Edith Durham - excerpt from http://www.peacelink.nu/Boker/Durham/

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THE BURDEN OF THE BALKANS BY M. EDITH DURHAM PART II - IN THE DEBATEABLE
LANDS

'Upon the Breaking and Shivering of a great State and Empire, you may be
sure to have Warres. For great Empires, while they stand, doe enervate
and destroy the Forces of the Natives which they have subdued . . . and
when they faile also, all goes to Ruine and they become a Prey.'—BACON.

CHAPTER V - EASTWARD HO!

FROM Vienna to Semlin I suffocated in a cruelly overheated carriage. My
companions, all young Magyars, played cards and quarrelled at the top of
their voices, and the corridor was crammed with sheepskin-clad peasants
who had overflowed from the already packed third-class. They were said
to be refugees from Turkish territories who had fled from the wrath to
come, and were to be dumped in the Slav-speaking districts.

One of the Magyars spoke to me in his native tongue, and was surprised
that I did not know it. Another tried German upon me, and translated for
the benefit of the company. 'The Freulein,' he asked, 'is learning
English ?' I had an English book in my hand. 'I can read it very
easily,' said I. They were astonished, for they had been told it was a
very difficult language, and were still more so when I explained my
nationality, which none of them had suspected. This has happened to me
often before, but never without giving me a curious sense of having lost
my identity, and I am always taken for something Slavonic. Now I was
supposed to be a Croat: 'Naturally, for you look quite Croatian.' The
Croat hates the Magyar, and the Magyar despises the Croat, so this
statement amused me vastly.

They left shortly afterwards. The train rushed on through the dark.
There was a blast of cold air from the corridor, a loud yell and a
scramble. One of the peasants, unused to railway travelling, tried to
get out of the train, and was collared only just in time by a gentleman
in the next compartment.

Passports were inspected on the Hungarian frontier, and restored on
leaving Semlin. I was already in the lands where everyone is 'suspect.'
The train thundered over the iron bridge that joins the banks of the
Save, and drew up in Belgrade. The soft Servian accent rang familiarly
in my ears, West Europe faded away like a dream, and I plunged into the
Near East and the whirlpool of international politics.

It was the night of December 23, 1903. A great black funeral car was
drawn up in the lamplit station; black-robed ecclesiasts moved on the
platforms; a mourning crowd hung about and candles twinkled. Firmilian,
Bishop of Skoplje (Uskub) was dead, and his mortal remains were to be
borne back for burial to the seat of that bishopric which Servia had
regained after long years of struggle. Now, after less than two years'
triumph, he was dead, and Servia lamented— not because he was beloved as
an individual, but because he had represented a national principle and a
political victory. So, as we whirled across Servia in his funeral train,
my comrades spoke much of the dead, and used him as a text on which to
preach Great Servia. They were all Serbs, young and aflame with patriotism.

I found that my acquaintance with the clan Vassoievich was a passport,
and the name of its leader one to conjure with. Talk all ran on
unredeemed Servia and King Peter, who is to realize the national ideal.
'Now we have a King who is as good as yours,' they said, 'and Servia
will have her own again.' And on the whole long track folk turned out in
crowds with priests, candles, and banners, and wailed funeral chants.

This began at Nish, in the black before the dawn with never a star
overhead. It went on all day at station after station; wenever forgot
that Firmilian was dead, and that Old Servia had yet to be redeemed.
This was rubbed into us hard on the frontier—at the best of times there
is something uncanny about the Turkish frontiernow—where we stayed for
an hour and three quarters, and were searched for dynamite. There was no
time even to offer backshish; the whole of everybody's possessions were
tipped out on to the dirty ground, and we waded knee-deep in one
another's worldly goods, in which the officials sought for contraband
with the minute industry of monkeys after fleas. Then followed
pocket-searching, punching, poking, pommelling, astrict personal
examination from which I alone was exempt, and our passports were taken.

We started again, more than an hour late, in the land of the Turk—a land
that was all agrin like a dog before a fight. Pickets of lean, ragged
Nizams guarded all the line, and were thick by the bridges; officers and
men bristled in the stations and crowded the train.

My companions lauded the skill which had twice enabled Boris Sarafov to
run the gauntlet of military, passport offlcials, and gendarmes, and
escape under the enemy's eyes; and this is noteworthy, for it was the
only word I ever heard in favour of Boris in the land where I had
expected to find him a hero.

And from every soldier-guarded station rose the harsh, penetrating
Servian wail; a black-robed crowd lamented Firmilian, and burned candles
for his soul's salvation among the enemy's guns. With the highlystrung
and imaginative Serbs, patriotism is almost a nervous disease, and the
air was full of ' electricity.'

A gunshot rang out suddenly from beyond the railway bank, there was a
rush of officers down the corridor, who tumbled over our legs in their
hurry to get to a window. Everyone started visibly, and said, 'It has
begun!' But it had not.

We reached Skoplje hours late, and as the authorities dared not run
trains after dark, had to stay the night there. The funeral procession
formed up, and, with a brave show of banners and candles and golden
consular kavasses, the Serbs of Skoplje received their dead Bishop with
the bitter knowledge that unless Russia supported their claim this
hard-won outpost might be lost to them. And they buried Firmilian on
Christmas Day in the morning.

The hotel was filled to overflowing, but I found quarters with a
friendly Austrian railway-man, and my kindly host and hostess were
grieved for mealone in a strange land on Christmas Eve, and took me with
them to a Christmas-tree party. It was a glorious tree, all glitter and
twinkle, with a pink Christkind on the top. The children played at
railway-trains on the floor, and their elders talked of the expected
outbreak. They, as did my friends in the train, timed it for the end of
March for certain. We thought neither of peace nor goodwill. A man who
often drove the train to AIitrovitza vowed he would not do so much
longer, and we drank to each other's long life in little glasses of
cognac as if we really meant it. I had never been in a land in a state
of war before, and felt as if I were acting charades. No one as yet,
here or elsewhere, reckoned Japan as an all-important influence in the
affairs of the Near East.

'Things are quiet just now,' they said; you can take off your breeches
when you go to bed. But some months ago, oh my God ! we were ready to
fly to the first consulate at a moment's notice. When the rising begins
anywhere the Turks will massacre every Christian they find, and make
sure they never rise again in this world. And they will begin here.'
Thus the foreign Christians, and they foretold I should return home by
sea. At five next morning I slopped through mud ankle deep, with a man
and a lantern which only made the darkness blacker, tumbled up against a
sleepy sentry, and scrambled up a slippery bank to the station, where a
stout and good-natured Jew insisted on standing me a cup of salep. It is
a treacly drink made of a species of orchis-root, and was, I believe, a
popular drink in England before the days of tea and coffee. Beyond being
wet and warm it had no attractions.

Christmas Day dawned marvellously in a blaze of gold over purple
mountains, but quickly faded into gray dulness. I spent it wedged
between Turkish officers, for the ladies' coupe said it was full, which
was a lie, and hurt my feelings. So along a picketed line all down the
Vardar River, with no friendly and amusing Gavros and Bogdans to talk
to, and over the dull, dull plain till we reached Salonika uneventfully.

'To-day,' remarked the hotel porter with the air of someone imparting
information—'to-day is a feast-day of the Catholics!'
Greece put in a claim but a few days later for the bishopric, Bulgaria
eyed the spot enviously, but the precedent instituted was followed,
andSkoplje's new Bishop is Serb.

CHAPTER VI - ROUND ABOUT RESNA

TRAVELLING in the Near East has been said by many to be difficult,
dangerous, and, which is even more alarming to the Cook-reared
tourist—uncomfortable. It may be so. I am not capable of judging. When I
am there, the only difficulty is to tear myself loose from its
enchantments and return Westwards. As for dangers or discomforts, they
are all forgotten in the all-absorbing interest of its problems. Its
raw, primitive ideas, which date from the world's well-springs, its
passionate strivings, its disastrous failures' grip the mind; its blaze
of colour, its wildly magnificent scenery hold the eye. Crowded together
on one small stage, five races, each with its own wild aspirations, its
insistent individuality, its rightful claims and its lawless lusts, are
locked together in a life and death struggle—a struggle that never
ceases, though it is only now and then that it reaches such a bloody
climax that it fills the front columns of the 'Latest Intelligence'
sheet. No Roman Emperor ever planned a spectacle on half such a scale.

Salonika lay blotted and smudgy in a gray drizzle, far too much
accustomed to alarming rumours to worry about them till obliged. And I
hastened up-country to the scene of the latest developments of the
international drama.

In many ways the Macedonia of Philip has not progressed in any
remarkable degree since his time, but—for the Balkan Peninsula is a land
of bizarre incongruities and anachronisms—it is traversed by a railway,
and I travelled in the 'dames seules' with two veiled Mohammedan women,
who ignored my presence entirely, moved my bag to make room for eight
bundles, a cupboard, a chiming clock, and some toys, and considered that
my unveiledness put me so completely beyond the pale that, to my
amusement, they invited a male relative to travel with them. The train
crawled slowly up among great snow-capped mountains and desolate
stretches of bare rock with scrub, oak, and juniper. Philip's old
capital, Edessa, stood somewhere near Vodena, which lies on the left of
the line. Now, far from being the home of a conquering people, the
landlay drear and abject, every station crammed with troops, and the
whole line picketed by wretched Tommies, standing forlornly by their
sodden tents in a condition little less pitiable than that of the
refugees from the burnt villages, save that they were at liberty to loot
food if any were handy. We skirted the beautiful lake of Ostrovo, and
steamed into Monastir as night was falling.

Monastir, called by the Slavs Bitolia, lies snugly against the hills on
a big plain some thousand feet above sea-level. It bristles with slim,
white minarets, and is boiling over with rival churches. Greek, Bulgar,
Serb and Vlah build schools that are surprisingly fine and large, and
the place reels with propaganda. For in a school in Turkish territory
you do not merely learn the usual subjects: you are taught to which
nationality you really belong, and each school is indeed a factory of
'kanonen futter,' which may some day enable the government which
supports it to obtain territory. That which is able to invest most money
in the business will, in all probability, come out as winner in the end.

To further complicate the already tangled knot of religions, there is a
Roman Catholic mission and a Protestant one, each ready to receive all
comers. Most of the Powers have consulates here. The Russian and the
Austrian, as representing the two parties most interested in future
developments, naturally attract much attention. Russia, ' the only
Christian nation,' the beloved of the Slavs and the protector of the
Bulgarian Church, is very heartily hated of the Albanian. Austria, by
being affable and obliging to everybody, doubtless hopes to include the
lot in Austrian territory later, and is meanwhile a popular character
with all except the Slavs. But I never met anybody who believed that
either had the smallest desire the 'reform' scheme should succeed,
except for their own private ends.

The movements of all the Consuls, both great and small, are carefully
watched; all the town knows when they call on one another, and ponders
the political import of their walks abroad, and each and all spend weary
hours in a vain endeavour to get questions answered by Turkish
officials, a labour as endless as that of the Danaides, especially in
the case of the luckless representatives of countries that have no navy
nor army worth mentioning.

Monastir was perfectly quiet outwardly—that is to say, the surface of
the lava was cool for the time being—and I walkedabout alone without any
trouble. All trade was said to be at a standstill, and some folk were
afraid to go outside the town to cultivate their fields, lest they
should fall into the hands of Bulgarian bands. The streets were full of
soldiers. Officers pervaded the billiard-rooms, baggage-waggons
clattered firewood on the mountain with two other lads, and there came a
Mohammedan Bey from Dibra with a large hunting-party. They carried off
the three boys to Dibra and shut them in a cellar, and threatened to
kill them all unless their friends paid ?T.lOO for each of them within
six months. My mother was in despair. I came home. We sold all our
beasts, but with that and all my savings we had only ?60. When the time
was nearly gone I managed to borrow ?40 from X—; he is very rich, and
says he is a patriot, but he made me pay 20 per cent. for it. We bought
my brother back. He was nearly dead and covered with sores. He had been
in the dark all the time. My mother washed his shirt four times, and
still little beasts came out of it. He swore he would be revenged some
day. When the bands were made he joined. The Turks in Constantinople
were very frightened about the bands. All Macedonians were ordered to
leave at once. I had to go. My master said it was nonsense, and that all
would be over in a few weeks, and he would take me back. Now it is four
months, and still we may not return! It is my wife's fault. She is a
stupid woman of my village. She has no intelligence. Many times I have
begged her to live with me in Constantinople. They are stupid, like
animals, these women. She and my mother were afraid to leave the
village. If they had come I should not now be a Macedonian. We should be
in Constantinople, and I should be having good pay. Also I should have
more sons. I came home one evening. In the village was a band, and my
brother was already a 'chetnik.' They permit one man in a family to take
care of the women. I remained. Next day the fight began. The band was
beaten. They escaped to the mountains. Then the Turks came and burnt the
village to the ground. All my goats and beasts were stolen. I lost
everything! even twelve new shirts I had never worn. House and all I
have lost to the value of ?200. We escaped to the mountains. My poor old
mother suffered very much. When it grew cold we came down and found a
room in another village. One night my brother comes. He says his life is
not safe, and he must fly to Bulgaria. He weeps and kisses me. "Danil,"
he says, "I leave my wife and children to your care."Now he is safe in
Sofia. He writes it is a very nice place. And here am I with three women
to take care of and five children. And my sister's husband is shot, and
she has three small children. But for the English flour we should all be
dead. It would be better to die. How can one live in such a land? Even
in peace they rob us! Last time my field was sown with maize the
tax-gatherers reckoned two kilos as twelve. They took toll of us at that
rate, and we had scarcely any corn left.' A doleful tale that is typical
of this wretched land.

Resna is a dirty little place of recent date. About half the inhabitants
are Moslem, most Albanian, some Slav. The Christians, as usual, are
split into parties. My landlady was a Vlah, a bright and rather
nicelooking woman, and her husband a polyglot mongrel who, when he went
to church at all, preferred the Greek variety. Madam's sympathies were
emphatically Greek. Of the two churches, the Greek was the smaller and
by far the older; the Bulgarian large, brand-new, and, for such a hole
of a place, surprisingly gorgeous. Cakes and sweet-stuff were on sale
near the door of each on feast-days.

With a desire to be strictly impartial, I attended each upon Christmas
Day of the Orthodox, lighted a twopenny candle in each, and bestowed a
similar sum upon the priest who begged for contributions at the door.
Each treated me with kind consideration, and classed me as a male—that
is, I was conducted to a spot near the front. The women in this land are
usually either left outside in a sort of covered passage that frequently
surrounds the church, whence they can only see and hear what is taking
place through the windows, or they are shut behind a fine lattice screen
at the further end of the building. There they while away the time by
chattering loudly; the babies squall, and the place is thick with
candle-smoke. From my exalted masculine position I observed that
chattering and the sucking of sweets was the rule in our department
also. And all the time the priest's long, yowling intonation rose above
the general talk, the congregation crossed itself, we bowed our heads,
were censed and splattered with holy water, and nobody showed the
smallest reverence or devotional feeling. Nor was there anything to
distinguish the ?Greek? congregation from the ?Bulgarian.?

The attendance at one or the other is merely a case of party politics.
Istared at the chattering, careless crowd and the slovenly priest as he
helter-skeltered the service, and remembered, with a start at the
contrast, the last Orthodox service I had attended but aix months
before, upon St. Peter's Day, in the heart of the Montenegrin mountains,
the rapt attention of the mountaineers, their almost painfully intense
devotion, the lordly figure of the Archimandrite, and the reverence with
which he read the words. My two Bulgarian comrades got a good deal more
of the service than they had at all bargained for. I was too much
interested to come away before the end; but as it was in the Bulgarian
church that I had spent most of my time, they were quite satisfied. My
land lady, meanwhile, was herded with the other women in the back part
of the Greek church. A Balkan man is very well aware of his superior
position. When he wishes to pay me a compliment he generally says I am
as good as a man; when he has added that it is a pity I am not a
gendarme or a soldier his imagination is exhausted. Some have even told
me, ingeniously, that the views held by the American missionary ladies
about Woman were very dangerous, and have expected me to sympathize.

Life up at Resna was rough but wholly fascinating. I lived a very
'native ' life, sharing two rooms with an Albanian and his wife, our
assistants in the work, and using mine, the larger one of the two, as an
office by day. It opened into a wide balcony, which was the correct
place to wash in; the wind whistled through the door at night, and the
pitcher in my room was a-clink with ice in the morning. Rolled in a
native blanket on the floor, the cold did not trouble me, but I was
bitterly aware what it meant for the destitute refugees. These often
began to bang at my door and try to force an entrance as early as seven
in the morning, when the chill gray dawn was breaking—unhappy wretches,
clad only in rags, part of whose object in coming was to squat by my
stove as soon as it was lit.

From dawn to dark I was never alone; case followed case. Now a headman
and a priest to beg help for their village, now a woman with a sick
child; some times a wretched old woman, blue with cold, who cried and
prayed for a little bit of blanket, and occasionally a well-fed youth,
who demanded a gift because he had fought in the insurrection and was
dismissed with difficulty. They all spoke at once. My interpreter and
the Albanian translated simultaneously into French and Servian of a
sort. Those who were refused would never take ' No ' as an answer, but
sat down and prepared to spend the day.

The local doctor—a little man of the Greek persuasion, who was rumoured
to possess a kind of diploma —discovered the hour when I was likely to
be chewing my hungry way through a lump of boiled mutton, and used the
opportunity to bring in patients and strip them, that I might see for
myself that suppuration had diminished, and I had one day the pleasure
of seeing him dress a small sore with saliva and cigarettepaper. Resna
had possessed a properly qualified man, but he was shot in the last
rising, and the Greek dared not visit patients outside the town without
an armed escort.

Serious cases we sent up to Ochrida, and we mitigated the lot of
incurables by the gift of bedding and food in their own homes. There was
in this district little illness as the results of the rising, but a
number of chronic cases of many years' standing. If ever a gap of a few
minutes occurred in the stream of villagers, my landlady hastened up
with her mother and the baby to console my solitude, for she was a
kindly soul and had a horror of being alone. She meant it so well that I
rarely had the heart to object, but I confess that, when I returned one
night after a hard day's ride to find ten people and five young children
waiting to cheer me up, I was not so pleased as they expected.

It may appear to the reader that the obvious way to secure quiet was to
lock the door. I thought so myself at first. But the only result was a
sort of bombardment, in which everyone took part. The life of the
peasant has deadened his intellect, blunted his feelings, blackened his
morals, but he has saved himself from extinction by developing a
peculiar mulish, persistent, boring obstinacy. It is a blind instinct,
which can scarcely be dignified by the name of perseverance, for he
applies it irrationally to every circumstance. It leads not infrequently
to his undoing, but, properly directed, will doubtless play a large part
in his ultimate liberation. It invariably caused me to open the door
after a short resistance, but by no means always secured him the gifts
he demanded.

Such was a day in the town—a drama in which most of the human passions
turned up, good, bad, and indifferent, and all in the rough, with never
asmear of Western varnish.

Then the villages had to be visited, and the truth of the tales sought
for. There was a great charm about these expeditions. I swallowed a bowl
of hot milk, having first put salt and pepper in it to hide the taste of
buffaloes, and was in the saddle about eight. A chill white fog hid all
the land; the roads—mere tracks pounded into deep pits—were frozen hard
as iron, and need was to ride warily. I let my horse down twice before I
had learnt this, but he recovered, luckily, without throwing me. We
plunged across country, over hoary grass, cut off from all the world;
the gendarme loomed ahead through the fog, sitting loose in his saddle,
his rifle across his knees, the collar of his great-coat turned up. My
man joggled behind, unhappily, for he was no horseman. We passed a heap
of blackened ruins—'that was a "kafana"'; another by the stream, hung
thick with great spears of ice—'that was the mill.' We rode under bare
and dripping trees at the entrance of a valley, and a village showed dim
in the mist.

Then came a fierce onslaught of great shaggy dogs, with bared white
teeth, followed by the stoning of them and their retreat, vowing
vengeance in thunderous undertones. We dismounted the gendarme, in whom
I always took a great interest, for he was as yet innocent of European
officers and reform, and generally an excellent fellow, sat in a shed
with the horses and smoked. Then followed the house-to-house visit in
company with my man, the headman of the village, and often the priest.
We squished and slopped through mud or slipped on ice, according to
whether it froze or thawed, climbed rickety wooden ladders to the upper
floors, ducked our heads under low doorways.

I choked in the pungent wood-smoke, questioned, listened, tried in a
tangle of contradictory statements to strike an average of truth;
shuddered, was wrung with pity; wondered and was disgusted in turn as
adversity cast a fierce searchlight on human nature, and exposed its
best and its worst with pitiless impartiality. Now and then we had a
joke, and I caught women taking off and hiding their silver waistclasps
and ornaments, in order to look as poor as possible. Then came the
writing of the list, on which everyone clamoured to be placed. We
remounted and left the village, with its sins and sorrows, for there was
yet another to visit before we turned our horses homewards, and cantered
back in the dusk over ground now soft, that would freeze again ere morn.

It is ill riding in the dark on such tracks, and we clattered into Resna
soonafter the Turkish clock on the tower struck twelve, and told that
the sun had set. My landlady flew to put wood in the stove, sprawled on
her stomach before it, and blew violently into the hot ashes. There was
a rush of folk who were waiting to see me, and, having dropped my man at
his village, I wrestled with them single-handed. My meal was either cold
or frizzled, for my landlady cooked it casually at any hour that
occurred to her, and it either waited by the stove or did not, as Fate
ordained. But I was so hungry that a lump of solid food was all I
required. I became a mainly carnivorous animal, and after seeing the
dirt of the neighbourhood never tasted water.

Asquat on the floor, I wrote lists for the morrow's flour-distribution
regardless of the talk carried on all round by people who were paying a
visit either to one of my assistants, my host, or myself, and their oft
expressed belief that so much writing would make my head ache. My
landlady, in answer to numerous inquiries, explained that I intended
washing later in the water that was warming on the stove. This was a
topic of never-failing interest. Then good-night, and, with the
exception of a dog-fight or two under the window, peace and quiet.

But not always. One dree night I was waked, about one o'clock, by a
portentous battering at the outer gate. Trusting it was in honour of
some saint or other—for they had ushered in Christmas Day with similar
cheeriness—I turned to go to sleep again ! No such luck. I heard
scrambling below. Someone went to the door; there was a parley. Worse
and worse; they were coming upstairs! I vowed that I would not receive a
visitor at that hour, even if it were the Vali himself. They knocked. I
took no notice. They hammered; I still lay low. They banged, thumped,
thundered and shouted. It occurred to me suddenly that to feign sleep
under the circumstances was absurd, and laughing, in spite of myself, I
cried: ' What is it?'

' Open the door,' they cried. In these lands everyone sleeps fully clad
in all his day garments, therefore it did not occur to them that I was
not in a completely presentable condition. My neglect to open the door
instantly produced efforts which threatened to force it. I scrambled
into an overcoat and let in an icy blast, my host, my hostess, her
mother, and a man with a lantern. There was a 'telegramma' for me, they
all said at once.

'To-morrow,' said I, in my limited vocabulary, for I guessed it would be
in Turkish and unreadable.

'No, no,' said everyone. It appeared that I must sign the receipt.
Barefoot and frozen, I fumbled in the dark for a pencil, only to learn
that it must be signed in ink. This I accomplished. Then the man
proposed to translate the message, and the whole party squatted on the
floor round the lantern. After a long pause I was told that all he could
understand was that it was for 'Hamham,' and had come from 'Brer.' I got
rid of the whole party.

Fortunately few nights were so lively, for next morning meant boot and
saddle again, and more tales of misery—hopeless, blank misery. In the
burnt villages a few people were still living in the ruins under
temporary 'lean-tos ' of wattle and thatch. In some cases they had
rebuilt their houses. And where the stone ground-floor was only partly
ruined this was not a difficult task, as the larger part of the houses
in this district are built of mud and wattle on timber frames, and all
the necessary material was plentiful. Ten pounds, I was told, built a
good house, five, a small one; a habitable shanty was even less. But few
started rebuilding, though the Government had given money for the
purpose; and they seemed unwilling to help one another. Some said they
would only be burnt out again, others that summer and fine weather would
soon be coming. Some left the neighbourhood; the majority crowded into
villages that had escaped.

If they had money—and some had—the house-owner charged them rent. If
they had none, he not infrequently demanded flour of us as compensation.
For one another's troubles they had, as a rule, very little sympathy.
Four large families were often crowded into one cowshed, with their few
goods, saved from the burning, piled around, the cattle, stabled at one
end, providing a grateful warmth. I have seen a party of women warming
themselves by sitting in amanure heap with their legs buried up to the
knee, but people did not seem to think this an out-of-the-way thing to do.

When first travelling in the Balkan Peninsula, I was struck with the
fact that the natives all seemed to feel both heat and cold far more
than I do. When, however, I became acquainted with the mysteries of
their costume, there was no room for astonishment. I smiled when I read
a pathetic tale in the papers about refugee women who had run away 'in
their nightgowns.' I knew those 'nightgowns.' Saving a shirt of coarse,
handwoven linen, the Christian women of these parts wear nothing at all
to cover their legs but a short pair of socks. On their arms and
shoulders, however, they crowd as many wadded garments as they can
obtain, and they protect the lower part of the body from the chill to
which it would otherwise be dangerously exposed, by girding themselves
with 20 metres of goat's-hair cord, knotting it all the way up the front
so that it projects hideously and forms a sort of shelf upon which the
lady rests her arms.

Half the amount of clothing, evenly distributed, would keep them warm,
but they pile on garments above and shiver below. I have often stood out
of doors bareheaded, and with nothing on my arms but the sleeves of a
flannel shirt, interviewing women clad each in a wadded waistcoat and
two wadded coats and head-wraps, but I was the only one that was warm.
When hot weather arrives, however, they gasp and perspire, for it rarely
occurs to them to shed a garment, and anyone who possesses a fur-lined
coat continues to wear it. To give them their due, I am bound to confess
that, in the matter of suffering heroically for the sake of the fashion,
they are quite up to the highest civilized standards. In the winter they
explain me by saying that I come from a far land where it is always
cold. In the summer the highly educated talk of the well-known cold
blood of the English.

Those who possessed sound garments felt the cold; those who had been
burnt out in the summer, and whose clothes were now reduced to a mass of
rags, suffered most bitterly, and there could be no possible doubt of
their dire distress. I remember the wild gratitude of a woman, with two
little children, who was absolutely destitute, as she sobbed, clung to
me, and cried, ' You have saved us!'

In general, the horrors they had seen appeared to have had but slight
effect upon them. The three or four intervening months had cured all
nervous shock, if 'shock' there had been, for they are people of very
low nervous organization. Nor, with their past history, is this to be
wondered at. Once only did I find a case of 'terror' in the Resna viIlages.

A -wretched woman sitting at a cottage door, when she saw my gendarme,
threw herself at my feet with a blood-curdling shriek, clung to my
knees, and prayed to be saved, and then fell on the ground, stiff and
only partially conscious. She had seen her husband's brains battered
out, and the sight of a man in uniform always brought on an attack, I
was told. But as the fit appeared to be of an epileptic nature, she was
probably subject to such before. The gendarme, whose presence caused it,
seemed much overpowered. He possibly knew better than any of us what
manner of sights she had seen.

One has to be careful about ascribing such cases to the effects of the
insurrection, however. I heard harrowing tales, which were published in
some of the papers, about women who had been driven mad, and went about
barking like dogs. The only one of these I had the chance of examining
proved not to be insane at all, but suffering from a peculiar form of
hysteria which I have met with before in other parts of the Peninsula.
It is not at all uncommon among the Balkan Slavs, and also, I am told,
in Russia, and the so-called 'barking' is a sort of hiccough, caused by
rapid and spasmodic contractions of the diaphragm. The local remedy,
often efficacious, is to direct the patient to go to church on some
special saint's day, to pray for relief and to abstain from making the
noise while the service is going on. If she succeeds in doing so she is
generally cured. This is an interesting example of cure by suggestion.

In most cases the result of the insurrection had filled them with a dull
astonishment. They said they had been told that in the late
Greco-Turkish War the Turkish soldiers had behaved very well, and that
they had not expected any outrages or deeds of violence. They seemed to
think they might kill without exciting reprisals. With their experience
of long years and the tradition of centuries this sounds incredible, but
they told me sorepeatedly. Of the future they seemed to take no heed,
and the past was already dulled. They lived from day to day with a sort
of bovine stolidity, heavy, apathetic, interested chiefiy in petty
quarrels, and seeing that they got as much 'relief' as the people next door.

In the villages that were half Mohammedan, there had, as a rule, been no
fighting, and therefore little looting, and these were crowded with
refugees. When visiting them, I was able to see what the unrobbed houses
were like. They, of course, contain nothing at all that West Europe
considers necessary for comfort, but are very much better than the mass
of the huts in which the peasants of Montenegro and North Albania live.
I never, even in a burnt village, had to rough it in Macedonia as I have
had to do in normal circumstances in the two other lands. Here the
ground is so fertile that even with the rudest cultivation it yields
abundantly, and but for the heavy and irregular taxation to which the
poor wretches are liable they would, as peasants go, be well off. Even
as it is they make a good living, for one of the leading Bulgarians
declared to me that before the outbreak there was not a beggar near
Resna. The Macedonian Committee has much to answer for. Judged by Balkan
standards, the housing and living was a very great deal better than I
had expected after reading the published accounts. And the poor physique
and bad health of the people appeared to be brought about largely by
their ignorance and their habits than by want.

CHAPTER VII - ON THE SHORES OF LAKE PRESBA

MEANWHILE doleful tidings poured ill from the villages round Lake
Presba—appeals for help from those yet unvisited, and rumours of
small-pox. When you have once made up your mind to be Balkan you are
always ready to start anywhere, at any minute. I rolled a native blanket
in a waterproof sheet, put a spoon, a tin cup, a few medicines, etc., in
a little bag, trusted entirely to luck that I should find food and not
get wet through, and was ready for a week's travel. Every extra pound is
a bother on horseback.

The Mudir decided that I must have two gendarmes, and as he had hitherto
let me do just as I liked, I asked for Christians—chiefly because the
Bulgars I was working with declared he would never allow it, also in
orderto 'sample' the new Christian gendarmes. However, he made no
difficulty, and the only Christian in the local force was allotted to me.

The start took some time. Almost every man in this land, not excepting
troopers and gendarmes, rides upon a fat and squashy pillow, which he
straps on his saddle. In default of this he piles up rugs or blanketing,
and no one could understand my taste for the bare leather. Regularly
every day the pony came round with a 'pernitza' upon it, and regularly
every day I had it removed and said it was not to come tomorrow. But it
always did, and they argued the point. A Montenegrin or Albanian
horse-boy rarely requires telling a thing of this sort twice. It
requires a week's hard labour to drive the glimmer of a new idea into a
'Macedonian.' On the sixth day the pony arrived pillowless, and I
thought they had learned. But now, after three days' interval, here it
was again. This time the populace was firm. A large crowd had come to
see me off, and there was quite an excitement about it. I was not made
of leather, they said, and the pillow was to stay where it was. They
even brought a larger and fatter one. I began unbuckling the girth, and
someone buckled it up again. A dozen people talked at once. According to
Danil, they recounted the shocking state of their own persons when fate
had deprived them of a pillow.

I learnt the great lesson that the native can be circumvented, but never
reasoned with, climbed on top of the 'pernitza,' and, perched squashily,
high above my beast, rode from the town. Safely outside, I got rid of
the pillow, and the toughness of English hide formed a pleasing topic of
conversation for many days. Danil and the gendarmes had to take care of
that pillow, and long before the end of the tour said they were sorry
they had insisted on its coming.

We left even the semblance of civilization that Resna possesses behind
us, and made straight across country at a canter for the shores of the
lake; for the gendarmes were in a sportive frame of mind, and poor Danil
was left far behind. It was a casual sort of an expedition. Neither of
my men knew the way after the first village or two. There are, of
course, no roads, often no tracks. We followed trails of misery, picked
up guides from place to place, and did not usually know in the morning
where we should spend the night.

The Christian gendarme, a large and jovial Vlah, was a great invention.
He had been a tradesman at Resna, had enlisted because all trade was at
a standstill, and had friends and clients in almost every village. He
wanted me to help everybody, and to rebuild all the churches. He was
greeted with great enthusiasm, and was wildly and aggressively
Christian. He kissed the priest's hand, got himself blessed and
sprinkled with holy water, when there was any about, and crossed himself
industriously.

His excessive Christianity and his numerous friends led to his
overshooting the mark badly on 'mastic,' the local drink, the second
night, and a wild and drunken sing-song raged till past midnight. Next
morning, overcome with shame, he came to me and said he had behaved like
a pig; that he was sorry, and while he was with me he would drink no
more mastic, because when he once began he could never leave off. To my
surprise, he kept this promise faithfully, in spite of very great
temptation, and Danil explained that the joy of the villagers on seeing
for the first time a Christian who was allowed to carry a gun was the
cause of the outburst! The gentleman himself was obviously quite
unaccustomed to carrying a weapon. He alternately spent much energy
cleaning it and forgot all about it. On one occasion he left it behind
him, to the vast amusement of his comrade, and we had to send back for
it. He was a liberal-minded man, was bringing up one son as a Serb in
Belgrade and the other as a Bulgarian, and his daughter was married to
some other nationality, I forget which. His comrade, a Mohammedan
Albanian—a long lean man deeply pitted with small-pox, which gave him an
unpleasantly moth-eaten appearance—was rather 'out of it' in this
Christian company. The two kept up an endless argument about the rights
and wrongs of the insurrection. They never agreed, but they never lost
their tempers. The Christian pointed out the awful devastation, and the
Moslem earnestly defended it.

'Tell the lady,' he would say, 'that we were obliged to. They began it;
they attacked us. They would kill every Turk (i.e., Moslem) in the land
if they could. It is our land. We must defend ourselves.' To which Danil
added: 'He does not understand. The land is really ours Naturally it is
we that must kill them.' And no one knew when the killing must begin
again. The land was raw with recent fighting—it was, so to speak, an
aching wound, and either party lived in terror of the other.

We started often before it was quite light in the morning, whether it
were rain, snow, or storm, and we rode till sundown. In all, we visited
nineteen villages and two monasteries. I went into more than a thousand
houses, and interviewed deputations from four other villages. At night
we arrived, if possible, at an unburnt village, and slept and supped at
the headman's house. The horses were stabled below. We climbed up a
ladder into the family dwelling. A crowd of women, who called me their
'golden sister,' kissed me on both cheeks, unless I resisted violently.
They spread rush mats on the mud floor. We took of our boots and
squatted round the hearth, and the master of the house threw on
brushwood till the fire blazed high, and I could see to write out the
necessary lists. In the better houses there was a big hooded hearth of
medi?val pattern; in the poorer the rafters overhead glittered black
with smoke, and were festooned with dried fish, and, in houses that had
escaped looting, with onions and salt meat cut into dice and threaded on
string; often with bunches of plaits of hair, hung on a nail—ends to
prolong ladies' pigtails on bazar days.

Then the priest in his high black cap and shaggy locks and all the chief
men of the village flocked in and settled down to hard drinking and
tales of the rising. Even in burnt villages where it was hard to find a
meal there was always mastic. Everyone drinks from the same bottle—a
quaint pewter one decorated with red glass beads. It flew from mouth to
mouth, pausing every few minutes for refilling, and the company sucked
the bottle and chewed leaves from a bowl of raw salt cabbage, hard and
woody pickled in strong brine, or ate 'paprika,' the local pepper pod,
and raised a colossal, incredible thirst. Weak mastic has little alcohol
in it, but the strong variety is potent and fiery, and they tipped it
down like water.

Many people came to see me, for they said, in most places, I was the
only European who had stayed there except the Russian Consul. He had
worked the land pretty thoroughly, and had left a tradition of fabulous
wealth. The talk ran mostly on 'bands ' and 'committees.' Of their poor
little victories they were very proud. When they had surprised a small
body of soldiers they killed the lot, and poured petroleum on the bodies
and burnt them. Then no one would ever know where they had fallen, and
they could not be avenged. ' I hope they were all dead when you burnt
them,' I said.

' Who knows?' they replied oracularly. About the committees they were
usually very bitter. 'They took all our money, and are safe in Sofia. We
have lost all.'Sarafov was very unpopular. The local leader, Arsov, many
of them still believed in. But as a whole they dreaded the committee
almost as much as they did the Turks.

I heard the same tale day after day—a hideous, squalid tale of wrong.
Each village had been visited by secret agents, and the people lured by
promises or forced by threats to join the movement. Each family had to
pay heavy toll in cash or kind. The guns were mostly smuggled in by
women, who carried them hidden in firewood or other goods. Then the
rising took place—futile, disastrous, and foredoomed to failure. The
wretched peasants, most of whom had rarely handled a gun, were led often
by the schoolmaster, who, save that he could read and write, was but
little better trained than themselves. They burned a Moslem house or
two, made a plot to blow up the mosques which failed, allowed themselves
to be trapped in a narrow valley; the survivors fled after a desperat
struggle for life, and the troops fell on the village. Chiefty women,
children, and old men remained in it and a few insurgents in hiding.
There was a wild sauve qui peut when the soldiers came; a volley was
fired into the thick. Some were killed, others suffered outrages at the
hands of the enraged soldiery; the majority got away into the mountains,
and stayed there till the cold drove them down. The women went into the
villages at night to make bread from the pretty numerous stores of corn
which, hidden in holes, had escaped looting. In some cases where the
band had given much trouble the village was burnt to the ground, and the
wrecking was so complete that all the pots and pans were piled in heaps
and smashed. The church was usually plundered and desecrated. Sometimes
its floor was torn up in search of hidden treasure. And the whole rising
fizzled out like wet powder. It seemed, in truth, when one was on the
spot, to have been planned solely with a view to bringing about a
wide-spread slaughter ofthese unhappy peasants. Had there been anything
like a general conflagration planned for a particular day it might have
stood a chance of at any rate temporary success. But it was a long drawn
out series of petty bonfires. The troops extinguished one and rode on to
the next.

The Macedonian Committee's action appeared to me marvellously
ill-devised. Had the Moslems chosen they could easily have annihilated
every village that rose. Perhaps this was what the Committee hoped.
Round Presba, too, it seemed that the people had believed there would be
no reprisals. Their total inability to learn from experience staggered
me. This time all was to have been different. 'And what was to have been
the end of it?' They were to have had no taxes to pay, and would be
allowed to carry guns and shoot Turks. This was their only idea of
liberty. Even Danil and the gendarmes were surprised to hear we paid
taxes in England. Lastly, they were to be repaid the money that the
'Committee' had 'borrowed' from them. In the whole long tour through the
Presba villages, to my astonishment, I did not meet one single patriot
(in truth, poor wretches ! they had no 'patria'), and I found no trace
of knowledge of the Great Bulgarian Empire. Out on the great lake in
full view of the villages lies the tiny wooded island called Grad, and
here Samuel, the last Tsar of the Bulgarian Empire, built his palace.

I asked, by way of picking up local tradition, whether anyone lived on
it. No, but there must have been a monastery once, for there were ruins
of a church. That was all they knew, and the ubiquitous Russian Consul
had been there. Nor in Resna, among the better informed, did I find any
more knowledge. Samuel and his empire were dead and forgotten, and I did
not revive their story.

Danil, who was a town-made patriot of recent construction, was vexed
with the villagers' apathy; but his efforts at rousing them had little
effect. He tried hard to persuade them they were hardly used, because
their Church service was in most cases conducted in Greek. But they
bolted raw cabbage and washed it down with mastic, and only said it did
not matter; many of them spoke Greek. The priest took a suck at the
bottle, and was of the same opinion. He spoke the local Slav dialect
himself for ordinary purposes, but he had learned all the services in
Greek. It was a good service, and what did it matter? Danil was annoyed,
and told me that they were very ignorant; really they were all
Bulgarians,and ought to have Bulgarian priests, but they did not know.
Nor, as far as I could see, did they care here. Once or twice when a man
told me that he was a Serb Danil was put out, and told him he was not. A
few said they were Greeks, but they all appeared 'much of a muchness.'
In type they differed from the people of the Ochrida district. They
were, as a whole, better looking the farther south one got. The aquiline
nose and well-cut jaw that is common in Albania began to replace the
broad flat face, the long upper lip, and the high cheek-bones of the
folk farther north; and in the villages at the lower end of the lake the
shirt worn outside became fuller and fuller in the skirt and developed
into the 'fustanella' worn alike by Greek and Albanian. They confided
largely in the Christian gendarme, and the local fight was fought again
for his benefit.

He and the Moslem generally came in with supper. The 'sofra,' a round
piece of wood on legs 3 or 4 inches high, was brought in by the women of
the house, and while we washed our hands the meal was laid upon it. A
bowl of broth, the fowls it was made of scarlet with paprika, often a
fish from the lake, a large flat loaf of steaming hot bread, and, if the
house were at all well-to-do, a 'komad.' We ate with our fingers and a
wooden ladle as tools, and I was the only one who made a mess and
slopped things about. 'Komad,' the local idea of a delicacy, is
calculated to upset the digestion of a hippopotamus. A huge mass of
pastry is whacked and thumped till all possibility of rising is knocked
out of it. Then it is rolled between the hands into a long, long rope,
and this is coiled round and round in a large flat dish till the dish is
full. It is covered with an iron plate, shoved in the ashes, and set to
bake. When it is half cooked a quantity of sugar and water is poured
over it, and the baking is finished. It comes to table a sodden mass,
sticky, slab, leathery, and of incredible weight.

The peasants have suffered from many misfortunes, and 'komad ' is one of
them. Their diet table is, indeed, an odd one. Meat they seem to prefer
heavily salted and dried into chips; some said it was the only way they
ate it. Eggs they boiled stone-hard as a rule. Milk they do not care
about, unless sour. Of bread, hot and heavy, they eat enough for an
elephant, and of salt cabbages and onions cooked in pepper they never
tire. I never saw people eat so enormously and get so little good from
it. In peace times, and even after the insurrection, in the villages
that had not suffered, the people have a far better food-supply, and are
better housed than the mass of Montenegrin peasants, even than some of
the Voyvodes.

Barring the effects of the rising indeed, I saw nowhere the dire poverty
that I met in Montenegro and the vilayet of Kosovo. But the Montenegrin
is fit and strong on milk and maize porridge, while the better supplied
'Macedonian' is a chronic dyspeptic, and the hardest drinker I know.
Often too much accustomed to drink to get honestly drunk, he is soaked
and soddened with alcohol so that he cannot do without it. Nor is this
surprising, for mothers give mastic to sucking infants, and tiny
children drink a heavy dose with no apparent effect.

When I asked how they had lived on the mountains, people almost always
said they could not get enough mastic, and had undoubtedly felt the
deprivation keenly.After supper, mastic drinking as before, they
discussed politics. No one wanted war, not even the Moslem.' Everyone
would be killed next time,' he said.

'The only thing,' said the Vlah, 'would be for a foreign country to save
them. Greece had been freed by a miracle. Why not they?'I knew nothing
about the miracle, and they were astonished. The Turks, they said,
outraged a little girl, and threw her body into the sea. Then God made
the wind to blow, and the sea carried the corpse, uncorrupted, and threw
it up on the shores of England. The people of England came down to the
shore and found the dead child. Filled with horror, they went and told
their King, and he sent his warships, and Greece was freed. Everyone
knew the story, even the Moslem, and believed it firmly, nor could I
shake them. I trust it is not equally well known on the coast, for,
driven by superstition, I believe there are many who would not shrink
from an attempt to summon the British navy in the same way.

They all gave me messages for the various Consuls —one about his son in
prison, another about his stolen pigs, and Danil told about the twelve
new shirts he had never worn. The gendarmes begged that the British
Consul would apply for their pay.
The Christian, being only newly-enlisted, was but two months in arrears,
and the joy of carrying a gun made up somewhat for the deficiency, but
the Moslem wanted seven months' pay, and was very unhappy about it. They
all discussed what would be the best thing for the Christian gendarmes
to do at the next rising, and decided that they would all take their
rifles and be off, which the Moslem considered a good joke. One night we
talked of the Sultan. He, said the company, had murdered Abdul Aziz, and
locked up his brother Murad. Murad was not mad, but was locked up
because he wished to be just to the Christians. I remarked that Abdul
Aziz was said to have killed himself. Moslem and all, they scouted the
idea. It was well known that he had been heard shrieking for help, but
the palace guards had kept the doors, and no one had been allowed to
enter till there was silence. Danil vowed that his grandfather had been
in Constantinople at the time, and had heard it from one of the men
employed to sweep up in the palace. Another proof was that the Sultan
would kill anyone; ?but naturally !' said Danil. ' So why not Abdul
Aziz?' When I had had enough of the conversation I rolled up in my
blanket and went to sleep. Sometimes almost the whole party slept in the
room, sometimes they didn't. It depended how many rooms there were. I
believe I was generally favoured with the company of the more exalted.

To detail the tramp from house to house, the inspection of flour-bins
and blankets, and the search for disease, the dull monotony of misery in
every village, would weary the reader. I will mention only the more
striking events of the tour.
Four villages had small-pox. In this almost unvaccinated land you have
small-pox before you are five, and either die or are afterwards immune.
No doctor visits these outlying parts. No precautions of any kind are
taken to prevent the disease spreading, and the family shares the
blanket of the patient. I had conscientious scruples about carrying
infectionmyself at first, but came to the conclusion that in the general
mix-up one more or less could make no difference. I found few adult
cases; those were of a virulent type, semi-conscious, and with confluent
pocks. The epidemic was passing over, and the surviving children were
beginning to run about scarred, but recovering.

The doctor, indeed, who was sent up, on my report, to vaccinate around
the infected area, said it could hardly be called an epidemic; there had
not been more than thirty deaths in any place. I thought of the people
at home, who are afraid to ride in a St. John's Wood omnibus if they
hear of a case at Willesden, and smiled. The small-pox chase, in fact,
was not without a certain grim humour. At one village, when I was
leaving, I was asked to give a little backshish to the priest's wife.

'Poor woman !' they said; 'two of her little children are ill of the
small-pox, one has died, she has had it herself and is not yet well, but
she cooked your supper in her own house and brought it here for you!'
Another time a woman rushed out of a house, seized me in her arms, and
kissed me upon either cheek until I struggled free. Her three children
were down with small-pox, and this warm greeting was an appeal to me to
give help.

That a certain percentage of children must always die of this disease
was an accepted fact, as it was in prevaccination days in England, and
the people took it stolidly. At one village there were even signs of a
festivity. Hardly were we settled round the fire when a lad, very gay
and smart in a red sash and a clean white fustanella, came in with a
troop of friends. Shyly he offered me a glass of hot mastic.'Take it,'
said Danil; 'he is a bridegroom. You must drink his health.' He looked
about fifteen. As a matter of fact, he was just seventeen and the bride
fifteen. ?They are very young,' said I, as the company chaffed him.

'It is true they are young,' said Danil philosophically. ' But it is
better so, they say. Twenty children have just died of the small-pox.
Maintenant on fera des autres, mais naturellement.' And the bridegroom
withdrew in a storm of jokes which Danil discreetly left untranslated.

A bride is far from holding the exalted position that she does in the
West. In one house was a young woman in gaudy costume. A silver
waistclasp and strings of obsolete Austrian kreutzers, roughly silvered,
gave her an air of importance. But the poor thing had to wait on
everybody, women included. She kissed our hands with painful humility,
and, as far as I could see, was not even allowed to sit down without
permission. 'But naturally,' said Danil, 'she is the son's wife. They
have only been married a few months !'

Sometimes I found traces of the old Slavonic family communities. Once a
man, with the popular Servian name Milosh, gave sixty-three as the
number of his family, and I found they formed the greatest part of the
village. But I only found five other instances (families of from twenty
to twenty-nine) in this district.

Many villages had a tale of horror. It is hard to arrive at the truth on
this subject, for my experience is that these people are hopelessly
inaccurate in reporting everyday affairs even when they have nothing to
gain by it and do not mean to be untruthful. It is not so much a wish to
deceive as a very low intelligence, which does not know what accuracy
is. For instance, 'five' means a few; 'a hundred,' a great many—quite
loosely. Also you may hear of the same murder in several villages from
various friends of the deceased, and reckon it as four, if not careful.

I avoided leading questions as likely to suggest answers, and noted the
information which dribbled out in the course of conversation. I do not
guarantee numbers, but that the usual atrocities of a wild soldiery had
been committed was beyond doubt. Podmacheni headed the list with
forty-five killed, including twenty women outraged and disembowelled;
the village partly burnt and wholly plundered, and the church wrecked.
Krani came next with ten women stripped and outraged. There were four
villages burnt out, and for dree misery Nakolech was the worst. Save
some Moslem houses nothing was left of it, and its wretched inhabitants,
squatting in mud-and-wattle huts, were living on the English flour and
the fish they caught in the lake. To add to their misfortunes a number
of soldiers had been camped alongside the village since the summer, and
stabled their horses in the church.

The state of the church was such that people doubted if I should be
allowed to see it. An employe of the relief agency had already been
refused. Some soldiers were washing clothes at the entrance. The
gendarmes said I had come to see the church. I added, 'Tell them to be
quick,' and after a short delay it was opened for me. It was not only
littered with stable manure, but had also been recently and filthily
defiled in every way, and was entirely wrecked. The wreckers had even
been at the trouble of scratching out the eyes of all the saints they
could reach.

The Vlah took off his cap and crossed himself boldly before a group of
soldiers who crowded round the door and looked black at us. The state of
the church was so disgraceful that it was beyond all words. I think the
Moslem gendarme spoke first. 'Tell the lady,' he said very eagerly,
'they were obliged to, else we should all have been killed. We must do
these things to frighten them. They would kill us all and take our land.'

There was a certain feeling of thunder in the air. I withdrew as soon as
I had looked well round. Outside were the commanding officer and
another, who did not look pleased, but said nothing, and turned away
abruptly. The gendarmes went to water the horses, and I went into the
priest's hut.

Several men were waiting here to speak to me. They were terrified of the
soldiers, and prayed me to have them moved. They accused them of no
violence, but said they stole the washing put out to dry, and so the few
poor garments saved from the burning were lost. (Here Danil told about
his twelve shirts.) What they dreaded was that some day they would all
be massacred. The state of the church was bad enough to report, but no
one could tell me the name of either officer or regiment. However, I
learnt it later, and the Russian consulate took up the affair. I believe
the officer was transferred.

The churches had suffered heavily, and it appeared that the Moslem
gendarme's idea about the moral effect of church-wrecking was correct.
The people were deeply affected by it. Until the churches were repaired
and consecrated all religion was at a standstill. It was impossible to
pray. I asked if they could not hold a service in a room. The priest was
astonished. It was perfectly impossible, he said. Without the proper
apparatus nothing could be done.

Christianity here consisted entirely, apparently, in the ceremonial
performed by the priest and a hatred of Mohammedanism.
I do not think I ever saw the picture of a saint in any of these houses.
The ikon and lamp so conspicuous in the houses of the Serbs, the
Montenegrins, and the Orthodox Albanians, was wanting. Nor did the
people invoke Christ or the saints, or cross themselves at meal-times or
before going to rest for the night. They seemed to possess none of the
religious fervour that usually is so marked a characteristic of Orthodox
peasants. They had more faith, apparently, in the amulets they wore than
in anything else. Some of these were very odd. One was a green glass
heart, two pink beads, and an English sixpence.

At German, named after St. German, one of the first missionary priests
to the Slavs, we came across the one cheery episode of that nine days'
tour. The village is a 'chiftlik' belonging to the Sultan's mother.

It had been but partially looted, and the church had not suffered. A
festival was in full swing in honour, Danil said, 'of St. John, who did
things with water.' Gay in their best clothes, the people came in
procession from church, the women carrying sheaves of straw prettily
plaited, and we followed up the valley. The Moslem thought he would not
come, but the Vlah made him.

It was freezing hard, and a white fog spoilt the quaint scene. The
priest, robed all in blue and gold, blessed the little stream which ran
black between its frosted banks. He threw in a crucifix; there was a
great scramble of men and boys to be first at the stream; the women
dipped in their sheaves, and everyone crossed themselves three times
with the holywater. The Vlah made all the responses in a loud voice,
rushed wildly for the water, and came back very wet with his fez full of
it for me. I made the proper signs, to the delight of the company, and
he threw the rest over his Moslem comrade, who took it calmly.

Shortly after my return to Resna I read an English newspaper article, in
which an impassioned young journalist described the crushed condition of
the Christian gendarmes, who, he said, were made to black the boots of
their Moslem confreres. I don't think I ever saw any gendarmerie boots
that had been blacked by anybody, and the Christian gendarmes I had were
all very cheerful; but things look so different when seen from newspaper
offices.

The priest filled a caldron, and we processed back to the village. Here,
I was told, he would like to bless me. I said I should be very pleased,
but nothing happened. Then, it appeared, he could not bless me till he
knew my name and that of my father. I supplied them; he murmured a few
words; he dabbed holy water on my face with a bunch of dried, sweet
basil (the holy 'vasilikon '), signed me with the cross, gave me the
crucifix to kiss, I dropped a coin in the waterpot, and the ceremony was
complete. When we rode away the Vlah carried a bunch of the holy basil
stuck triumphantly in the muzzle of his gun.

At Rambi the usual state of affairs was reversed. It was a mixed
village, and the Moslem half, with the exception of the mosque, had been
looted and burnt by the Christians. The Moslems had retorted later by
looting the Christians pretty completely, but I was told of no outrages.
The place appeared to have been a very well-to-do one. It was once the
local seat of Government. The headman's house was a really good one, and
he valued his losses at ?T1,000. They included two gold-coin necklaces.
In this house was a mysterious Albanian in a cartridge-belt, who was
very polite to me and made me coffee. I asked about him in private.

'He is a good Turk,' I was told. 'The owner of the house pays him to
live here, and gives him all his food. He protects the house from being
burnt. But all his friends come to feed here, too; and now the master
has hardly any money left, and does not know what to do. If he tells the
good Turk to go, the house may be burnt down next day.'

When I left, three friends—smart young fellows, with guns and sporting
dogs—were occupying the best room. We met many such on our journey. Then
the Christians said: 'To-day we dare not gather firewood; the Turks are
out on a hunting-party. They would shoot us, and say it was an
accident.' But I heard of no such thing taking place.

On the shores of the lake I was promised a wonderful sight; it was the
one great sight of the neighbourhood —the hoof-prints of Marko's horse!
Did I know about Marko? He was once a great King, and he rode upon a
winged horse. Marko Kraljevich, the brave and greatly-admired hero of
the Servian ballads, who was the last Serb ruler of this district
(fourteenth century), was not forgotten. Christian and Moslem alike knew
of his exploits. It was a fine wild scene—fit background for a medi?val
warrior on a winged steed - and the fact that the marks bore no
resemblance to hoof-prints was of no moment, for Sharatz was a magic horse.

We scrambled by a stony mountain-track to Nivitza, a wretched little
fishing village on the other side of the lake. The people here had fled
to the island of Grad during the insurrection, so had escaped; but the
village had been robbed, their fishing-tackle destroyed, they had an
outbreak of small-pox, and were in great distress. It was a miserable
hole of a place, but possessed a large new church that was surprisingly
fine. This had been robbed of its silver candles and altar-plate, but
was otherwise intact. One day, said the people enthusiastically, that
great and good man the Russian Consul had come here with some friends to
shoot birds. He had stayed a week, paid them lavishly, and had asked if
they would like to have a church of their own. Here was the church. He
must undoubtedly have been immensely rich.

They begged me to visit the island and see the ruined churches on it.
The priest promised to go with me next morning, and I arranged to cross
the lake and send the horses round. Unluckily it blew hard when the time
came, and the lake was fringed with breakers. It did not look very
terrible, but the caiks were cranky affairs, and no one, even for a
bribe, dared put to sea. I was very much disappointed, and had,
reluctantly, to return the way I came, meaning, when I had finished my
list of villages, toreturn at once from Resna to explore the island. But
the gods thought otherwise.

Children in the villages told curious tales. They played at
insurrections, and, oddly enough, the parents found it amusing. At one
place a tiny boy of four came straight up to the gendarmes and asked for
a 'fisik' (cartridge). This he solemnly wedged into the handle of the
tongs, and, at the word of command, went down on one knee and brought
his weapon smartly to his shoulder.
'Oganj bit' !' ('Fire !') cried his grandfather, and the child dropped
flat behind a cushion and aimed at us over the top.

Arsov, the local leader, had taught him this trick, and he repeated it
over and over again to the admiration of the company. Even after we had
ceased talking to him he wandered round the room uncannily, and
continued to cover us with his weapon from different points of vantage
till the gendarme restored the 'fisik ' to his belt.

Poor little 'oganj bit' '! his father had been shot, his mother was
quite destitute. I almost volunteered to take him home with me. But in
the next village was a little girl who called me 'auntie' straight off
and went to sleep in my lap, and I nearly took her too. Danil was
delighted with her, and translated all her chatter.

The Turks, she said, were very naughty people, and had stolen her new
red stockings and the little shirt her mother had made her. Now she had
to wear odd stockings, and was very cross about it. If the Turks came
again she should hit them very hard. They had burned down her house, and
her father had gone to build it up again, but she would stay where she
was, lest the Turks should steal her new earrings, of which she was very
proud.

I was asked to adopt any number of children. I might teach them any
religion I pleased if I would only take them to a land where there were
no Turks, and give them enough to eat. Some of these unfortunate little
things, I am glad to say, have found a home and excellent training in
the orphanage started for the purpose at Salonika by the Rev. E.
Haskell.The whole tour was pretty gruesome, and Pretor, the last place
on my list, was one of the most miserable. It was a little hole of a
place, and all plundered. Even the best house had no glass windows,
holes in the floor and a huge hole in the roof for chimney. The master
of the house, a broken old man, pointed to a spot near the door. This
was where his wife was shot; the blood ran down there by the steps; she
died almost at once. Then they had to fly for their lives, and had no
time to bury her. When, after three months, they returned, he collected
her bones and buried them, but someone, he regretfully added, had broken
them. He made no complaint; he simply related the occurrence, and asked
that I should be told. Here everyone was in great terror. Tax-collecting
had begun. The burnt villages were exempt from taxation, but to make up
for the expenses caused by the rising, the taxes were raised everywhere
else—the cow tax to 10 piastres per cow per annum, and the pig tax to
122 (two shillings and sixpence), for only the Christians keep pigs.
'Ici,' as poor Danil said, though it was not quite what he meant—'ici,
seulement les cochons sont Chretiens.' There is a certain grim humour,
too, about taking two shillings and tenpence per head road tax in
villages which have no road anywhere near them. Plundered of nearly all
their belongings, the poor wretches had been unable to pay the rates
they were assessed at, and were in terror lest the gendarmes should
return for it. One woman, who came in sobbing, said she had offered her
children to the tax-gatherers, for they were all she possessed. Another,
old and blind, said the soldiers had taken all her oats in the autumn
for their horses, and now she was to pay tax for them.

When night came I found that no one in the village dared sleep with my
two guardian angels, so there was nothing for it but to have them
myself. This had happened once before. They were very civil, and came
and wrapped my feet up tenderly when they thought I was asleep. But the
Vlah snored like a thunderstorm, and the Moslem got up and made coffee
when ever it occurred to him. So it was about as peaceable as sleeping
in a kennel of hounds. When at last I slept, I was wakened by a gentle
patting, and there was the Moslem with a cup of coffee he had made for
me. It was 3.30 a.m.! I growled and went to sleep again, but the kind
creature made me another at five. They were both wide awake, so it was
useless to try to sleep. We piled on fuel, and they smoked by the fire.
It was freezing hard, and we could see the stars brilliant through the
big chimney-hole. They said they feared I had slept badly, but that one
soon got used to this sort of thing, and with a month in barracks and a
Martini, I should make an excellent gendarme. Then by the firelight,
Danil interpreting, the Moslemsaid he had something to tell me.

He had a great friend, a Mohammedan Albanian, who came from his own town
(a place, by the way, that has a wild, bad reputation for brigandage).
This friend had lived for years near Resna. When the rising took place
he said he had always been friends with the Christians, and would not
desert them. He joined Arsov's band, fought gallantly, and did much
message-carrying, and, being a Moslem, was not suspected by the
authorities. Finally, he escaped over the borders with the band. The
Government learnt of his doings, captured his three small children, and
threatened to cut their throats if he did not appear by a given date. He
thereupon returned and gave himself up. He was sent into Asia as an
exile, and all his property was confiscated. Now, his wife and children
were in hiding near Resna, were entirely dependent on charity, and in
dire want. Would I help them?

It was true they were Moslems, but they had acted like Christians, said
the gendarme naively. He was very eager. We talked it all round till the
clammy gray dawn crept through the holes in the walls, and having
breakfasted on bread and raw mastic, we rode back to Resna through a
bitter, icy wind without my having made any promises. I was pretty dirty
when I got there, as I had not had my clothes off for eight days, but I
learned I was wanted almost at once at Ochrida, and there was such a lot
to do that I had to leave such details till the evening.

Resna entirely corroborated the gendarme's tale, and wished help to be
given. I asked to see the woman and children, but was told it was
impossible; my visit would arouse suspicion. The gendarme came next day,
bringing a ragged little boy with him as a specimen. I asked for the
woman's name. He told me, but prayed me not to put it in our list,
because, as he ingenuously said, the police might find her out. None of
our Christian employes had the least fear that the goods would go
astray, so the conveying of them was finally left to the Moslem
gendarme, who fetched them in the evening, in order that the Government,
of which he was a fanatical supporter, might not find out.

I was asked by the Christians to help this case. Just afterwards I had
avery different appeal. Would I knock two names off the list ? They had
been put on before I came, and had drawn rations once, but they were
spies, and must not have any more. They had been in Arsov's band, and
had gone with him to bury the guns before leaving for Bulgaria. They
left with the band at night, but doubled back in the dark, and were seen
next day leaving the town with the Mudir and some troopers. A hundred
and fifteen rifles was the result of the ride. Arsov sent a message that
they had deserted, and he suspected them, but the deed was already done.
'I wonder,' said the man who had come to take my place—'I wonder that
they are alive !'

'Monsieur,' said Danil earnestly, 'there is no one here now that can do
it. But later, I swear to you, it will be done. Mais naturellement.' I
had been over a month in the district, and was sorry to leave Resna and
all the people I was interested in, and especially sorry to give up the
visit to the island of Grad, but I was needed urgently, and left for
Ochrida next day.

CHAPTER VIII - OCHRIDA

"Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays.'

OCHRIDA hangs on a hillside, and trails along the shores of a lake that
half Europe would flock to see were it not in this distressful country—a
lake of surpassing beauty, second to none for wild splendour. The
purple-and-silver glory of its snow-capped mountains fades into a mauve
haze beyond the dazzle of its crystal waters. Its awful magnificence
grips the imagination, and, in mad moments, awakes a thrill of sympathy
for the unknown men who painfully hewed out tiny chapels in its flanking
cliffs, and lived and died alone above its magic waters. There were
times when I should not have been surprised to hear the white Vila of
the ballads shriek from the mountains; and the tale of the two brothers,
as told by the boatman, explained the structure of the rocks better than
geology.

Upon that mountain-side there lived a man many years ago—who knows how
long. He was very rich. He had many hundreds of sheep; some
saythousands. When he died he left them to be divided between his two
sons. But the elder was a very wicked man. He took all the finest sheep,
and gave only a few that were weakly to the younger. Then God was angry
with the elder brother, and struck his flock with barrenness; but the
ewes of the younger all bore twins. Soon the flock of the elder was the
smaller of the two. In great wrath he sent for his brother, and demanded
to exchange flocks, and the younger refused. Then they fought on the
point of that great rock which you see above you. They fought all day
until they were both killed, and their blood ran down the cliff into the
lake, and the rocks are red to this day, as any man can see. 'If there
were only another Government here, how beautiful this lake might be !'
sighed my comrade. 'We might have a steamboat with coloured lights and a
band!'

One should even give the Devil his due; there is one point, and one
only, for which I am grateful to the Sultan: so long as he reigns there
will never be a road by which a trip tourist can get up-country, nor a
hotel in which he can stay and play 'Arry.
Ochrida, the town, is mean and squalid. The houses, though modern, have
a strangely medi?val appearance, for they are built of timber and
plaster with widely-projecting upper storeys, and in the a narrower
streets folk can almost shake hands with their neighbours over the way.
But they are for the most part nineteenth-century buildings hastily run
up. The lath and plaster work is of the most gimcrack sort, and tumbles
fast to pieces; the place is poor; few repairs are undertaken, and
modern ruins moulder on all sides. As for the streets, they are steep,
narrow, and crooked on the hillside in the Christian quarter, and rugged
with the usual Turkish pavement of odd-shaped stones jammed haphazard
together. When it rains it pours. Then garbage of every kind is hastily
shovelled into the street, and races down to the lake in stinking
torrents. After rain the people drink water that is turbid and yellow—
'la soupe dysenterique,' as the doctor pleasantly called it. It is not
surprising that Ochrida's death-rate is about four times that of London.
There are awful centralgutters, and black, unspeakable intervals haunted
by the unlaid ghosts of the stench of all the centuries; for it is an
old, old site, and is claimed by all the peoples of the Balkans with
such jealous ardour that I doubt, for example, if the Bulgars would
allow a single one even of its foul odours to date from anything but the
Great Bulgarian Empire.

It is a town in which you can scarcely look out of a window without
being suspected of doing it for political purposes; a town in which each
party strives to prevent your views from becoming 'prejudiced' by
telling you the 'truth' (that is, horrible tales) about everybody else.
I do not know a spot where 'earth hunger' can be better studied and
observed. At Resna I was only on the edge. At Ochrida I had a most
exhilarating feeling of being in the thick of the fray.

All the land around was a hell of misery! We lived on a thin crust of
quiet, beneath which surged a lava-bed of raw prim?val passions and
red-hot race hatreds into which no Power dare thrust its fingers for
fear of having them burnt off. It was a position of such absorbing
interest that, with apologies to my friends, I must confess I never
wanted either European comrades or books. Someone lent me a George
Meredith and a Maeterlinck, but, compared with the human documents
around, they were masses of dilute drivel, and unreadable. The study of
the forces that underlay the mass of surrounding suffering seemed the
only thing worth living for; its temporary relief but court-plaster on a
cancer.

War between Russia and Japan, not yet declared, was expected daily. I
had wandered about the Balkan Peninsula for four summers, and I had
struck recent Russian trails. I believed that the immediate history of
the Near East hung on the issue of the inevitable Far Eastern struggle,
and I waited to see which would draw first blood with almost savage
interest.

Ochrida is gloriously in the thick of things. It has belonged in turn to
everyone that has ruled in the Peninsula. First to Philip of Macedon and
Alexander the Great; then to Rome, when it was an important station on
the Via Egnatia. Rome, it is true, does not claim it now, but it lies
within Austria's possible line of march to Salonika, and Italy watches
her own and Albanian interests with a jealous eye. She has recently,
with great skill, planted her own gendarmerie officers in this district,
and by thus checking for the time being the designs of bothAustria and
Russia upon it, has caused them both to explain loudly to Europe that
they do not like having an Italian General at the head of the reform
scheme. Ochrida next was included in the Byzantine Empire. Then it was
part of Simeon's Big Bulgaria. It was even the capital of Samuel's
Western Bulgaria for seventeen years, and the residence of the Bulgarian
Patriarch. Therefore, say the Bulgars, it is clearly Bulgarian.

'But we took it then,' say the Greeks. ' We smashed your big Bulgaria,
and destroyed your Patriarchy. It was never re - established here.
Ochrida is clearly Greek.'

The Normans even held Ochrida for a little while, and they make
themselves quite peculiar by being the only ones of its former
possessors who do not hanker for it now. I am sure, if they only knew
it, they would like it, for the smaller towns of Normandy are the only
ones I know that at all approach it in filth.

Ochrida next belonged to the Despots of Epirus, whose principality,
together with North Albania, corresponds fairly well with modern
Albanian aspirations, for there is nothing new under the Balkan sun.
John Asen came along, and swept the whole territory, Despot and all,
into his Bulgar-Vlah Empire. And then it became Servian along with
almost all the rest of the Peninsula. Even after the fall of the Servian
Empire it formed part of the realm of the beloved Marko Kraljevich, and,
to come to quite modern days, Ochrida supplied a chieftain who fought
under Kara- george for the freeing of Servia. Moreover, the Slavs' were
there before ever the Bulgar arrived. Ochrida is, therefore, clearly
Servian. But if it comes to ar prior claim, the Illyrians were there
before anyone.Therefore Ochrida belongs to their descendants, the
Albanians. Moreover, it was held and fortified by the great Ali Pasha.
As we have seen, when Slav power waned the Albanians spread back over
the lands from which they had been driven, and regained power. Ochrida
has been more or less Albanian ever since, and, until quite lately, both
Ochrida and Presba were rightly described by travellersas the Albanian
lakes. Everyone's claim to Ochrida is perfectly clear, but no one else
will admit it. Meanwhile, Ochrida is the Sultan's—till the others agree
about it. Rather more than half the inhabitants are Moslem, mostly
Albanian, and possession is nine points of the law.

The situation would be farcical were it not so bloody. I vow the place
is dizzy with propaganda. Even the Vlahs, not to be out of the fashion,
have a church (a Greek one, that is) of their own here. The dear little
Vlahs! They claim no lands, but they keep planting little schools
wherever they go, and no one knows on which side they mean to play
ultimately. Meantime, they are as interesting and as valuable to all
parties as is the Irish vote at home, and everybody says fervently, 'For
Heaven's sake, don't let us quarrel with the Vlahs!' Even the Sultan,
aware that he exists on the differences of his Christian subjects, has
smiled upon them recently, and rather encourages their propaganda. As
there is money in it, we may confidently expect the number of Vlahs to
increase. I heard, for instance, of a priest who had been a Bulgarian
for years, but who has now discovered that he is really a Vlah. As the
Vlahs pay their priests at a higher rate, the discovery was a very
fortunate one for him.

The Vlahs are waiting to see 'which way the cat hops,' and meanwhile do
odd jobs all round. They did a certain amount of letter-carrying for the
Bulgars in the insurrection, but they live on very good terms with the
Albanians and Turks, and, I fancy, are likely to throw in their lot with
Albania ultimately.

Nor is this hurly-hurly of history and politics peculiar to Ochrida. It
is common, with variations, to every town of any importance in no man's
land. While this state of things continues it is useless for anyone to
put labour or money into any commercial enterprise. The population
lives, like Mr. Micawber, in a constant state of 'waiting for something
to turn up,' and, not unnaturally, becomes more and more demoralized.
Ochrida boasts of several antiquities all jealously (* On February 1,
1905, the Turkish Government granted permission to the Vlahs to have a
church in which their own language is used. This puts them politically
on a level with the Greeks and Bulgars, and is likely to have a marked
effect in Balkan politics) claimed by everyone. On the top of the hill
stands the fine old Byzantine red-brick church of St. Klima (Clement),
whose body is enshrined within. He was one of the seven wandering
priests from Thessalonica who bore Christianity into this wild land, and
converted the Slav peoples. His brethren are not far off. St. Naum
sleeps at the other end of the lake; the ruined church of St. Zaum on
the lakeside and the rockhewn chapel of St. Spaso (or Erasmo)
commemorate others, and bear witness to the fact that it was to Greece
primarily that the Slav peoples owed their civilization.

I was amazed to hear a tale that the church was a Bulgarian building of
the seventh century. The church itself said it was quite middle-aged,
and could not be earlier than the twelfth or thirteenth century, but I
had not the knowledge requisite for reading the inscriptions. Germans,
however, know everything, and from a heavy arch?ological work I have
since unearthed a translation:

'This church was built (rebuilt?) in the time of Andronikos Paleologos
and Irene and Makarios, Archbishop of Justiniana Prima and all Bulgaria,
in 1331.' It was probably rebuilt, and the fragments of marble in the
walls and some of the piers of the porch, which have 'Ravenna cushions,'
belonged to the earlier structure.

Justiniana Prima was the birthplace of Justinian, who was of Slavonic
blood. It was the seat of an Archbishop and of a Prefect. Its exact
situation is uncertain. Some have identified it with Ochrida itself or
with Struga; other authorities place it at Kostendil, near Sofia. The
occurrence of the name in this inscription, and the fact that it comes
before Bulgaria in the Bishop's title, is of very great interest. The
church is said to possess a valuable old library, notably a church codex
extending over very many years, an examination of which led Von Hahn to
doubt whether the Bulgarian tongue had ever again overpowered the Greek
in the church at Ochrida.

I was especially anxious to see the old Slavonic books, but though I
applied for permission the first week of my arrival, and both the Bishop
and his secretary said there would be no difficulty about it, I was put
off everyweek with most childish excuses, and in the end told I might
see only the catalogue. Such was the chattering and mystery about it
that I wondered at last whether the library, or the Slavonic part of it,
had secretly flitted to St. Petersburg, as so many others have done, and
should like to hear of someone who has seen it recently.

Down below, nearer the lake, defaced by a minaret, and much mutilated,
stands all that is left of Ochrida's old cathedral, St. Sofia. How much
truth there is in the tale that it is one of the many built by
Justinian, and contemporary with St. Sofia at Constantinople, I cannot
ascertain, but the body of the church, now used as a mosque, is
undoubtedly very old, and the eagles of Byzantium appear on the pavement.

The Hodja who admitted me told me of a miraculous oil that flows from a
certain stone, and also of a part of the roof which no one dare enter
for fear of a great evil befalling. It appears to be haunted by a
Christian ghost, who defends a little stronghold up aloft. Both miracles
maybe, are connected with its former use as a church. The few fragments
of fresco that remain are too faded to tell anything. The Hodja further
volunteered that he would have visited me, but feared, for in the
present state of things it was not safe for a Moslem to be friends with
a Christian. The trouble was all the fault of the Turks, who had treated
the Christians very badly. Whether this sentiment was intended to
increase his backshish or was genuine I do not know.
Joined to the main body of the church at the west end is a large
building, which seems to be a later addition. A long Greek inscription
in big brick letters forms a frieze, and has been deciphered as:
'Erecting this tent, he taught in all ways the divinely revealed law to
the people of Mysia. M?sia being the Roman name of Bulgaria and Servia,
this building must have been one of the early missionary schools for the
Slav people. It is used for military stores, and I could not go inside
it. On the hill to the west of the town in a ruined mosque, obviously
the remains of a very early church, and on the promontory is a
picturesque red-brick church, which is mediteval. None of these
buildings, to my mind, belong to Dushan's days.

The last and most disputed of all Ochrida's monuments are the great
walls and castle which in old days guarded it from land attack. Massive
andmajestic, they are built of large irregular gray stones, with round
towers, heavy square buttresses, and barrel vaulted gateways. And
nowhere is there any inscription to fix the date. I took a daily tramp,
to blow away the hospital iodoform with which I reeked, and climbed,
scrambled, nosed, and prodded all over the ruins, except the eastern
part, which was occupied by the garrison, and forbidden ground.

The height of the hill, its position at the lakeside, and its very steep
slopes make it a place which the first man who came along would choose
as a stronghold; and it has been fortified since Roman days. Boue',
indeed, in the forties found two Roman statues and a Latin inscription
in the eastern castle. The mass of the present buildings are probably
medi?val, and founded at the beginning of the eleventh century, when
Ochrida was for some years the capital of Western Bulgaria. But such an
important site would have been strengthened by each conqueror in turn,
and the present remains are doubtless partly Servian, Turkish, and Albanian.

Much of the rough, irregular masonry is like that of the castle at
Uzhitza, in Servia, and Tsar Lazar's tower at Krushevatz. The Bulgarian
yarn that it, as well as St. Klima, is Bulgarian work of the seventh
century, can be put forward only by a people who have still very much to
learn about architecture and other things.

I called on the Bulgarian Bishop once, when his table was adorned with a
large white sugar church, a hideous caricature of Gothic style. It was,
he said, a correct model of the church of the Exarchate at
Constantinople. So childishly delighted was he with his new toy that,
when he said the church was made entirely of iron, and there was nothing
like it in all England, I agreed, and did not add, 'God forbid !' He
then grew eloquent, and declared that to Bulgaria alone of all the other
nations had there come the great idea of building churches of iron! He
defied me to mention another example.

I told him of the ordinary corrugated iron affairs, and explained that
they were not similarly magnificent, for I was far from wishing to hurt
his feelings. But at the mention of any other iron structure he lost his
temper.

'His Grace,' said his secretary, who spoke English, 'says that what you
sayis quite untrue. In no other land has another iron church ever been
seen.'

It was a frontal attack, but I did not want to fight; I looked at the
bastard Gothic edifice, bred of Bulgars and cast-iron, and saw it was an
allegory of ?progress.'

Alas for Western ideas planted untimely upon Eastern soil! Perhaps the
greatest foes of the Balkan peoples are those well-meaning people who
wish to hurry them on.

It was very obvious, within a week of my arrival at Ochrida, that all
parties except the Bulgar were not a little anxious lest the British
relief work meant that Great Britain would ultimately support Bulgarian
claims. Greek and Serb lost no time in assuring me that, sooner than be
handed over to Bulgarian rule, they would remain Turk. Then, at any
rate, there would be some hope of getting their rights in the end. The
Greeks, if they could not have the land themselves, would prefer it to
be Servian, and the Serbs similarly made no objection to the Greeks. The
Serbs received me with enthusiasm. They said I ' understood' them and at
the feast of St. Sava they photographed me with the school-children in
the middle of a Servian group, a copy of which, inscribed to 'Her
Excellency,' I still possess. I was the only person at this 'slava ' who
had been to the shrine of St. Sava's father, St. Simeon, and this was
rather a feather in my cap.

A Greek told me that the Greeks were very pleased about this photograph,
and it was soon clear that the Bulgars were not. They used to ask to see
it when they called on me, and it made them snort. The virulence of the
Bulgar party against the Serbs, with whom for all reasons they should be
allied, disgusted me extremely.

'I teach the children to be Servian patriots,' said the active little
Servian schoolmaster to me; 'their parents are Serb, and they wish their
children also to be Serb, but unluckily this is only an elementary
school. Those who cannot afford to go elsewhere to finish their
education must finish in the Bulgarian as a photographer, and then went
through Servia as a strolling player. One day he wrote and demanded more
cash. He had already got through a gooddeal, and old P. refused to
supply any more. The son thereupon returned to Ochrida minus a
'teskereh' (permit to travel). There is, of course, a penalty attached
to this. Great excitement Old P. refuses to pay.

Enter gendarmes, who arrest son. Son halts in street, vows vengeance,
and swears to burn down the paternal establishment. Son removed
swearing. Then old P., seriously alarmed, hastens to the Kaimmakam (the
representative of the Government, against which he and his party have
been industriously conspiring), and prays him on no account to release
his son at Ochrida, but, when his term of imprisonment has expired, to
let him loose in some distant spot where he cannot slay his father. And
the Kaimmakam kindly consents. In Turkey prisoners fare but leanly. It
is customary for their families to supply them with clothes and extra
food. Old P. cheerfully declines to do anything of the sort, and when I
meet him a few days later is in a remarkably fine state of preservation,
and as jovial as ever. In spite of his patriotism, he has no kind of
shame about exposing his family squabbles to the enemy. Under the
Kaimmakam's protection, he goes on cheerfully humming the popular
patriotic street-song of the day. This, in fact, was the only way in
which he and others displayed their 'patriotism,' and the authorities
listened calmly with a fine air of 'It amuses them, and it does not hurt
us.'

I was unlucky everywhere in the types of 'Bulgarian patriots' I met.
They quite decided me that if Ochrida were mine to give away they would
be the very last people upon whom I would bestow it. And the cultivated
and courteous Albanian Kaimmakam sat in the 'konak' and ruled this
menagerie with considerable tact. He deprecated all European
intervention, but afforded us every facility for relief work, though I
gathered from some remarks he let fall that he did not entirely approve
of it. Nor was it likely he should, for every Albanian hopes that
Ochrida will be his in the end as it was in the beginning, and no
support of the loudly-advertised Bulgarian claim is likely to meet with
Albanian approval. If the peasants had any complaints to make, he said
they should come straight to him, and not to relief agents. Like 'le bon
Dieu,' he was accessible to everyone all day long, and an intermediary
priest was no more necessarv than he was in every sensible man's religion.

Bishops in Turkey are very much fishers of men, and to place Bishops is
the chief aim of each party. Bulgaria planted one in Ochrida about
twelve years ago; therefore of all the Christian factions the Bulgarian
is now the largest. My work entirely concerned this, and brought me into
contact with both its leaders and its rank and file. The latter crowded
our premises daily for relief, and I was also in charge of them at the
hospital.

The care of the hospital, started for the wounded by Mrs. Brailsford,
and the visiting of all the sick refugees in the town, took up the
greater part of my time. Surgery can be as interesting as politics, and
the wrestle with disease as exciting as circumventing the Turks.
Suppurating gunshot wounds, which were what we chiefly had in the
hospital, were a quite new experience to me, and I found them most
fascinating. Nevertheless, as they do not appeal to the general public,
the hospital work, except inasmuch as it throws light on the manners and
customs of the people, is better omitted here. But I owe a passing
tribute to the skill and perseverance of our young Greek doctor, an
Athens-trained man, to whose untiring care the patients were very much
more indebted than they had any idea of.

Here, as well as round Resna, chronic dyspepsia was rife among the
Christian peasants. Hot bread, red pepper, raw cabbage, and the passion
for sour food is quite enough to account for it without taking into
consideration the enormous amount of alcohol consumed. So great, I was
told, is the love of sour food that dilute oxalic acid, when obtainable,
is used as a flavouring. Every day, and especially bazar-day, brought
out-patients to see the 'hakimo,' and 'My belly aches ' was their usual
complaint. 'How long has your belly ached?' brought an answer that
varied from 'Always' or 'Fifteen years' to 'Four or five years.' They
all gave similar accounts of their diet, and were angry if advised to
change it.

Scrofulous and tuberculous subjects were very common; enlarged and
broken glands in neck and armpits, white tumours in knee and other
joints, and very many cases of diseased bone, especially in the hands
and feet. These for the most part were too advanced for anything but
amputation, and that no one would hear of. I believe the cutting off of
heads is the only form that is common in Turkey, and can be performed
without fear of scandal. Overcrowding—for sixteen or twenty people think
nothing of sleeping in one room if they can crowd into it, and this from
choice, not necessity—filth, and the intermarriage of diseased subjects
is working far more havoc among the Christian peasants than are the Turks.

People would insist on keeping limbs that were mere black and offensive
lumps of suffering. But though they could only sit in a corner and die
of slow poisoning, nothing would induce them to part with a limb, or a
portion of one. At the suggestion of amputation all the relatives set up
loud shrieks. When told death was the alternative, they cried, 'Let him
die if it is his Kismet!' and the patient echoed the sentiment. The poor
wretch had usually come a long day's ride on a pack-animal, and the only
thing we could do was to pay his fare back. He invariably preferred
death to mutilation. It was a dree scene enough: the man, long, lean,
and pallid, with black, sad, sunken orbits, who clung with both hands to
his discoloured and suppurating limb, crying, 'Leh! leh! leh! let me
die! let me die!' as he sat in a heap on the floor of a dirty hovel, and
his friends chorused round him. I remember several such.

One day a hump-backed woman appeared. She was terribly distressed when
told we could do nothing for her, and burst into tears. I was surprised,
for it was a case of spinal disease that probably dated from childhood.

She explained that, if we could not cure her, her husband would divorce
her. I asked how this was possible, and was told that a divorce could be
bought for a small fee from the Bishop. None of the women attendants
seemed to think it at all out of the way, and the episode produced a
crop of anecdotes about Bishops of a most unholy nature.

One odd superstition, for which I cannot account, is that it is fatal
for the wounded to taste fish. The wound will never heal. The lake
supplied magnificent trout, but not one of our wounded dared touch it.
Two refused fowl for the same reason. Most wore amulets. One boy wore an
old silver Slavonic coin which I wanted to buy. He consulted his family,
forhe was afraid to sell it. They decided that it was on no account to
be parted with. As a matter of curiosity, I asked them to name a price,
and, to my surprise, was told that they would not sell on any terms, as
it had cured many people.

There are also some peculiar customs about the wearing of finger-rings.
Village women who have brothers wear their ring on the first finger;
those who have not wear it on the middle finger. They regarded this as
important, but there seemed to be no particular custom as to where a
wedding-ring should be worn.

Marriage is apt to be a vague and floating sort of affair. Many women
had not heard of their husbands for years, the gentlemen in question
having gone to Roumania or Bulgaria in search of work. It was taken for
granted that they had all married again, and would never come back.
Their wives, however, were unable to follow their example, as divorces
are not sold to women. The women employed as servants in the hospital
were all in this unpleasant predicament, and, on the strength of it,
asked me almost every day to make them presents with the frankness and
pertinacity of young children. Their very rudimentary minds were an odd
compound of childish simplicity and animal craftiness, but a craftiness
that was apt to fail because there was no intelligence behind it. The
study of it amused me exceedingly. If I dropped in at an unexpected
hour, I almost always had to 'tell them they must not.' Then they said,
first, that they had not been doing it; secondly, that it was what they
always did; thirdly, that the doctor had told them to; fourthly, that
they did not know what had been ordered; and, lastly, that they had been
just about to carry out the orders when I had arrived. Then we all
laughed, for they did not in the least mind being found out, and the
original order was fulfilled in the end. Their inability to learn was
noteworthy. The doctor used an ordinary douche that had an indiarubber
tube with a tap at the end. It was used every day for five months, but
they never succeeded in learning how to turn the tap off, let alone in
perceiving whether it were 'on' or ?off.' They persistently filled it
when turned on unless the sharpest eye was kept on them, and then
shrieked and squirted dilute carbolic about, crying 'Stop it ! stop it !'

They seemed to have the intelligence of tortoises, and I began to
believe that if their brains were extracted they would go on boiling
onions by reflex action.

It would have been no use getting rid of them, for they were fair
average specimens. The native can be obstinate, but so also can the
Briton, and by persistent efforts I got the rooms cleaned, the bandages
boiled, the muckremoved, and the odours mitigated with chloride of lime,
and a pleasing atmosphere of iodoform. But it was a matter of daily
hammering.

One day, ten days after I arrived, we had quite an excitement. A whole
ward went out on strike, and said it would not be cleaned again. Neither
would it have the window open. Even Vasilika, the head attendant, was on
the side of the patients. 'They did not like having the room cleaned,'
she said; 'it was a thing they were not accustomed to, and they had
quite decided that in future a gentle sweeping was all that the room
should have.' I pointed out that even this detail had been omitted.
There was a grand chattering. The patients threatened to leave. I said
they might, and started the cleaning operations at once. Of course, none
of them did leave. They squatted happily round the fire in Vasilika's
room; we got rid of the rich monkey-house odour which they treasured,
and they never struck again.

Patients safely inside the hospital could be tackled. Out-patients in
the town were a far harder task; if they were very bad I had to go more
than once a day, for, like animals, these people, when they feel ill,
will make no effort at all to take food, and their friends make no
attempt to give them any, but let them die of exhaustion. They did not
even lift the patient's head by way of helping him. In order to prove to
me that he really required no food, they poured something into his
mouth, and triumphed when he choked, and both patient and friends
assured me he was about to die. I had to go round resuscitating people
with raw eggs, milk, broth, etc. It is a simple matter to beat up an egg
in England and give it to an invalid. Here, however, no one possesses
either a vessel in which to beat it nor anything to beat it with. The
whole family drinks from a great earthen jar with a spout, and eats out
of a large bowl, and has neither cup, glass, nor small basin. Fingers
and a clasp-knife and huge wooden ladles are the only table implements,
and I had to take round the necessary 'plant.'

The comic element in the midst of all this was supplied by the
'doctoress,' a stout and very voluble lady whose handsome fur-lined coat
and general air of well-being spoke of a remunerative practice. She was,
of course, the be^te noire both of our doctor and of the municipal
doctor, for she claimed all the cures and credited them with an
appalling death-rate, and a ceaseless war raged between them. She had an
infallible ointment for everything, especially cancer. We kept her out
of the hospital, but she gotat the out-patients and killed a case of
typhoid by filling it with parboiled horse-beans. Women of this sort
practise in most of the villages. They had 'first go' at most of the
wounds, which only came on to us when they were nice and septic, and we
were then asked to pay the doctoress's bill, which was often heavy.

The municipal doctor had a rusty set of instruments in a dirty case, a
truly alarming sight, but I think they were more for show than use. His
position was an unenviable one. He was supposed to receive ?T6 a month
to attend the poor of the district, but he only got ?T4, and that at
irregular intervals, and after he had signed a receipt for ?T6.

Turkish Government appointments are unsatisfactory things to hold,
except for the pickings, and there are not many to be gathered by a
medical man in a poor district. However, he did his best. When the
English reported small-pox, and intimated it was a complaint that
required fussing about, the Turkish officials, who had previously
ignored it, announced suddenly that they were about to start small-pox
hospitals. They collected a few cases and put them in a house in the
town, but, of course, made no pretence at isolation or anything European
of that sort. The poor 'municipal' had to attend them all, included in
his ?T4. This did not suit him at all. So, when the first batch was
worked off, he made an inspection in the neighbourhood, and found no more.

Now, the 'municipal' was also public vaccinator. There are public
vaccinators in most towns, I believe; their chief drawback is that they
have no vaccine; so, though the people are willing, and even anxious, to
be vaccinated, few are. The municipal really could not be expected to
throw in vaccine along with medical attendance for ?T4. The people
therefore brought their children to us, saying that their next-door
neighbours had small-pox, and revealed the true state of affairs. But
there was nothing to be gained by causing more cases to be stored in the
town in a Turkish, haphazard manner, so our doctor did a large quantity
of vaccinations, and we left the municipal to make up his ?T6 by
attending people in their own houses.

His methods formed a half-way house between those of the doctoress and
the properly-qualified Greek, an odd mixture of the various
mysteriousointments beloved of the people and recent inventions. He had
a perfect passion for antitoxin, even when it was three years old and
thick. There was a good deal of diphtheria about, so we sorted out all
the swaddled-up throats at once from the crowd of out-patients. The fame
of the injection had already spread, and people used to ask to 'be given
the needle.'

Their necks were generally stained with purple ink. The priest writes a
text on two pieces of paper, which are applied, ink downwards, on each
side of the throat and bandaged on. They infallibly cure an ordinary
'sore throat' in a fortnight or so. 'Neck' and 'throat' are the same in
the local dialect. Sometimes 'My neck hurts' meant inflamed glands. One
woman was told to come next day to have them opened. She met the
'municipal,' the rival practitioner, outside.

'Neck hurts ? Diphtheria,' said the municipal, and without further
investigation he took her off and made an injection, and we saw her no more.

Filled with pride for his superior powers of diagnosis, he came and told
us. He and our man had words on the subject. A day or two afterwards the
municipal announced that, as the glands had broken of themselves, and an
operation had been avoided, his treatment was undoubtedly correct, and
that antitoxin was wonderful stuff.

Medicine under the Turkish Government is very odd, but then, so are most
things.

Wherever I went I tried to interview the doctors. At one place I met a
man who had been trained in Berlin. He was in great despair. All his
things, including a good microscope and an electrical apparatus, had
been confiscated on the frontier. His most important medical books he
had recovered by paying full value for them. His electrical apparatus
was refused, because such a thing had never been used before, so why
now? The microscope he was to have when the authorities had satisfied
themselves it was not dangerous. This was three years ago, and after
repeatedly applying for it, he had given up all hope.

'Alles ist verloren !' he cried—'alles, alles! All my bacteriology
study—everything! It is a lost land. What can I do here? Give quinine to
a fever the nature of which I am not permitted to investigate!'

I was not surprised when he told me he was leaving shortly, and hoped
never to return. If the Government had spent only half the energy in
encouraging knowledge that it has in suppressing it, I really think
Turkey might be one of the best-informed nations in Europe.

The Turk will set his back to the wall and die hard, but he will never
learn. 'Alles ist verloren.' The only thing that can develope freely is
evil.

Among the refugees in the town was an unhappy little boy dangerously ill
of typhoid fever. His village was burnt, his father had been shot, and
he had no relatives but a devoted little sister of about sixteen. She,
poor child ! against all orders, gave him the coveted delicacy,
'koniad,' to eat. He had a violent relapse; all our efforts to save him
were in vain, and a few nights later the long-drawn wails of his sister
and the old women of the neighbourhood shrilled weirdly in the dark. He
was dead. The little sister was bitterly distressed, and had no friends
to help her. I paid for the dish of boiled wheat which she believed a
necessary aid to his soul's salvation, and, learning it was the proper
thing to do, I advised the Bishop at once, that a priest might be sent.

The old women and the little sister waited by the corpse, and no priest
came. I sent again. Finally, after fruitless waiting, to his sister's
distress he was buried priestless. I had been anxious not to add to the
troubles of these poor people by trampling on their religious
prejudices, and had mismanaged the affair hopelessly. The explanation
was volunteered at once.

'When you sent for a priest you forgot to tell the Bishop you would pay
for him.' Alas ! it was true. On a third and revised message a priest
was forthcoming, who read the correct prayers. He was drunk, but that
was a matter of detail.

Every Saturday there was a little crowd up at the church, in front of
which is a stone table, where folk commemorated their dead by eating
boiled wheat, handfuls of which they offered to the passers-by, for here
the funeral feast does not, as in Servia, take place on the grave. But
the people, for the most part, took little apparent interest in
church-going. I suggested to such of our patients as could walk that
they might go to church, but they never did, nor did any priest visit
them. It was not til Lent that the power of the Church appeared. Sunday,
February 21, was the last day of Carnival. This isusually celebrated by
a good deal of gaiety and dressing-up, but this year, naturally, there
were no rejoicings.

The two correct things to do were to wash your head and to eat 'komad.'
My landlady appeared in the morning without her sham pigtails and with
her locks dripping. She was rather upset to find me dryheaded, and
seemed to think I had lost the only chance of a wash for the year. The
hospital patients had a head-wash, and I found them all agog for
dinner-time and 'komad.' The doctor had gone round with me the day
before, and had sorted out those who might eat this delectable delicacy
from those who might not. It was impossible to forbid 'komad'
altogether, for 'komad ' eating was the one religious observance that
interested everyone. Vasilika was given strict orders. You might,
however, as well give orders to a cat. They all had 'komad.'

Next day our convalescent typhoid, whose temperature had been normal for
three days, was in high fever, and so it was with three other patients.
They were much surprised when accused of 'komad,' and wondered how the
doctor had found out.

We 'went for' Vasilika. She was very pleased with herself, and said they
had had their 'komad ' in spite of us. Nor, unless I had stayed in the
hospital all day and all night, could I have prevented this. Even then
they would no doubt have eaten 'komad' in one room while I was in
another. But I am afraid it cost the typhoid man his life.

That was the end of Carnival. We began a fortyeight days' fast. On the
first day nothing at all is eaten till evening; after that there is
complete abstinence from all animal food. Even olive oil is only allowed
twice a week, and not at all in the first week. Diet was limited to
bread, onions, and dried beans. Beans should be very nourishing, but it
is the custom here to only partially boil them. After a heavy feed on
'komad,' a day's abstinence, and (literally) a 'blow-out' of parboiled
beans, 'belly-ache' became epidemic among the out-patients. As to the
hospital patients, I was on the edge of despair, for they all appeared
to be about to commit suicide under my eyes. The low diet told upon them
almost at once; wounds ceased healing, andsuppuration that had almost
ceased began again merrily. Even the arguments of the doctor, who
belonged to the Greek Church, were of no avail. One or two consented to
take broth, chiefly because they did not consider it food, and we gave a
few doses of cod-liver oil under the name of physic, but milk and eggs
were totally barred. Some sat up and prayed, with tears in their eyes,
not to be made to break the fast, saying the food would go bad in their
insides, and such was their nervous terror that it probably would have
done so. To add to the difficulty, Vasilika and all the attendants were
on the fasting side, and set their energies resolutely to thwart the doctor.

There was an unhappy little boy of four whose foot had been shattered
with a Martini ball. A fortnight before I had with difficulty kept him
alive by pouring milk down his throat, for he was too weak to move, and
refused all food. When the fast started he had just begun to eat with
appetite, but liked only soup and meat. His mother then said that I had
saved him once, and might give him what I pleased, soup, milk, and all.
But I had to ask every day if he had had it.

No, he had had nothing at all since yesterday.

'Why not?'

'Vasilika says there is none to-day.'

Then to the kitchen. Vasilika all smiles.

'Why has not Jonche had his soup ?'

'Because there is none, lady; it is not required. There are plenty of
beans.'

'You have been told to make soup every day.'

'It is impossible. There is no meat in the Christian shops.'

I sent Leonidas out to buy some in the Turkish bazar, and returned in an
hour to see if the soup was being made.

'No.'

Then the same story: 'There is no meat, but plenty of beans. Also we
have asked Jonche, and he says he is not hungry.'

I sent for a Moslem fowl, and Jonche got his soup at last.

To add to my difficulties, the result of low diet was that everyone
craved for and obtained raw spirits.

I was on friendly terms with the Bulgarian Bishop, and went to petition
him. I explained that I was not a missionary, and did not wish to go
against anyone's religion. What was his rule about food under these
circumstances, and would he relax it for a few cases that the doctor
considered urgent?

The Bishop folded his hands upon his stomach, gazed at the ceiling, and
delivered his episcopal opinion with an unctuous piety that was a
dramatic masterpiece.

Faith, he said, was better than food. Judging by his well-nourished
appearance, his faith, I redected, must be really very great. For his
own part, he could not imagine that milk was of any importance if the
people truly believed. I did not like to suggest to His Grace that he
had, as yet, taken no steps to promote belief among them—for he had
never either visited them himself or sent a priest—but I thought about
it. For his own part, he said, he did not believe in doctors. You got
well or you did not according to the will of God. He was sorry that
money which might have been spent in helping 'the cause' should have been
wasted on a hospital. After a little more I perceived that the root of
the matter was the usual 'Burden of the Balkans.' The doctor was a
Greek! His Grace, however, ended by saying that he would send a priest
to convince such patients, for whom it was really necessary, that the
fast might be broken. But he never did.

However, to my relief, most of the patients succumbed by degrees to the
attractions of animal food. The few who bravely persisted suffered in
consequence, and, in the end, I was sorry to leave one girl unhealed,
who previous to the fast had been mending steadily and well. But enough
of hospitals.

The sick I visited. The sound visited me. The relief lists here had been
all drawn up previous to my arrival, but this made no difference in the
mass of applicants; if anything, it increased them. The yard was full of
them daily, and they called me their 'golden sister.' Plainer and
heavier built than the Presba women, with faces like Dutch cheeses, they
prolonged their draggled pigtails with string or wool, and ornamented
them at the ends with old brass buttons, obsolete Austrian coins, bits
of steel chain, or the handle of a broken pair of scissors.

'Give, give, give!' they cried from morning till night.

'I have received nothing,' says one, throwing her arms round me—'
nothing at all ! Oh, my golden sister, tell them to give to me!'

I take the name of her village. It has been burnt; she is on the list.
'Thou hast received flour.' She admits it reluctantly. Her ticket shows
she has also had a blanket and a 'mintan' (wadded coat). This, too, she
admits. But all these were given her by another madama.' This one
(myself) has given her nothing—nothing at all. She expects a new outfit
from me. 'To-day thou hast taken flour for a month! Go, there is no more
for thee.' She is very indignant. Someone else has had wool for socks or
linen for a shirt. She is well clad, but she has made up her mind to
have what the other woman has had, and is left declaiming. When I return
at mid-day she will begin again, 'Another woman has had,' etc. Very few
families get more than their share—their neighbours see to that; but it
is impossible to see that the right member of a family gets the garment,
for the stronger ones annex them.

The able-bodied press forward; I search in the background for the aged
and infirm. Some of these, who are not on the list—for their villages
are not burnt—are more grateful for a small gift of flour than are those
who have been receiving it for weeks. One poor old lady crossed herself
and threw up her hands heavenward before shouldering her little sack,
and some murmured blessings. Two stout and dumpy brides whose marriage
coffers had been looted were so overcome with the gift of a length of
good cloth apiece that one burst into tears, and both were loud in their
thanks. Most, I am sorry to say, on receiving a gift, asked for another.

Twice I was asked for help by women who said their husbands had been
roasted to death in the oven by soldiers. 'Like bread!' added a man who
thought I did not understand. The ovens are large buildings separate
from the houses, and are heated by burning wood inside them. The tale
was a possible one, and their manner of telling it inclined me to
belief, for medi?val manners prevail in this land. Of excessive flogging
inflicted during the search for hidden weapons I had plenty of evidence.

And the terror that the Moslems have of a Christian rising will drive
them to great lengths in order to suppress it. It is indeed a wonder
that any Christian village was left standing. If they cannot get what
they want at the depot, my 'golden sisters' track me to the hospital,
and appear as out-patients. They say they have a pain. When this
statement breaks down under the doctor's examination, they say it is not
the 'hakim' they want, but 'madama'; they have a ticket for flour, and
my servant has refused to give them any. They shout, cry, and all talk
at once.

An examination of their tickets shows that a week ago they received
flour for a month. They must wait for three more bazar days. This has
already been explained to them at the depot, but we explain it all over
again. They begin again: 'Listen, my golden sister: I have a ticket for
flour, but your servant will not give it to me.' More explanations; but
you might as well argue with a cow. Before you have finished speaking
they begin again: 'My golden sister, I have come for flour,' etc. After
three or four more explanations I tell them to go.

They squat on the ground, and prepare to spend the day. They admit that
they have plenty of flour at home, but they know we have flour in the
depot, so they mean to have more; and there they squat, and begin again
every time I pass, till it is time to return to their village.

Their slow-wittedness and inability to grasp a new idea is almost
incredible, their dogged obstinacy even more so. They will probably
return every week until the flour is again due. When the doctor has
written a prescription and given his instructions, trouble is apt to
begin. All his eloquence sometimes fails to make the patient understand
that she must take the paper to the pharmacy and get the 'bilka' there.
She does not know where the pharmacy is. It is in the bazar, where the
folk of her village are now selling firewood. She has only to go to the
bazar, and anyone can point it out to her. 'My golden brother,' she
begins (this to the doctor), 'I have come for bilka; you have given me
only paper,' etc. Benewed explanations. She is to go straight to the
bazar; she leaves reluctantly.

When all the work is finished at the hospital I return to my quarters
for lunch. There she is, squatting in the yard, with her prescription
still in her hand. She has not been to the bazar—not she— though she
will have to go there in the end on her way home. She has come straight
to the depot, and she begins at once: 'Listen, my golden sister. I am a
poor woman. I have come for bilka,' etc. Not all the eloquence of two
interpreters, my landlady, her neighbours, and her mother, can make some
women understand.

Their male-folk are only a fraction more intelligent, but, under orders,
carrying and dealing out flour-sacks, they worked hard and well. They
usually sent their women out to do the begging. My dealings with them
were mainly political; and whenever I got the chance I tried to point
out to them that the expected rising must not take place.

After what I had seen and heard, it seemed to me that they possessed
about as much power of military organization as guinea-pigs, and that if
another insurrection took place on the lines of the last they would be
slaughtered wholesale; for both Greek and Serb, alarmed lest a new
rising should cause Europe to support Bulgarian aspirations, and in many
cases maddened by having blackmail forced from them, would probably aid
in suppressing it. Also, unless the country remained fairly quiet, the
Turkish troops could not be withdrawn, and it would be impossible to get
the reform scheme into working order.

Not that I greatly believed it was meant to succeed by either Austria or
Russia, but because I hoped that other Powers might enforce it in spite
of them. And I looked forward vainly to the day when a French, Italian,
or British officer should ride into the town. A Russian would only mean
more Pan-Slavonic money and extension of Russianinfluence (for at this
time the Japanese War was but just begun, and the drain on Russian
finances not marked), and as for an Austrian, he would only help to
smooth the road from Vienna to Salonika.

The peasants here also were torn between fear of the Turks and of the
'Committee.' A man came one day and asked me to take charge of a lot of
ammunition. He was tired of living in hiding with it, and wished to
return to work, and did not know what to do. If he gave it up to the
Kaimmakam the Committee would kill him; if the Turks found it in his
possession they might kill him. He thought it would be safe with me. I
was to hand it back again if wanted. I was sorry for him, but could not
turn our premises into a storehouse for the Committee.

Politics here cover a multitude of sins. One night a man turned up
mysteriously. In his village there were three traitors. Before anything
further could be done they must be destroyed. They could not be shot,
for this would probably bring down the authorities, and it was
impossible to buy poison because the law on the sale of it was very
strictly enforced. (This is interesting, as it shows that it is possible
to enforce a law in Turkey when expedient.) But 'madama' (myself) was a
friend of the doctor. No doubt if she asked him he would write her
something that could be put in coffee. Then the three gentlemen could be
asked to supper, and their political differences quietly arranged. Nor
had he any doubt that I should fulfil this humble request. An episode
such as this is vividly interesting. It is possible to ride hastily
through the Balkan Peninsula and credit the people with Western
twentiethcentury feelings. A short residence among them reveals the
Middle Ages, their sentiments, morals, and point of view, all preserved
alive by the overlaying stratum of Oriental rule.

There was a man in the town, a refugee from over Dibra way. When he was
sober he talked Slav, but when he was drunk enough to straddle on his
heels, which was not infrequently, he talked Albanian. He was a
Bulgarian patriot. One day he came and begged my protection. Some
soldiers had threatened last night to kill him. 'Why did the soldiers
want to kill him ?' I asked. ' Because they suspected him.' 'What of,
and why?' Then he related with pride that he was the man who had made
the poisoned bread that had killed fifteen Turkish soldiers. I advised
him to clear out, saying that if he did such things I could not possibly
help him. He was astonishedthat I was not aware of his great
achievement, and still more so that I did not admire it. This was just
before I left Ochrida, so I never knew if he took my advice. Later I
learnt whence the poison had beenobtained, and also that few, if any, of
the soldiers, had really died, though they had all been very ill.

This type of patriot I had no sympathy for, but there were other poor
fellows for whom I was very sorry. They had lost their all, and
possessed only paper notes given them in exchange for their corn and
cattle impounded by the Committee. This was in-
genious, as it gave the Committee a lever for raising another revolt,
for the notes are not payable till Macedonia is free.

Meantime, what were they to do? Would I cash the notes? A patient in the
hospital treasured one in a knot in his handkerchief. It was a printed
form, signed by the leader of a band who had made him kill three oxen
and turn 'chetnik.' The note was for ?5, but the man vowed his cattle
had been worth ?12. Fortunately, he added, he had not had to fight, as
he had been left as a reservist elsewhere, and the fight had taken place
while he was away, but the village and all his goods were burnt.

Daily I marvelled more at the crass stupidity of the Turkish Government.
Such a very little common-sense and ordinary justice would have saved
all this trouble. The Christian peasant here is not a fighting man; if
he were allowed to till his fields in peace without having more than the
legitimate tax raised off his labour, and were guaranteed the security
of himself and his women, revolutions are the last things he would be
likely to undertake.

Of the outside world he is absolutely ignorant— so ignorant that it was
impossible to make a deputation from a village understand that English
or Italian officers were expected at Monastir soon who would ride about
the country and see that justice was done. They had heard of Russians,
but of no other foreigners. Then the interpreter suggested 'kaurski'
officers—that is, giaours, unbelievers— and they grasped that the
officers would not be Turks, and cheered up. All that the peasant knows
is that his life is wretched under the present state of things.
Oppressed by the Government and terrorized by the Committee, he rises,
and will continue to rise so long as there is anything left of him, and
he is used, poor wretch ! as the cat's-paw to help some Power or other
extract territory from the burning. That he rose on behalf of Bulgaria
is owing to the fact that the Bulgar party, though Bulgaria is a poor
country, has for the last thirty years outbid easily all others. He
would have risen as willingly for Servia or Greece had they been able to
finance the matter as liberally. When Von Hahn visited Ochrida in 1868
he found one Slav school and four Greek, and the people expressed their
preference for the Greek party. Since then money has been poured into
the land with a lavishness that is amazing. It comes from 'outside,' and
is paid to the Exarch Josef. Or it is a handsome present from the
Russian Consul to the neighbourhood. It is called 'Pan-Slavonic,' but it
works against the Serb, who is as Slav as anybody. I remembered the
bitter cry of Servia as I had heard it eighteen months before: 'Europe
did not consider us as peoples; she mapped the Balkan Peninsula out into
spheres of influence, and we are in the Austrian sphere.'

At Ochrida it was certainly not the Austrian sphere that I was in. The
dismay of the people on learning that Russia was not conquering speedily
was great. Japanese victories were following one another in quick
succession. The local outbreak that had been promised for the end of
March was put off. All I could learn from the villagers was that they
had had no orders and did not know, and there were only two small bands
in the neighbourhood.

Once troops were sent out to search Vekchani for band of twenty-five.
The soldiers, who have a poor time in garrison, made, it seems, a sort
of picnic of the affair, and were entertained by the Moslem part of the
village with coffee and 'tambooras' (guitars) and sing-song. They came
back empty-handed. A rumour reached Monastir that an affair with troops
had taken place. The foreign Consuls made inquiries, and the Vali, not
unnaturally, refused to give any details of the affair. After this the
'cheta' was spoken of as very powerful, and my landlady, Maria, told me
triumphantly that it had consisted of no less than 250 men, who had all
escaped.

Talk turned on 'chetas.'

'Do you know what they are doing?' asked Achilles bitterly.

I did not.

'They are killing Greeks,' he said fiercely.

'Killing Greeks!' said I in amazement.

'Yes,' he replied; 'they are not fighting Turks, but Greeks. They go
armed to a village, and they offer the people a petition to sign. It is
to ask for a Bulgar priest, and to say they are Bulgars. They do not
wish to change their priest, but if they do not sign they will be shot!
We Greeks have had enough of this. I myself have had to give money to
them. Otherwise I should have been shot from behind a wall the first
time my business took me outside the town. Now we have sworn an oath we
will stand it no longer. We shall organize Greek bands, and for every
Greek that is shot we shall kill ten Bulgars.' He stripped his right arm
and slapped it dramatically. 'With this arm I will myself do it,' he
said fiercely, 'car vous savez, mademoiselle, nous autres, nous sommes
aussi un peu extraordinaire!'

Nor has there been another attack upon the Moslems, but the Bulgars have
occupied themselves throughout the summer by making attacks upon Greek
villages, which the Greeks have continued to avenge. My life, in fact,
at Ochrida was no more dull than a 'penny dreadful.' Something lively
happened in each chapter.

I tried to get it in the Greek, the Bulgar, and the Turkish edition;
also in the Albanian and Serb if possible, and there was a perfect
library of tales all quite different. Then at night, when it was dark
outside, and the night-watchman cheerfully went tap taptapping round the
town with a staff and a lantern, I squatted by the stove and compared
the lot with the accounts given in the English papers I received now and
again.

Something happens—the Lord alone knows what. It appears a different
colour to each beholder. The report of it floats through bazars and
gathers additions; it reaches a town, and is black or white, small or
gigantic, according to the nationality which retails it to the
correspondent, also in accordance with the sympathies of hisinterpreter.
But it is not finished yet. It has to be painted Radical or Conservative
to suit the paper it is going into, for not one of the said papers cares
twopenny jam about the good of the Balkan peoples; they merely use them
as a lever for tipping home Governments in or out, and thereby building
or blowing up the British Empire.

Poor Balkan peoples ! the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the
strong, but to him that is most heavily financed by an outside Power.
Still, their position is not hopeless, for when Nature is chivied with a
pitchfork she comes back with a repeating-rifle, and in time the fittest
will probably survive, in spite of European intervention.

At midnight, when all good people are abed, the troops were
shifted—tramp, tramp in the dark. Whither or whence ? I was keen on
knowing, for the Balkans had got into my blood, and I could not bear to
leave when the relief work should be finished. I had an idea that the
Albanian question was the one that was most pressing. All the unknown
beyonds were a-calling, but I must plan my route to suit political
developments. News dribbled through that the last battalion to make a
midnight flitting had gone, not south, as was said at first, but up
Dibra way, to persuade the Albanians to pay cattle-tax—a vain task. Why
should they pay increased tax to make up for damage done by odious
Bulgars? On second thoughts, why pay tax at all? They got no return for
it; it only paid Turkish governors that they would rather be without.
Second thoughts are best, and not even artillery modified their views.
It did mine, though, for I knew that the Turkish authorities would find
me much easier to tackle than the Dibra Albanians, and that I should be
turned back ignominiously and hunted out of the Empire if I appeared
near a spot where anything really funny was happening. I gave up a plan
to dash through the hottest part of Old Servia to the back door of
Montenegro as foredoomed to failure.

But having lived now with the Montenegrins, the Serbs, and the
'Bulgarian Macedonians,' I clung to the idea that somehow or other I
must get right into Albanian territories, and see what the political
situation looked like from that side, too.
A day or two after the reports of fighting at Dibra, excitement was
nearer home. An old man was shot in the bazar just after sunset. Maria
brought the news with my morning milk. Now we were all going to be
killed. No Christian could go to the bazar. It was the beginning of the
end, etc. The Christian version was that a Moslem had entered the old
man's shop and asked for 'rakija'; as he had not paid for some previous
drinks, he was refused. He then whipped out a revolver and shot the old
man dead. The Moslem version was that the old man was met in the streets
after sunset by the night patrol minus the lantern enforced by law. They
challenged him, but as he was unfortunately deaf, he did not hear, so
they fired, and he was unfortunately killed. That he was killed was the
only part in which the tales corresponded, and as he had two bullets
through his chest and one through his arm, it was a fact not easily got
over. The result was that the man who sold rakija round the corner mixed
a special blend with petroleum especially for Moslems. He said he was
very sorry, but he had upset the lamp into it, and the demand for gratis
drinks fell off.

Next time it was the turn of a Moslem to figure on the death-list. Two
officers were riding over from Monastir, and quarrelled on the way,
whereupon one shot the other dead. They were both said to have been drunk.

Oh, it is a gay land for law and order !

I got so used to these episodes that, when one night I heard a row, a
running about, and Dooley, the oddjob man, who was rather cracky,
screaming, I only half woke up, and went to sleep again at once. Next
morning my interpreter explained it.

'I had very bad bellyache,' he said, 'so I cried out " Help!" Then the
"kavas" thought something was happening, and he came running in with his
rifle and revolver. Then Dooley, when he saw the rifle, was very
frightened, so the kavas pretended he would shoot him, and he ran after
Dooley with his rifle, and Dooley screamed, and we hope you were not
disturbed !'

'Not at all,' said I,

Then more excitement. A man was shot over at Vekchani, a Christian. Who
shot which this time? Other Christians. The recent military raid on
Vekchani was connected with this latest death, rumour said. The word
'traitor' was mentioned. The Kaimmakam himself went over hotfoot, but no
arrest was made.

The Bishop had been very indignant about the man who was shot in the
bazar, and wanted me to act in the matter. So I asked him what should be
done in the present case. Oddly enough, though it was much talked about,
the Bishop had heard nothing— merely that a man had been shot, that was
all; a Christian, he believed. He did not see that anything could be
done. Nor did I, for it seemed to be one of those little affairs in
which there is more than meets the eye; and iI1 Turkish territory the
arranging of who is to be ' removed' is said to be an episcopal function.

The problem of the Bishop fascinated me from the beginning: the
old-young man with his inscrutable smile, his veneer of courtesy, and
his capacity for flat contradiction; his unctuous piety as he posed as
one of the Lord's elect, and his taste for Munich beer; his palace well,
even luxuriously, furnished in European style; himself, made Bishop at
the callow age of twenty-flve, swarthy, black-eyed, with the puffy flesh
and dull skin of a man who lives well and takes no exercise. What was
his relationship to this mass of miserable peasantry? How did he regard
them, and to what end was he working?

The wretched refugees he neither heeded nor helped. I discovered early
that he had a terror of infection, and he was not even aware till the
end of our stay that the sick, other than those in the hospital, had had
British relief. That, being Bulgar, neither Serb, Greek, nor Albanian
had a good word to say for him was a matter of course. I waited
patiently for the Bishop to explain himself. Messages flowed constantly
between our depot and the palace. I called on the Bishop and the Bishop
on me. His Grace's secretary, trained in an American college, a dire
example of the mental indigestion caused by rashly overdosing the East
with Western ideas it cannot assimilate, haunted my premises and
swoopedgreedily on all my newspapers, which he bore off to the palace.
He was European outside, and spoke English very fairly.

The Bishop began to explain himself. He wanted me to supply rations for
various 'chetniks.' I perceived that if I were not careful we should
have revolutionary schemes carried on under the shelter of the British
flag. We were being trusted by the Turkish Government to play no tricks,
and were allowed quite extraordinary liberty of action. I replied that
our business was to care for the wounded and feed the inhabitants of
villages that had been burnt out. I must see the parties and hear
particulars. I was told I could not see them. This was the little rift
within the lute. His Grace made many similar requests, until at last his
secretary was afraid to deliver the message to me, and left it with the
interpreter with the remark that he knew it would be of no use. It
appeared the relief was not going the way the Bishop had intended. That
the peasants had been saved from starvation gave him no pleasure.

'We had expected quite half the population would die as a result of the
insurrection,' said his Jackal, 'and not one quarter have. Next time a
great many more must die, and Europe will have to listen to us. Next
time there will be a great slaughter. Every foreign Consul will be
killed as well as every foreigner. It will be their own faults!'

'You propose to set the people free by sending them to heaven!' I said;
'it is certainly one way.' I added: 'You are not only wrong, but very
silly, especially about the Consul-killing.'

And he was much annoyed. We speedily got to the root of the matter—that
Great Bulgaria had to be constructed at any cost. What became of the
peasants for whose 'freedom' the scheme was supposed to be worked was a
matter of small moment. I gathered he had as yet taken no part in the
fighting, and intended to be one of the survivors.

At the beginning of March we gave out the last distribution of flour
that the funds permitted of, enough to last till the end of April
(O.S.). After this, in view of the expected rising, the British
Ambassador gave notice that it would be well to wind up the hospital
work shortly, and that all agents who stayedup-country must do so at
their own risk. At Ochrida it seemed clear, however, that nothing would
happen just yet, so, as there were still some wounded to see to, I
arranged to stay on a bit, and called on the Bishop to tell him of our
plans. He was very angry to hear we were leaving soon, and bade me write
to England for more money; he had expected us to feed the people all the
summer. If an outbreak took place my presence was the more necessary, as
a martyr to the cause would be invaluable.

'You are afraid !' he cried—'you are afraid !'

Up till now I had not entered into party politics with him, but had
taken his advice whenever it did not entail active support of 'chetas.'
Except for his habit of contradicting flatly, he had always been
elaborately polite. Now the natural man burst through the ecclesiastical
varnish.

'You are afraid!' he repeated; 'you are running away. You think we shall
take you as we did Miss Stone. And it would be quite possible!' he added
wrathfully.

Now, the kidnapping of Miss Stone was one of the most mean and dirty
political 'jobs' ever perpetrated. I wonder if the public has any idea
how dirty. I had not credited the Bishop with a lofty moral standard,
but this was lower than I expected. Also it was silly.

'I like travelling,' said I, ' and it would be cheap. You would never
have a piastre for me.'

His Grace and the Jackal were taken aback.

'Fourteen thousand pounds was paid for Miss Stone,' they said.

'Miss Stone was an American,' I answered. 'I am English. I can't afford
to pay ransoms.'

' But the British Government would pay.'

' Oh no, it would not—not a piastre.'

'Miss Stone,' said the Bishop sententiously, 'might have been killed!'

There is something highly farcical in being threatened with brigandage
and murder in the course of a morning call with a background of European
furniture, and I laughed.

'You kill me,' said I, 'and there is the end of your Bulgaria. No
civilized Power will help you. I am not going because I am afraid of
you. The work is finished here, and I am going to ride through Albania.'

'You can't,' cried the Jackal; 'it is most dangerous.'

'Oh no it isn't,' said I; ' the Albanians won't want to take me like
Miss Stone." '

Check to the Bishop. He changed the subject.

I had been astonished at his outbreak; the cause now appeared. I was
black sheep for my nation. England, he said, was attacking Russia under
the Japanese flag, with English ships, English officers, English
weapons. England had provoked the declaration of war. The news in the
papers I had lent him were lies, English lies. England had never liked
the Balkan Slavs, and now she was attacking their only friend.

Blood is thicker than water. 'Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar,'
seemed to apply to Bulgars. He threw off all pretence of friendship for
England, and displayed a bitter Balkan hatred—raw and fierce. I was
vividly interested. I wanted, of all things to learn what part Russia
plays in Bulgaria's scheme for territorial aggrandisement. Weeks ago I
had been convinced that the peasants were only tools. Now, at last, I
had it from the Bishop, a head centre of Bulgarian propaganda, that
Russia was of paramount importance to their plans. I threw only enough
doubt on his information to keep him going, and bore his abuse of my own
country with equanimity. He felt better when he had let off steam, and
we parted quite politely.

Our depot was empty, and I remained alone with an interpreter to finish
the hospital work. My surprise, therefore, was great when, coming home
at an unusual hour, I found the yard filled with pack-horses and
'kirijees,' who were busy stowing bales in our basement, and I learnt
they containedmen's clothes and shoes, had been consigned to the
Bulgarian Bishop, and were to be put in the English premises by his orders.

I waived the usual etiquette of sending to know if it were convenient,
went straight to the palace, and asked if His Grace would kindly see me
at once on an urgent matter. His Grace and the Jackal seemed flurried. I
explained that, doubtless by mistake, goods belonging to the Bishop had
been delivered to me. No, there was no mistake. The depot was no longer
ours. The Bishop had taken it. He was going to make a distribution of
clothing, and it was more convenient to make it at our place. There was
no room at the palace. I added up the situation mentally. Why had I not
been told beforehand? Why had the goods been 'dumped' at an hour when I
was usually out? Why was there 'no room' in the extensive palace ? Why
was it more convenient to distribute from what were recognised as
British premises? Above all, why were His Grace and his secretary so
upset? They conversed together in rapid whispers, and I have rarely felt
more uncomfortable. So long as I was in the depot I was bound to see
that there was no possibility of a 'cheta' being fitted out under our
protection. The Bishop was an adept at wire-pulling, but I would see him
somewhere before he wire-pulled Great Britain.

'The house is ours till the end of the month,' I said, 'and has been
paid for.'

They were vexed, for it overthrew their first point.

'The distribution can take place while you are out, and will not
inconvenience you,' said the secretary, after more whispering.

The situation was unpleasantly strained.

'It is not the inconvenience,' said I, scraping up my courage; 'the
difficulty is that so long as I am here any distribution that takes
place on our premises will be considered by the authorities to be
English, and I know nothing either about the goods or the people who are
to have them. I am sorry to disoblige His Grace.'

This left little more to be said, for they did not think fit to
enlighten me about their plan. I had it on my mind that I ought to ask
for the removal of the bales, for the manner of both men suggested
'there was more thanmet the eye.' But I did not. I believe I 'funked it.'

With apologies for troubling His Grace, I withdrew from the somewhat
thunderous atmosphere of his study. And at a distance from the palace my
interpreter and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. The bales
remained where they were, and in order to make all ' square and
above-board' so far as the British Relief Fund was concered, I told the
Kaimmakam on leaving that our distribution work had been quite completed.

My last week was a crowded one. I had some money to give away; the
question was, how? I thought of buying plough-oxen for one or two
villages to aid the spring sowing. This was impossible, as the headmen I
interviewed insisted that the beasts must be presents to individuals ( =
themselves), and not for ploughing land to feed the village. The owner
could let them out to his neighbours, and so make money. I had already
learnt how the leading men of the villages made money by capturing the
flour-tickets and selling them back to the owners—one gang even charged
so much a head for letting the people have the flour; and I should have
handed them over to the Kaimmakam had I discovered the fraud in time to
see the matter through. Then I offered a few sheep and goats to certain
villages to start a flock. Everyone quarrelled, and was certain that no
one who had them would let anyone else have even one lamb. It was but
another example of the 'Burden of the Balkans.' They were too much
occupied in 'doing' each other to be able to work together for a common
end. I therefore chose three very poor villages, gave money to each
widow and child to buy one month's flour, and had almost accomplished
the task, which gave very great pleasure, when a 'bazar rumour' raged
through the town that 16,000 had arrived from England, and was to be
distributed broadcast! An Eastern bazar rumour is a fearsome thing.

Within twenty-four hours every woman in the neighbourhood was a widow
and every child an orphan, and we were besieged by them. A few
enterprising men joined the throng, and said they were widowers. A
parley failed utterly. The yard was crammed, and they tried to get into
the house. It was an anxious time. The crowd was such, I feared
childrenwould be hurt.

We fastened the doors, and from an upper window I roared to them that we
had nothing left—neither flour, linen, clothes, nor money. They must go.

The scene beggars descriptions. They refused to believe me, struggled to
get in, and cried out in the crush. It was getting unpleasant. I went
down with the kavas, managed to squeeze out, ordered every child to
leave at once, collected them, and drove them out of the gate, which the
kavas shut after them. This caused many women to go in search of their
offspring. They were let out with difficulty, as a crowd was trying to
get in. The women remaining then squatted on the ground, and declared
they would remain till they received something, no matter what. So long
as any remained in the yard those outside believed a distribution was
going on. More flocked up and tried to get in.

The Moslem kavas was getting excited; he was itching to play the part of
chucker-out. The air was thick with abuse. It had been going on for a
couple of hours. The only way to avoid a catastrophe was to evict
everyone, so that they might spread a counterrumour and stop the affair;
but I could not employ a Moslem man to chuck out Christian women.

There was a final and futile parley. Then I turned to the nearest woman,
pointed to the gate, and said:

'Go!'

'No,' said she.

I took her by the belt and collar and ran her down the slope; the kavas
whipped open the gate, and she was outside and the gate shut before she
had got over her surprise.

I hoped this would be enough, but never a bit. I was not educated for a
policeman, and, as I evicted the fourth, feared they meant to tire me
out. However, to my relief the fifth turned the scale, and the rest got
up and went. It was one of the most trying episodes I ever had to tackle.

The next bazar rumour proved true. Ochrida was agog with the news thata
Russian newspaper correspondent was coming. His possible mission was
much canvassed. He arrived from Kastoria with a military escort, and was
chaperoned carefully about Ochrida between two Turkish officers. When I
called next morning on the Bishop, to make my final farewells, the
Russian was coming out, and His Grace, 'Pan-Slavonically' consoled, was
in high spirits, and adorned once more with his inscrutable smile.
We arranged that the hospital plant should be handed over to him, and he
then asked how I was going to Monastir.

'On horseback over the mountains to-morrow,' said I.

His Grace was horrified. It was impossible: the fatigue would be
terrible. He himself always drove by the carriage road. I preferred
riding. He smiled fatuously, and said he was growing old, and horseback
was only for the very young.

'Exercise is good,' said I. 'His Grace is younger than I am, but I am
English.'

His Grace expressed a total inability to comprehend me. Sporting
instincts were naturally beyond him.

'I am going,' he said, 'to ask you a great many questions on your
religion, which no doubt is what has caused you to take up this work,
and live alone in a wild land.'

Here followed an excursus on faith.

'I came,' said I, 'to help the victims of the insurrection, and to see
the Eastern Question from a fresh side. I hope in time to explore the
whole Peninsula, and see all its peoples.'

The Bishop folded his hands and cast up his eyes. He could look very
holy when he chose.

'I continue to believe,' he said, ' that it was religion that sent you.'

I assured him I had not troubled about my body or my soul; I had come to
learn as much as I could of the truth about recent events, and see what
could be done.

The Bishop was nonplussed. I do not fancy truth was an article he
greatly valued, and he certainly was not afflicted with a thirst for
knowledge. He had not even learnt to speak Turkish.

"'Knowest thou aught a Corsaint that men call Truth ?

Couldst thou aught wissen us the way, where that wight dwelleth ?"

" Nay, so God help me," said the gome then.

" I saw never palmer, with pike nor with scrip

Axen after him ere, till now in this place!"

The lines, vaguely remembered, sketched the situation fairly.

'What have you learned ?' said the Bishop eagerly.

I hesitated. The Bishop was persistent; so was his secretary. They
questioned and requestioned. I looked at the Bishop, young, smug,
unctuous—the man who had faced no bullets, visited no sick - beds,
comforted no dying; who had fared softly in his palace while his flock
rotted and starved. I thought of his cowardly dread of infection, the
priestless burial of the little boy; I heard again the words, ' Not a
quarter of the population are dead,' etc.; I saw the helpless mass of
wretched humanity with whose blood this man and his friends meant to
paint red the frontiers of Big Bulgaria. Then I told quite frankly what
I had seen of the game. Their interruptions only showed it more clearly,
and I tried by questions to make them tell the tale themselves. The
bitter sufferings of the people under the Sultan's Government were
nothing to them: better that they should continue to suffer than that
Greece or Servia should gain an inch of territory. Both nations they
abused freely. The European intervention which they demanded was to
support only Bulgarian claims; ' autonomy for Macedonia ' was to be a
half-way house to Great Bulgaria. I wished Bulgaria a fair share of the
Sultan's territories, but I did not admit the justice of all her claims,
and I most strongly condemned her methods.

Then it was the Bishop's turn, and he was equally outspoken.
Christianity, he said, was the greatest power in the world, and would
eventually triumph. England was not a Christian country, and would be
wiped out by Holy Russia; the sooner the better. He had a piece of news
for me: Russia had conquered Japan, and wasoccupying half of it. The
other half was occupied by the English, who would shortly be forced to
withdraw. We had dropped from tragedy to farce, and I laughed aloud.
'As England wishes to take Japan herself, you will be sorry to hear this
!' he said. 'Also that Russia is going to occupy all the rest of India.'

Here we had an excursus on geography, concerning which his ideas were
suitably medi?val. I explained that for the sake of the human race I
always wanted the best man to win. When we were no longer able to defend
ourselves we should go, and not before.

'You will,' said the Bishop, 'you will. All the world knows you have no
army. You are very proud of your navy. What is a navy ?

Nothing, I tell you—nothing ! I have seen a navy, and I know!'

'His Grace,' said I, ' has perhaps seen the Bulgarian one.'

The audience had now lasted quite long enough. I thanked the Bishop for
all he had done for me, and took what I hoped was a last farewell of
him. But etiquette had to be maintained. I was told His Grace would
return my call that afternoon.

When he arrived I was parleying with two widows of the town, each with
an orphan. Maria rushed in: 'The Bishop, the Bishop!'

His Grace entered solemnly, Maria kissed his hand humbly, and retired,
so did one widow; the other sat firm and ignored His Grace completely.
She was a stout, elderly party, with a good deal of presence. I
perceived she intended to sit the Bishop out. The Bishop looked at her.
She gazed over his head. For a little while he ignored her. Then he said
suddenly to the child:

'What school do you go to?'

'The Greek,' said the widow.

'That is a pity,' said the Bishop.

'No, it isn't,' said the widow. 'Greek is more useful.'

'Children should learn the language of their father and their nation,'
said the Bishop severely.

'This child's father was an Armenian,' retorted the widow triumphantly.
'It is my daughter's child, and I am Greek.'

The Bishop tried to be clever. 'What did you speak at home ?' he asked
the child.

'Turkish !' came the answer smartly.

The widow regarded the discomfited Bishop with unspeakable contempt. He
arose, made his adieus, and fled.

We wrestled for the last time with the greedy demands of the pharmacy
man, and the provision dealer, who was very drunk and more than usually
obstreperous, went to bed early, to be ready to start at dawn, and spent
a truly Balkan night.

Dooley, the odd-job man of the depot, had been promised work in
Monastir, and was to ride there with us. In the black hours before dawn
came an awful row in the street—battering on the gates, shouts, screams,
soldiers and what not, all mixed up in the dark. Dooley was arrested by
the night patrol and taken to prison. I dressed hastily; friends flocked
in. It was a brutal outrage: poor Dooley had been merely coming to make
final arrangements; had been attacked and beaten by the soldiers. I was
called on to act promptly and save him from a Turkish prison.

Day dawned and our horses were ready, but the Kaimmakam, who had to be
appealed to, was naturally not yet up. My chances of getting through to
Monastir that night were slipping away, and my plans depended on it.
Finally, when, to everyone's joy,

Dooley was released-—for the Kaimmakam acceded at once to my request—the
victim of the brutal outrage was crazy drunk. Riding on horses was very
cruel, he spluttered; he had gone out at three in the morning to hire a
carriage; he didn't mind the expense—not he; he wouldn't ride—not he;
was looking for a carriage when thesoldiers arrested him ! I made a
final effort to save the poor devil, but it was in vain. He was too
drunk to sit in a saddle even could we induce him to try.

We left him behind, and, owing to this final piece of local colour, had
a stiff ride to Monastir; for though we pushed on as fast as the
mountain-tracks allowed, the sun went down before we got in. A bitter
wind arose, and we crawled along at a foot's pace, for it was
pitch-dark, and the road a mass of loose stones and holes; also it was
freezing hard. I clung to the saddle-peak, and comforted myself only by
reflecting what fun it would have been to have brought the Bulgarian
Bishop along.

Finally the lights of Monastir came in sight. I dismounted, cold and
stiff, at the door of the Hotel Stamboul; high time, too, for my
luckless interpreter, who was no horseman, was about done up, and my
landlord, who had taken advantage of our escort to come to Monastir too,
had had quite enough.

But I was in a tearing, raging hurry, for an unique chance had offered
itself for getting right through Albania, and I did not wish to lose it.
A well-known society was sending an agent from one end of the country to
the other on business, and was willing that I should accompany him. He
was an Albanian, and spoke some French. The one drawback was that I had
never seen him; he had already started, and I must pick him up—an
unknown quantity in a quite unknown land. As, however, I was going alone
and on my own account, and so was responsible for no one's money or
life, I was free to take any risk. The one thing necessary was to obtain
Turkish Government permission for the expedition. Without this I should
be fairly certain to be turned back somewhere, and the society might get
into trouble, as Turkish officials were very suspicious of strangers.
Some of my friends on the relief work were of opinion that to ask
permission was to court failure, and that a refusal was certain. The
British Consul, however, knew best he advised me to call by myself on
the Vali, and predicted success.

Calling by yourself at a Government Konak is a nervous task. There is a
yard full of soldiers and gendarmes, and several staircases more or less
muddy that lead to unknown heights, and, naturally, all the directions
are scribbled up in Turkish. Upstairs there are corridors where o~cers
hangabout and smoke, and messengers hurry from one heavily-curtained
door to another. No one took the faintest notice of me, so I addressed
the most gorgeous in French. He did not understand, but called someone
who did, and in two minutes I was in the presence of His Excellency. He
was much amazed at my request, but very affable, and gave me leave to
wander as long as I liked, though he was sure that cold and hardships
would prevent my carrying out my proposed route. I fancy the fact that
we both painted in water-colours was a bond of sympathy. He hoped I had
my apparatus with me, and assured me I should see ?des choses tre`s
bizarres.? I thanked him, and was about to leave, when he said that, as
I had been on hospital work at Ochrida, I should perhaps like to see the
Turkish hospital, over the arrangements of which he had taken much
trouble and he called up a soldier to take me there.

It is a very decent building, airy, clean, and bright, with good wards,
big windows, and a large garden. Mine was a surprise visit, and I found
the bed-linen all clean. I do not know what the doctoring is like, but
the patients almost all looked cheery and comfortable, with the
exception of some in the typhoid ward, where there were some very bad
cases. The pharmacy man took me round, and told me the prescriptions.
Patients of every race and religion are received, but lack of funds
prevent it from opening all its wards.

I had now nothing left to do but buy a second-hand gendarmerie saddle
and bridle, with a blue saddlecloth adorned with scarlet crescents, cram
the necessaries of life into a pair of saddle-bags, roll up my blanket
in a waterproof sheet, and be off.

[June R Harton]

In a letter to Prof. Marin Drinov of May 25, 1888 Kuzman Shapkarev writes:
"But even stranger is the name Macedonians, which was imposed on us only 10
to 15 years ago by outsiders, and not as something by our own
intellectuals... Yet the people in Macedonia know nothing of that ancient
name, reintroduced today with a cunning aim on the one hand and a stupid one
on the other. They know the older word: "Bugari", although mispronounced:
they have even adopted it as peculiarly theirs, inapplicable to other
Bulgarians. You can find more about this in the introduction to the booklets
I am sending you. They call their own Macedono-Bulgarian dialect the
"Bugarski language", while the rest of the Bulgarian dialects they refer to
as the "Shopski language". (Makedonski pregled, IX, 2, 1934, p. 55; the
original letter is kept in the Marin Drinov Museum in Sofia, and it is
available for examination and study)
Here is the text in the original:

"No pochudno e imeto Makedonci, koeto naskoro, edvay predi 10-15 godini, ni
natrapiha i to otvqn, a ne kakto nyakoi mislyat ot samata nasha
inteligenciya... Narodqt obache v Makedoniya ne znae nishto za tova
arhaichesko, a dnes, s lukava cel ot edna strana, s glupeshka ot druga,
podnoveno prozvishte; toy si znae postaroto: Bugari, makar i nepravilno
proiznasyano, daje osvoyava si go kato sobstveno i preimushtestveno svoe,
nejeli za drugite Bqlgari. Za tova shte vidite i v predgovora na izpratenite
mi knijici. Toy naricha Bugarski ezik svoeto Makaedono-bqlgarsko narechie,
kogato drugite bqlgarski narechiya naricha Shopski."

from: Spirit of Truth

(using June's e-mail to communicate to you)!