snow and the effete mauve flame of the mountain crocus, and looked up at the long ridge of snow, five miles long, that is furrowed by a pilgrim’s way to the church on the high peak. There could be no question of going there without proper climbing boots, but we followed the track as far as we could go, the crystal air making us all happy. Gerda became contented, and was pleasant to Constantine. We glacised down a slope and found a boulder surrounded by a sudden affluence of pansies growing sheer from the surrounding snow, and sat on it, staring down at the battlefield that tilted forward to the plains, seamed with deep valleys sunk in firwoods. The joy of the mountains is real, because it is of the blood and the muscles, where life has its ultimate stand, and yet it is false. Everything that I saw or heard as I sat on the boulder pleased me, yet the battlefield below me proved that I had been born into an age too uncertain about fundamental ideas for continued existence to be easy.
Yes, the proof was there. Surely there are certain things about a battlefield which can be taken for granted by everybody; the first being that if men fought well there for a worthy object they proved themselves valuable human beings. How can it not be so? There are objects which are worth fighting for: the fate of the Slavs under the Turks proved it once and for all. That non-resistance paralyses the aggressor is a lie: otherwise the Jews of Germany would all be very well today. A race that has not good soldiers must be enslaved by any neighbouring race that has them: a race that has not the soldierly characteristics of courage and discipline cannot in later ages refuse to fight unnecessary wars and insist on proceeding with the work of civilization. If ever peace is to be imposed on the world it will only be because a large number of men who could have taken part in the drill display by the Guards or Marines or at the Royal Tournament turn that strength and precision to the service of life.
This I believe to be true, in spite of the obvious defects of many professional soldiers, which afflict them surely not because they are soldiers, but because they are professional. It is doubtful whether army officers of high rank are more limited or unsound in their general ideas than lawyers or doctors of an equivalent degree of specialization. It is in any case unlikely that a soldier would hold as silly ideas about any sphere of civilian activity as vast numbers of civilians would hold about this battlefield. To countless thousands, even millions of people in England and America, the slopes of Kaimakshalan would have no meaning whatsoever except as a place where a lot of people had perished ingloriously, as they might have in a railway accident, because they were stupid enough to get mixed up in a fight. Many Americans, owing to their inexperience of aggression, sincerely believe that all wars are planned by armament manufacturers and that no people ever suffers any real maltreatment at the hands of another. They would not credit the simple fact that the Germans and Austrians and Bulgarians had invaded Serbia with the intention of murdering the inhabitants and seizing their property. Not having been educated to accept the possibility of such an act by the contemplation of a large area where the Turks had certainly done this very thing to the Balkans, and had gone on doing it for five centuries, they feel that this must be a fable spread by Vickers or Skoda. There has also been in America a wave of cynicism, entirely mindless, destitute of all content, save ‘Oh, yeah’ and ’So what,‘ which, by a strange twist, results in a bland acceptance of the whole universe that has never been surpassed by Christian Scientists. An automatic scepticism regarding stories of atrocities leads to a rosy belief that every member of an invading army behaves with the courtesy of a cinema theatre usher. The Serbs must have been mistaken in believing that the Germans and the Austrians passed through village after village, wrecking houses, smashing the furniture, emptying corn and pouring wine and oil into the mud, and trampling on the icons. Any peasant in the invaded countries over thirty can tell you that it was so, but innumerable Americans, over and under thirty, can tell you that it was not so. This battlefield was therefore to them an area of pure nonsense, discreditable to the human race.
And so it is to some extent to many English intellectuals. If the Serbs had done something ... something... something, they need not have fought. So one feels, when one is young, on hearing that a friend has to have a dangerous operation for cancer. Surely if she had not eaten meat, if she had not eaten salt, she need not have had cancer; and by inference one need not have cancer oneself. Yet cancer exists, and has a thousand ways of establishing itself in the body; and there is no end to the ways one country may make life intolerable for another. But let us not think of it any more, let us pretend that operations are unnecessary, let every battlefield seem a place of prodigious idiocy. Of this battlefield, indeed, we need never think, for it is so far away. What is Kaimakshalan? A mountain in Macedonia, but where is Macedonia since the Peace Treaty? This part of it is called South Serbia. And where is that, in Czechoslovakia, or in Bulgaria? And what has happened there? The answer is too long, as long indeed, as this book, which hardly anybody will read by reason of its length. Here is the calamity of our modern life, we cannot know all the things which it is necessary for our survival that we should know. This battlefield is deprived of its essence in the minds of men, because of their fears and ignorances; it cannot even establish itself as a fact, because it is crowded out by a plethora of facts.
Dragutin followed us up the track, making as he went little posies for Gerda and myself. ‘I feel a fool in this holy place,’ he said, ‘because I was too young to be in the war.’ ‘Yes, indeed, the place is holy,’ said Constantine. ‘If we could only bring a thousand Croats up here and show them how liberty is won.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ said Dragutin, bursting into laughter, ‘show them how liberty is won, and then hang the lot of them.’ He meant the Croats no actual harm; nothing would have been further from his mind than that he would offer any physical violence to a Croat, but such was his lively and telling way of referring to the political differences that rive Yugoslavia. ‘But you can’t sit up here all day,’ he said, ‘holy place or not, I have driven you enough to know that that won’t do for you instead of your dinner.’
We ate at a tourist hut ten miles or so down the mountainside, very Swiss among the pinewoods, save for the soldiers’ graves in a clearing across the road. Two young soldiers who were in charge of the hut came out and set up a trestle table for us, and I laid out the food. Gerda did not help, and I thought this was because she was happy sitting in the sunshine that came through the cold air all light and no heat, a bodiless excitement. But she was still in the grip of her obscure misery, and when we gave her the tongue sh
e asked grimly, ‘What is this?’ Weakly I explained, ‘We thought you might like this, as you said you cannot eat sucking-pig and paprikasch.’ To this she answered, ‘It is not that I cannot eat sucking-pig and paprikasch, but I do not see why I should eat them all the time.’ She then drew the tongue towards her and cut herself a helping without reluctance. Because my husband held the plate steady for her, her face crumpled up with racial hatred too irrational to find words.
On the step of the automobile Dragutin sat and ate his lunch between the two young soldiers, who had the dutiful and dedicated look I have noticed so often in Yugoslav conscripts. His lunch was, as always, ascetic and chosen in accordance with the principles of sympathetic magic: he liked lean meat and rough black bread and paprika, and he regarded as weakening all soft and slippery things like butter and kaymak and sardines. ‘Hey, did you ever hear the like of this!’ he called to us. ‘These two say that they know it is a great honour to be the guardians of Kaymakchalan, and they are content in the daytime, but it’s terrible in the night, because they hear the dead soldiers calling for their mothers.’ ‘What do they say?’ asked Constantine. ‘They say, “Yao matke! Yao matke!”’ one young soldier told us. The words mean Alas, mother! ‘And of course the others, the Germans and the Bulgarians, say it in their own languages,’ added the other. They both shuddered and went on eating with the solemnity of young calves at a haybox.
I had always wondered whether people who have a primitive attitude towards fighting, who regard it as a necessary and noble activity, were perhaps spared the full realization of the piteousness of death in battle. Now I knew, and life was by so much the more disagreeable; and I had a further testimony to the fatuousness of such pacifism as points out the unpleasantness of war as if people had never noticed it before. I regretted the amateurishness of much in modern thought, but realized that this was only proof of the recalcitrance of the material on which thought must work. On my journey home I felt unequal to sharing the vision of Dragutin which constantly pierced to the primordial disharmony of life which I would have liked to forget. Driving down through the colourless yet radiant hills he came to a stop that we might see in the sky above us an angry monogram which was an eagle fighting with a stork. Later we got out and drank from a spring that leaped out of a rock to join the Black Drin, and Dragutin shot out a finger at an emerald lizard a foot long that leaped through the grass between my feet. ‘It is poisonous,’ said Dragutin. ‘It is not,’ said Constantine, but I knew he was only being patriotic. Back in my seat, I fled from this dangerous universe into sleep.
I woke and found that the automobile had broken down beside a fountain, and that Dragutin was tinkering with the engine under the appreciative eyes of three superb women in magnificently embroidered robes, each of whom was carrying a blue-enamelled tin jug with queenly grace. The lot of all the beautiful women who go down to the waters in romantic lands has been irradiated as by sunshine at the passing of the amphora and the coming of enamelware. Dimly I heard Dragutin tell them that the car had broken down because we had passed a priest riding on a donkey, and the queens splutter into laughter. I slept again, and when I woke we were near the outskirts of Bitolj, and I looked across a patch of grass to a little house that stood in a vineyard, with a porch of vine-clad poles, and a flimsy iron balcony under its upper windows. ‘Stop the car!’ I said. ‘Stop the car!’
I had reason; for on the balcony stood a man dressed in shining grey garments who was announcing his intention to address the plains by a gesture of supreme authority. The proud stance of his body showed that he had dug the truth out of the earth where it lay under the roots of the rock. The force of his right arm showed that he had drawn fire from heaven, so that he might weld this truth into our life, which thus shall not perish with our bodies. The long shadows lay bound to the plains, the mountains’ bleakness was explored by the harsh horizontal beams of the falling sun; they, and the men and beasts who laboured on them to no clear purpose, would know their deliverance so soon as they had heard him. Near by there squatted on the grass beside the roadside two wretched veiled women, faceless bundles of dust-coloured rags, probably Moslem divorced wives of the sort, more pitiable than the beggars of the towns, who hang about the fields and stretch out their hands to the peasants. It seemed as if they must spring up and throw aside their veils never to beg again as soon as he had spoken.
But he would never speak. He was a scarecrow dressed in rags which had been plastered in mud to give them solidity against the winter, and he had been stored on the balcony till it was time to put him out among the fruiting vines. His authority was an exhalation from a bundle of straw, as the murmured promise of salvation from the Roumanian gipsy in the central square of Belgrade had been an exhalation from the action of alcohol on her tissues. The soul can be uplifted, it can be seduced into seeing an end to its misery and believing that all has been planned for its good from the beginning, by a chance concatenation of matter that in fact means nothing and explains nothing, that is simply itself. So potent was the argument of the scarecrow to the eye that it made for incredulity regarding all other exaltations. It might be that the Mozart symphony which had issued what I had taken to be a proof of beauty from the restaurant radio on the Frushka Gora was not in a different category from the scarecrow’s gesture and the gipsy’s promise, but only at the other end of the scale, and that it proved nothing save that flesh has a wider range than straw, and that there is a subtler drunkenness than comes of wine.
Bitolj II
The scarecrow was a true citizen of Bitolj, for the town constantly presents pictures so strange that the mind can take them only as symbols, though they never disclose their significance. As the dusk fell we went out for a stroll under the acacia trees by the river, and looked into the shops, which were little bright caves in the darkness. At the great mosque, whose swelling cupola and towering minaret and lovely plaster decoration speak of delicacy and power, of a clean hand holding a sword, we stared through a wrought iron gate and saw a procession of grave and beautiful elderly men passing under the acacias to the porch, their fezes shining as crowns of mystery because the evening glow caught the white bands which betokened them to be Moslem priests. We were halted by the second and really affecting German war memorial: a carillon in an old tower which twice a day rings out ‘Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden, einen bessern findst du nicht,’ evoking pictures of golden-haired boys dying thirsty and fevered in this land which is cruel even for the hardy brown amongst us. We hung behind a Jew of the tall hawk-like kind and his wife who wore a close cap rimmed with gold sequins and a purple gown of seventeenth-century Spanish fashion; and we saw them go softly, murmuring Spanish, into a home refined almost to decadence in its contempt for the exuberant and its concentration on propriety. We left this peepshow only because we had risen early and were to rise early again, and on the way home a final emblem and mystery was disclosed to us and not explained. The sound of passionate speech made us look through a doorway, and there in a warehouse, with sacks of grain lying on the floor and ropes hanging down in loops from the rafters, under an oil-lamp stuck in the wall, a man leaned on a broken column of classical appearance, entirely inappropriate to the place, and addressed three men as if he were preaching them a gospel. They looked at him with grave and pursuivant anxiety, for each word he spoke was taking him farther away from them. One man began to stir uneasily, and it could not be told whether he was going to surrender to the speaker and throw himself at his feet, or rebel against him and strike him. But as we watched our attention was distracted by the rhythm of a sleeper’s breathing, close at hand. We looked about and found that a man in peasant dress with a mountaineer’s round fur cap was standing just beside us, leaning against the hinged frame of the door, fast asleep. He was a giant, perhaps seven feet tall.
The day gave us other mysteries, though of a more prosaic sort. As we had motored into the town from Resan I had seen a tumbledown mosque with some very elaborate tombs in white marble carved in the Mosle
m Regency style which I find so enchanting and so surprising; and we went there in the early morning to take some photographs. For half an hour or so we scrambled over the rough ground and through the long grasses, among tombs which, if they were mere columns, were leaning drunkenly to right or left, and if they were solid erections were burst asunder by bushes which, like the poppies and cornflowers beside them, derived rich colour and profligate growth from the uncoffined dead. The monuments were well worth a film or two. They had apparently been produced by a pastrycook under the influence of Persian art. Such sugary little scrolls and swags, such sissy little flowers in pots, such coy little etchings of swords on the soldiers’ tombs, so much valid accomplishment lavished on invalid objects. There is here a double paradox. This is so odd a form of art to have sprung up among a military people, and so odd a form of art to be treated with such wild negligence. When an elderly lady makes an exquisitely hem-stitched handkerchief or a beautifully embroidered baby’s gown it is not suffered by her or those to whom she gives them that they should go into the rag-bag; and even less is this the case when it is not a female but an ephebe who is responsible for the craftsmanship. Yet it seems to be no protection whatsoever to an object in Moslem possession that it precisely accords with Moslem taste.
But this was not the only paradox to be detected at this mosque. Two veiled women came out of the mosque to see what we were doing, bundles of dusty blackness, who were caretakers, with the difference that it was evidently not expected that they were to take any care of the place. They took us in to see it, and it was inside as it was outside. I think that nowhere in England or America would there be a plot of ground so disordered as this graveyard, unless it were the garden of a home inhabited by a lunatic; and the mosque itself was used as a store by the peasants who farmed the neighbouring land. They had piled hurdles and coops and hoes between several wooden tombs which must have belonged to men of great eminence, for they were painted green, which is the Prophet’s colour, and were surmounted by little globes on which there hung rotting kerchiefs which had originally been laid there by pious hands. The plaster had fallen from the walls in thick scabs, but had left two frescoes intact, one a landscape of ochre palaces among blue trees, another a whimsey of bluish curtains caught back with rose-coloured bows that might have been the work of any Madison Avenue decorator. As we looked at them the plank cracked under my feet, and there was a sickening turmoil below. From a hole in the floor on the other side of the room a rat scurried to the open, holding a nameless white object in its mouth.