“On arrive novice à toutes les guerres,” wrote the French philosopher; or if he did not, he said something like it. I have never known a place where being on the spot made so sharp a difference in one’s point of view as the Near East, and where one’s ignorance, and the ignorance of the great mass of one’s fellow-countrymen, was so keenly brought home to one. The change in the point of view happened with surprising abruptness the moment one crossed the Austrian frontier. There are other changes of a physical nature which happen as well when one crosses the frontier into any kingdom where war is taking place. The whole of the superficial luxuries of civilisation seem to disappear in a twinkling; and so adaptable a creature is man that you feel no surprise; you just accept everything as if things had always been so. The trains crawl; they stop at every station; you no longer complain of the inadequacy of the luxuries of your sleeping-car; you are thankful to have a seat at all. It is no longer a question of criticising the quality of the dinner or the swiftness of the service. It is a question whether you will get a piece of bread or a glass of water during the next twenty-four hours.

Belgrade Station was full of reservists and peasants: men in uniform, men half in uniform, men in the clothes of the mountains—sheepskin coats, putties, and shoes made of twisted straw; dark, swarthy, sunburnt and wind-tanned, hard men, carrying rifles and a quantity of bundles and filling the cattle vans to overflowing. At every station we passed trains, most of them empty, which were coming back to fetch supplies of meat. Every platform and every station were crowded with men in uniforms of every description. A Servian officer got into the carriage in which I was travelling. He was dressed in[407] khaki. He wore a white chrysanthemum in his cap, a bunch of Michaelmas daisies in his belt, and he carried, besides his rifle and a khaki bag which had been taken from the Turks, a small umbrella. He had been wounded in the foot at Kumanovo. He was on his way to Uskub. He was a man of commerce, and had closed his establishment to go to the war; the majority of the officers in his regiment were men of commerce, he said. They had sacrificed everything to go to the war, and that was one reason why they were not going to allow the gains of the war, which they declared were a matter of life and death to their country, to be snatched from them by diplomatists at a green table. “If they want to take from us what we have won by the sword,” he said, “let them take it by the sword.”

I asked him about the fighting at Kumanovo. He said the Turks had fought like heroes, but that they were miserably led. He then began to describe the horrors of the war in the Servian language. As I understood about one word in fifty, I lost the thread of the discourse, and so I lured him back into a more neutral language. He told me that someone had asked a Turkish prisoner how it came about that the Turks, whom all the world knew to be such brave soldiers, were nevertheless always beaten. The Turk, after the habit of his race, answered by an apologue as follows: “A certain man,” he said, “once possessed a number of camels and an ass. He was a hard taskmaster to the camels, and he worked them to the uttermost; and after trading for many years in different lands, he became exceedingly rich. At last one day he himself fell sick; and feeling that his end was drawing nigh, he wished to relieve himself of the burden on his soul, so he bade the camels draw near to him, and he addressed them thus: ‘I am dying, camels, dying, only I have most uncivilly kept death waiting, until I have unburdened my soul to you. Camels, I have done you a grievous wrong. When you were hungry, I stinted you of food, when you were thirsty, I denied you drink, and when you were weary, I urged you on and denied you rest; and ever and always I denied you the full share of your fair and just wage. Now I am dying, and all this lies heavily on my soul, I crave your forgiveness, so that I may die in peace. Can you forgive me, camels, for all the wrong I have done you?’ The camels withdrew to talk it over. After[408] a while the Head Camel returned and spoke to the merchant thus: ‘That you ever overworked us, we forgive you; that you underfed us, we forgive you; that you never remembered to pay us our full wage, we forgive you; but that you always let the ass go first, Allah may forgive you, but we never can!’”

It took over twelve hours to get from Belgrade to the junction of Nish, where there was a prospect of food. When we stopped at one station in the twilight there was a great noise of cheering from another train, and a dense crowd of soldiers and women throwing flowers. Then in the midst of the clamour and the murmur somebody played a tune on a pipe. A little Slav tune written in a scale which has a technical name—let us say the Phrygian mode—a plaintive, piping tune, as melancholy as the cry of a seabird. The very voice of exile. I recognised the tune at once. It is in the first ten pages of Balakirev’s collection of Russian folk-songs under the name “Rekrutskaya”—that is to say, recruits’ song. Plaintive, melancholy, quaint, and piping, it has no heartache in it; it is the luxury of grief, the expression of idle tears, the conventional sorrow of the recruit who is leaving his home.
“You are going far away, far away from poor Jeannette,
And there’s no one left to love me now, and you will soon forget.”

So, in the song of our grandfathers which I have quoted earlier in the book, the maiden sang to the conscript, adding that were she King of France, “or, still better, Pope of Rome,” she would abolish war, and consequently the parting of lovers. But the song of the Slav recruit in its piping notes seems to say: “I am going far away, but I am not really sorry to go. They will be glad to get rid of me at home, and I, in the barracks, shall have meat to eat twice a day, and jolly comrades, and I shall see the big town and find a new love as good as my true love. They will mend my broken heart there; but in the meantime let me make the most of the situation. Let me collect money and get drunk, and let me sing my sad songs, songs of parting and exile, and let me enjoy the melancholy situation to the full.”

That is what the wistful, piping song, played on a wooden flageolet of some kind, seemed to say. It just pierced through the noise and then stopped; a touching interlude, like the[409] shepherd’s piping amidst the weariness, the fever and the fret, the delirious remembrance and the agonised expectation, of the last act of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolda. The train moved on into the gathering darkness.

We arrived at Nish at eight o’clock in the evening. It was dark; the station was sparsely lighted; the buffet, to which we had been looking forward all day, was as crowded as a sardine-box and apparently devoid of anything suggesting food. Wounded soldiers, reservists, officers filled the waiting-room and the platform. The Servian officer dived into the crowd and returned presently, bringing his sheaves with him in the shape of three plates of hot chicken.

Nish seemed an unfit-like meeting-place for triumphant soldiers; it resembled rather the scene of a conspiracy in a melodrama, where tired conspirators were plotting nothing at all. One felt cut off from all news. In London, one knew, in every sitting-room people were marking off the movements of the battles with paper flags on inaccurate maps. Here at Nish, in the middle of a crowd of men who either had fought or were going to fight, one knew less about the war than in Fleet Street. One bought a newspaper, but it dealt with everything except war news.

A man came into the refreshment-room—the name was in this case ironical—and said, “I have had nothing to eat, not a piece of bread and not a drop of water, for twenty-four hours,” and then, before anybody could suggest a remedy—for food there was none—he went away. Afterwards I saw him with a chicken in his hand. One man was carrying a small live pig, which squealed. In the corner of the platform two men, with crutches and bandages, dressed in the clothes of the country, were sitting down, looking as if they were tired of life. I offered them a piece of cold sausage, which they were too tired to accept; only at the sight of a cigarette one of them made a gesture, and, being given one, smoked and smoked and smoked. I knew the feeling. Suddenly, in the darkness, a sleeping-car appeared, to the intense surprise of everyone—an International sleeping-car, with sheets, and plenty of room in it. My travelling companion and myself started for Sofia, where we arrived the next morning.

At Sofia the scene on the platform was different. The place was full of bustle; the platform crowded with Red Cross[410] men, nurses, and soldiers, in tidy, practical uniforms. The refreshment-room, too, was crowded with doctors. You heard fragments of many languages: the scene might have been Mukden, 1904, or, indeed, any railway station in any war anywhere. An exceedingly capable porter got me my luggage with dispatch, and I drove to the hotel in a “phaeton,” but not with the coursers of the sun. The horses here had all gone to the war. At the hotel I was first given—the only room said to be vacant—a room which was an annex to the café. For furniture it had six old card-tables and nothing else.

Full of Manchurian memories, I was about to think this luxurious, when the offending Adam in me quite suddenly revolted, and I demanded and obtained instead a luxurious upper chamber. I stayed about a week at Sofia, and made unavailing efforts to get to the front. I was then told I would find it easier to get to the front where the Servian Army was fighting. So, laden with papers and passports, I started for Uskub.

I travelled from Sofia to Nish in the still existing comfortable sleeping-cars; but when I arrived once more at the junction of Nish I learnt a lesson which I thought I had mastered many years ago, and that is, take in a war as much luggage as you possibly can to your civilised base, but once you start for the front or anywhere near it, take nothing at all except a tea-basket and a small bottle of brandy. I had only a small trunk with me, but the stationmaster refused to let it proceed. War goes to the heads of stationmasters like wine. This particular stationmaster had no right whatsoever to stop my small trunk on the grounds that it was full of contraband goods, and he could perfectly well have had it examined then and there; instead of which he said it would have to be taken to the Custom House Office in the town, which would involve a journey of two hours and the missing of my train. I was obliged to leave my trunk at the station, nor cast one longing, lingering look behind. The only reason I mention this episode, which has no sort of interest in itself, is to illustrate something which I will come to later. At Nish I got into a slow train. The railway carriage was full of people. There was in it a Servian poet, who had temporarily exchanged the lyre for the lancet, and enrolled himself in the Medical Service. His name was Dr. Milan Cur?in—pronounced Churchin. He showed me the utmost kindness.[411] Like all modern poets, he was intensely practical, and an admirable man of business, and he promised to get me back my trunk and either to bring it to Uskub himself, as he was continually travelling backwards and forwards between Uskub and Nish, or to have it sent wherever I wished. He spoke several languages, and we discussed the war. He said the Servians resented the abuse which had been levelled against them by Pierre Loti. Pierre Loti, he said, accused them of being barbarians and of attacking Turkey without reason.

“We,” said the poet, “hate war as much as anyone. What does Pierre Loti know of our history? What does he know of Turkish rule in Servia? He knows Stamboul; ‘but what does he know of Turkey who only Stamboul knows?’ Besides, if Pierre Loti’s knowledge of Turkey was anything like his knowledge of Japan, as reflected in that pretty book called Madame Chrysanthème—a book which made all serious scholars of Japan rabid with rage—it is not worth much.” He had no wish to deny the Turks their qualities. That was not the point. The point was Turkish rule in Servia in the past, and that was unspeakable. The poet was obliged to get out at the first station we stopped at, and after his departure I moved into another compartment, in which there were a wounded soldier, a young Russian volunteer, who was studying at the Military Academy at Moscow, two men of business who were now soldiers, and a gendarme who had been standing up all night, and who stood up all day. I offered these people some tea, having a tea-basket with me. They accepted it gratefully, and after a little time one of them asked me if I were an Austrian. I said no; I was an Englishman. They said: “We thought it extremely odd that an Austrian should offer us tea.” The wounded soldier, thinking I was a doctor, asked me if I could do anything to his wound. A............