HIS MAJESTY NICHOLAS I. KING OF MONTENEGROHIS MAJESTY NICHOLAS I. KING OF MONTENEGROHe has been on the throne longer than any living sovereign, he is the father-in-law of two kings, and is connected by marriage with half the royal houses of Europe
King Nicholas, as is generally known, has been remarkably successful in marrying off his daughters, two of them having married Kings,two others grand dukes, while a fifth became the wife of a Battenberg prince. Remembering this, I was sorely tempted to ask the King as to the truth of a story which I had heard in Cetinje years before. An English visitor to the Montenegrin capital had been invited to lunch at the palace. During the meal the King asked his guest his impressions of Montenegro.
"Its scenery is magnificent," was the answer. "Its women are as beautiful and its men as handsome as any I have ever seen. Their costumes are marvelously picturesque. But the country appears to have no exports, your Majesty."
"Ah, my friend," replied the King, his eyes twinkling, "you forget my daughters."
Another story, which illustrates the King's quick wit, was told me by his Majesty himself. When, some years before the Great War, Emperor Francis Joseph, on a yachting cruise down the Adriatic, dropped anchor in the Bocche di Cattaro, the Montenegrin mountaineers celebrated the imperial visit by lighting bonfires on their mountain peaks, a mile above the harbor.
"I see that you dwell in the clouds," remarked Francis Joseph to Nicholas, as theystood on the deck of the yacht after dinner watching the pin-points of flame twinkling high above them.
"Where else can I live?" responded the Montenegrin ruler. "Austria holds the sea; Turkey holds the land; the sky is all that is left for Montenegro."
One of the things which the King told me during our conversation will, I think, interest Americans. He said that when President Wilson arrived in Paris he sent him an autograph letter, congratulating him on the great part he had played in bringing peace to the world and requesting a personal interview.
"But he never granted me the interview," said the King sadly. "In fact, he never acknowledged my letter."
I attempted to bridge over the embarrassing pause by suggesting that perhaps the letter had never been received, but he waved aside the suggestion as unworthy of consideration. I gathered from what he said that royal letters do not miscarry.
"I realize that I am an old man and that my country is a very small and unimportant one," he continued, "while your President is the rulerof a great country and a very busy man. Still, we in Montenegro had heard so much of America's chivalrous attitude toward small, weak nations that I was unduly disappointed, perhaps, when my letter was ignored. I felt that my age, and the fact that I have occupied the throne of Montenegro for sixty years, entitled me to the consideration of a reply."
But we have strayed far from the road which we were traveling. Let us get back to the people of the mountains; I like them better than the politicians. Antivari, which nestles in a hollow of the hills, three or four miles inland from the port of the same name, is one of the most fascinating little towns in all the Balkans. Its narrow, winding, cobble-paved streets, shaded by canopies of grapevines and bordered by rows of squat, red-tiled houses, their plastered walls tinted pale blue, bright pink or yellow, and the amazingly picturesque costumes of its inhabitants—slender, stately Montenegrin women in long coats of turquoise-colored broad-cloth piped with crimson, Bosnians in skin-tight breeches covered with arabesques of braid and jackets heavy with embroidery, Albanians wearing the starched and pleated skirts of linenknown asfustanellasandcomitadjiswith cartridge-filled bandoliers slung across their chests and their sashes bristling with assorted weapons, priests of the Orthodox Church with uncut hair and beards, wearing hats that look like inverted stovepipes, hook-nosed, white-bearded, patriarchal-looking Turks in flowing robes and snowy turbans, fierce-faced, keen-eyed mountain herdsmen in fur caps and coats of sheepskin—all these combined to make me feel that I had intruded upon the stage of a theater during a musical comedy performance, and that I must find the exit and escape before I was discovered by the stage-manager. If David Belasco ever visits Antivari he will probably try to buy the place bodily and transport it to East Forty-fourth Street and write a play around it.
There were two gentlemen in Antivari whose actions gave me unalloyed delight. One of them, so I was told, was the head of the local anti-Serbian faction; the other, a human arsenal with weapons sprouting from his person like leaves from an artichoke, was the chief of a notorious band ofcomitadjis, as the Balkan guerrillas are called. They walked up and downthe main street of Antivari, arms over each other's shoulders, heads close together, lost in conversation, but glancing quickly over their shoulders every now and then to see if they were in danger of being overheard, exactly like the plotters in a motion-picture play. From the earnestness of their conversation, the obvious awe in which they were held by the townspeople, and the suspicious looks cast in their direction by the Serbian gendarmes, I gathered that in the near future things were going to happen in that region. Approaching them, I haltingly explained, in the few words of Serbian at my command, that I was an American and that I wished to photograph them. Upon comprehending my request they debated the question for some moments, then shook their heads decisively. It was evident that, in view of what they had in mind, they considered it imprudent to have their pictures floating around as a possible means of identification. But while they were discussing the matter I took the liberty, without their knowledge, of photographing them anyway. It was as well, perhaps, that they did not see me do it, for thecomitadjichieftain had a long knife, tworevolvers, and four hand-grenades in his belt and a rifle slung over his shoulder.
From Antivari to Valona by sea is about as far as from New York to Albany by the Hudson, so that, leaving the Montenegrin port in the early morning, we had no difficulty in reaching the Albanian one before sunset. Before the war Valona—which, by the way, appears as Avlona on most American-made maps—was an insignificant fishing village, but upon Italy's occupation of Albania it became a military base of great importance. Whenever we had touched on our journey down the coast we had been warned against going to Valona because of the danger of contracting fever. The town stands on the edge of a marsh bordering the shore and, as no serious attempt has been made to drain the marsh or to clean up the town itself, about sixty per cent of the troops stationed there are constantly suffering from a peculiarly virulent form of malaria, similar to the Chagres fever of the Isthmus. The danger of contracting it was apparently considered very real, for, before we had been an hour in the quarters assigned to us, officers began to arrive with safeguards of one sort or another. One broughtscreens for all the windows; another provided mosquito-bars for the beds; a third presented us with disinfectant cubes, which we were to burn in our rooms several times each day; a fourth made us a gift of quinine pills, two of which we were to take hourly; still another of our hosts appeared with a dozen bottles ofacqua mineraleand warned us not to drink the local water, and, finally, to ensure us against molestation by prowling natives, a couple of sentries were posted beneath our windows.
TWO CONSPIRATORS OF ANTIVARITWO CONSPIRATORS OF ANTIVARIThey stood lost in conversation, heads close together, exactly like the plotters in a motion picture play
"Valona isn't a particularly healthy place to live in, I gather?" I remarked, by way of making conversation, to the officer who was our host at dinner that evening. His face was as yellow as old parchment and he was shaking with fever.
"Well," he reluctantly admitted, "you must be careful not to be bitten by a mosquito or you will get malaria. And don't drink the water or you will contract typhoid. And keep away from the native quarter, for there is always more or less smallpox in the bazaars. And don't go wandering around the town after nightfall, for there's always a chance of some fanatic putting a knife between your shoulders.Otherwise, there isn't a healthier place in the world than Valona."
Across the street from the building in which we were quartered was a large mosque, which, judging from the scaffoldings around it, was under repair. But though it seemed to be a large and important mosque, there was no work going forward on it. I commented upon this one day to an officer with whom I was walking.
"Do you see those storks up there?" he asked, pointing to a pair of long-legged birds standing beside their nest on the dome of the mosque. "The stork is the sacred bird of Albania and if it makes its nest on a building which is in course of construction all work on that building ceases as long as the stork remains. A barracks we were erecting was held up for several months because a stork decided to make its nest in the rafters, whereupon the native workmen threw down their tools and quit."
"In my country it is just the opposite," I observed. "There, when the stork comes, instead of stopping work they usually begin building a nursery."
I had long wished to cross Albania and Macedonia, from the Adriatic to the Ægean, by motor, but the nearer we had drawn to Albania the more unlikely this project had seemed of realization. We were assured that there were no roads in the interior of the country or that such roads as existed were quite impassable for anything save ox-carts; that the country had been devastated by the fighting armies and that it would be impossible to get food en route; that the mountains we must cross were frequented by bandits andcomitadjisand that we would be exposed to attack and capture; that, though the Italians might see us across Albania, the Serbian and Greek frontier guards would not permit us to enter Macedonia, and, as a final argument against the undertaking, we were warned that the whole country reeked with fever. But when I told the Governor-General of Albania, General Piacentini, what I wished to do every obstacle disappeared as though at the wave of a magician's wand.
"You will leave Valona early to-morrow morning," he said, after a short conference with his Chief of Staff. "You will be accompanied by an officer of my staff who was with the Serbian army on its retreat across Albania to the sea. The country is well garrisoned and I do not anticipate the slightest trouble, but, as a measure of precaution, a detachment of soldiers will follow your car in a motor-truck. You will spend the first night at Argirocastro, the second at Ljaskoviki, and the third at Koritza, which is occupied by the French. I will wire our diplomatic agent there to make arrangements with the Jugoslav authorities for you to cross the Serbian border to Monastir, where we still have a few troops engaged in salvage work. South of Monastir you will be in Greek territory, but I will wire the officer in command of the Italian forces at Salonika to take steps to facilitate your journey across Macedonia to the Ægean."
This journey across one of the most savage and least-known regions in all Europe was arranged as simply and matter-of-factly as a clerk in a tourist bureau would plan a motor trip through the White Mountains. With the exception of one or two alterations in the itinerary made necessary by tire trouble, the journey was made precisely as General Piacentini planned it and so complete were the arrangements we found that meals and sleeping quarters had been prepared for us in tiny mountain hamlets whose very names we had never so much as heard before.
Until its occupation by the Italians in 1917 Albania was not only the least-known region in Europe; it was one of the least-known regions in the world. Within sight of Italy, it was less known than many portions of Central Asia or Equatorial Africa. And it is still a savage country; a land but little changed since the days of Constantine and Diocletian; a land that for more than twenty centuries has acknowledged no master and, until the coming of the Italians, had known no law. Prior to the Italian occupation there was no government in Albania in the sense in which that word is generally used, there being, in fact, no civil government now, the tribal organization which takes its place being comparable to that which existed in Scotland under the Stuart Kings.
The term Albanian would probably pass unrecognized by the great majority of the inhabitants, who speak of themselves asSkipétarsand of their country asSccupnj. They are, most ethnologists agree, probably the most ancientrace in Europe, there being every reason to believe that they are the lineal descendants of those adventurous Aryans who, leaving the ancestral home on the shores of the Caspian, crossed the Caucasus and entered Europe in the earliest dawn of history. One of the tribes of this migrating host, straying into these lonely valleys, settled there with their flocks and herds, living the same life, speaking the same tongue, following the same customs as their Aryan ancestors, quite indifferent to the great changes which were taking place in the world without their mountain wall. Certain it is that Albania was already an ancient nation when Greek history began. Unlike the other primitive populations of the Balkan peninsula, which became in time either Hellenized, Latinized or Slavonicized, the Albanians have remained almost unaffected by foreign influences. It strikes me as a strange thing that the courage and determination with which this remarkable race has maintained itself in its mountain stronghold all down the ages, and the grim and unyielding front which it has shown to innumerable invaders, have evoked so little appreciation and admiration in the outside world. History contains nosuch epic as that of the Albanian national hero, George Castriota, better known as Scanderbeg, who, with his ill-armed mountaineers, overwhelmed twenty-three Ottoman armies, one after another.[A]
Picture, if you please, a country remarkably similar in its physical characteristics to the Blue Ridge Region of our own South, with the same warm summers and the same brief, cold winters, peopled by the same poverty-stricken, illiterate, quarrelsome, suspicious, arms-bearing, feud-practising race of mountaineers, and you will have the best domestic parallel of Albania that I can give you. Though during the summer months extremely hot days are followed by bitterly cold nights, and though fever is prevalent along the coast and in certain of the valleys, Albania is, climatically speaking, "a white man's country." Its mountains are believed to contain iron, coal, gold, lead, and copper, but the internal condition of the country has made it quite impossible to investigate its mineral resources, much less to develop them. With theexception of Valona, which has been developed into a tolerably good harbor, there are no ports worthy of the name, Durazzo, Santi Quaranta, and San Giovanni de Medua being mere open roadsteads, almost unprotected from the sea winds. There are no railroads in Albania, and the indifference of the Turkish Government, the corruption of the local chiefs, and the blood-feuds in which the people are almost constantly engaged, have resulted in a total absence of good roads. This condition has been remedied by the Italians, however, who, in order to facilitate their military operations, constructed a system of highways very nearly equal to those they built in the Alps. Though the greater part of the country is a stranger to the plow, the small areas which are under cultivation produce excellent olive oil, wine of a tolerable quality, a strong but moderately good tobacco, and considerable grain; Albania, in spite of its primitive agricultural methods, furnishing most of the corn supply of the Dalmatian coast.
Albania, so far as I am aware, is the only country where you can buy a wife on the instalment plan, just as you would buy a piano or an encyclopedia or a phonograph. It is quite truethat there are plenty of countries where women can be purchased—in Circassia, for example, and in China, and in the Solomon Group—but in those places the prospective bridegroom is compelled to pay down the purchase price in cash, not being afforded the convenience of opening an account. In Albania, however, such things are better done, a partial payment on the purchase price of the girl being paid to her parents when the engagement takes place, after which she is no longer offered for sale, but is set aside, like an article on which a deposit has been made, until the final instalment has been paid, when she is delivered to her future husband.
Albania is likewise the only country that I know of where every one concerned becomes indignant if a murderer is sent to prison. The relatives of the dear departed resent it because they feel that the judge has cheated them out of their revenge, which they would probably obtain, were the murderer at large, by putting a knife or a pistol bullet between his shoulders. The murderer, of course, objects to the sentence both because he does not like imprisonment and because he believes that he could escape fromthe relatives of his victim were he given his freedom. If he or his friends have any money, however, the affair is usually settled on a financial basis, the feud is called off, the murderer is pardoned, and every one concerned, save only the dead man, is as pleased and friendly as though nothing had ever happened to interrupt their friendly relations. A quaint people, the Albanians.
In order to develop the resources of the country and to transform its present poverty into prosperity, Italy has already inaugurated an extensive scheme of public works, which includes the reclamation of the marshes, the reforestation of the mountains, the reconstruction of the highways, the improvement of the ports, and the construction of a railway straight across Albania, from the coast at Durazzo to Monastir, in Serbian Macedonia, where it will connect with the line from Belgrade to Salonika. This railway will follow the route of one of the most important arteries of the Roman Empire, the Via Egnatia, that mighty military and commercial highway, a trans-Adriatic continuation of the Via Appia, which, starting from Dyracchium, the modern Durazzo, crossed the Cavaiaplain to the Skumbi, climbed the slopes of the Candavian range, and traversing Macedonia and Thrace, ended at the Bosphorus, thus linking the capitals of the western and the eastern empires. We traveled this age-old highway, down which the four-horse chariots of the Cæsars had rumbled two thousand years ago, in another sort of chariot, with the power of twenty times four horses beneath its sloping hood. This will entitle us in future years to listen with the condescension of pioneers to the tales of the tourists who make the same trans-Balkan journey in a comfortablewagon-lit, with hot and cold running water and electric lights and a dining-car ahead. It is a great thing to have seen a country in the pioneer stage of its existence.
In that portion of Southern Albania known as North Epirus we motored for an entire day through a region dotted with what had been, apparently, fairly prosperous towns and villages but which are now heaps of fire-blackened ruins. This wholesale devastation, I was informed to my astonishment, was the work of the Greeks, who, at about the time the Germans were horrifying the civilized world by their conduct inBelgium, were doing precisely the same thing, it is said, but on a far more extensive scale, in Albania. As a result of these atrocities, perpetrated by a so-called Christian and professedly civilized nation, a large number of Albanian towns and villages were destroyed by fire or dynamite. Though I have been unable to obtain any reliable figures, the consensus of opinion among the Albanians, the French and Italian officials, and the American missionaries and relief workers with whom I talked is that between 10,000 and 12,000 men, women, and children were shot, bayoneted, or burned to death, at least double that number died from exposure and starvation, and an enormous number—I have heard the figure placed as high as 200,000—were rendered homeless. The stories which I heard of the treatment to which the Albanian women were subjected are so revolting as to be unprintable. We spent a night at Ljaskoviki (also spelled Gliascovichi, Leskovik and Liascovik), three-quarters of which had been destroyed. Out of a population which, I was told, originally numbered about 8,000, only 1,200 remain.
THE HEAD MEN OF LJASKOVIKI, ALBANIA, WAITING TO BID MAJOR AND MRS. POWELL FAREWELLTHE HEAD MEN OF LJASKOVIKI, ALBANIA, WAITING TO BID MAJOR AND MRS. POWELL FAREWELL
Though the great majority of the victimswere Mohammedans, the outrages were not directly due to religious causes but were inspired mainly by greed for territory. When, upon the erection of Albania into an independent kingdom in 1913, the Greeks were ordered by the Powers to withdraw from North Epirus, on which they had been steadily encroaching and which they had come to look upon as inalienably their own, they are reported to have begun a systematic series of outrages upon the civil population of the region for which a fitting parallel can be found only in the Turkish massacres in Armenia or the horrors of Bolshevik rule in Russia. In their determination to secure Southern Albania for themselves, the Greeks apparently adopted the policy followed with such success in Armenia by the Turks, who asserted cynically that "one cannot make a state without inhabitants."
I do not think that the Greeks attempt to deny these atrocities—the evidence is far too conclusive for that—but even as great a Greek as M. Venizelos justifies them on the ground that they were provoked by the Albanians. That such things could happen without arousing horror and condemnation throughout the civilizedworld is due to the fact that in the summer of 1914 the attention of the world was focused on events in France and Belgium. I have no quarrel with the Greeks and nothing is further from my desire than to engage in what used to be known as "muck-raking," but I am reporting what I saw and heard in Albania because I believe that the American people ought to know of it. Taken in conjunction with the behavior of the Greek troops in Smyrna in the spring of 1918, it should better enable us to form an opinion as to the moral fitness of the Greeks to be entrusted with mandates over backward peoples.
Though Albania is an Italian protectorate, the Albanians, in spite of all that Italy is doing toward the development of the country, do not want Italian protection. This is scarcely to be wondered at, however, in view of the attitude of another untutored people, the Egyptians, who, though they owe their amazing prosperity solely to British rule, would oust the British at the first opportunity which offered. Though the Italians are distrusted because the Albanians question their administrative ability and because they fear that they will attempt to denationalize them, the French are regarded with a hatred which I have seldom seen equaled. This is due, I imagine, to the belief that the French are allied with their hereditary enemies, the Greeks and the Serbs, and to France's iron-handed rule, which was exemplified when General Sarrail, commanding the army of the Orient, ordered the execution of the President of the short-lived Albanian Republic which was established at Koritza. As a matter of fact, the Albanians, though quite unfitted for independence, are violently opposed to being placed under the protection of any nation, unless it be the United States or England, in both of which they place implicit trust. I was astonished to learn that the few Americans who have penetrated Albania since the war—missionaries, Red Cross workers, and one or two investigators for the Peace Conference—have encouraged the natives in the belief that the United States would probably accept a mandate for Albania. Whether they did this in order to make themselves popular and thereby facilitate their missions, or because of an abysmal ignorance of American public sentiment, I do not know, but the fact remains that they have raised hopes inthe breasts of thousands of Albanians which can never be realized. Everything considered, I think that the Albanians might do worse than to entrust their political future to the guidance of the Italians, who, in addition to having brought law, order, justice, and the beginnings of prosperity to a country which never had so much as a bowing acquaintance with any one of them before, seem to have the best interests of the people genuinely at heart.
Leaving Koritza, a clean, well-kept town of perhaps 10,000 people, which was occupied when we were there by a battalion of black troops from the French Sudan and some Moroccans, we went snorting up the Peristeri Range by an appallingly steep and narrow road, higher, higher, always higher, until, to paraphrase Kipling, we had
"One wheel on the Horns o' the Mornin',An' one on the edge o' the Pit,An' a drop into nothin' beneath usAs straight as a beggar could spit."
"One wheel on the Horns o' the Mornin',An' one on the edge o' the Pit,An' a drop into nothin' beneath usAs straight as a beggar could spit."
But at last, when I was beginning to wonder whether our wheels could find traction if the grade grew much steeper, we topped the summit of the pass and looked down on Macedonia. Below us the forested slopes of the mountains ran down, like the folds of a great green rug lying rumpled on an oaken floor, to meet the bare brown plains of that historic land where marched and fought the hosts of Philip of Macedon, and of Alexander, his son. There are few more splendid panoramas in the world; there is none over which history has cast so magic a spell, for this barren, dusty land has been the arena in which the races of eastern Europe have battled since history began. Within its borders are represented all the peoples who are disputing the reversion of the Turkish possessions in Europe. Macedonia might be described, indeed, as the very quintessence of the near eastern question.
With brakes a-squeal we slipped down the long, steep gradients to Florina, where Greek gendarmes, in British sun-helmets and khaki, lounged at the street-crossings and patronizingly waved us past. Thence north by the ancient highway which leads to Monastir, the parched and yellow fields on either side still littered with the débris of war—brokencamionsand wagons, shattered cannon, pyramids of ammunition-cases, vast quantities of barbed wire—and sprinkled with white crosses, thousands and thousands of them, marking the places where sleep the youths from Britain, France, Italy, Russia, Serbia, Canada, India, Australia, Africa, who fell in the Last Crusade.
Monastir is a filthy, ill-paved, characteristically Turkish town, which, before its decimation by the war, was credited with having some 60,000 inhabitants. Of these about one-half were Turks and one-quarter Greeks, the remaining quarter of the inhabitants being composed of Serbs, Jews, Albanians, and Bulgars. Those of its buildings which escaped the great conflagration which destroyed half the town were terribly shattered by the long series of bombardments, so that to-day the place looks like San Francisco after the earthquake and Baltimore after the fire. In the suburbs are immense supplies of warmatérielof all sorts, mostly going to waste. I saw thousands of camions, ambulances, caissons, and wagons literally falling apart from neglect, and this in a country which is almost destitute of transport. Though the town was packed with Serbian troops, most of whom are sleeping and eating inthe open, no attempt was being made, so far as I could see, to repair the shell-torn buildings, to clean the refuse-littered streets, or to afford the inhabitants even the most nominal police protection. The crack of rifles and revolvers is as frequent in the streets of Monastir as the bang of bursting tires on Fifth Avenue. A Serbian sentry, on duty outside the house in which I was sleeping, suddenly loosed off a clip of cartridges in the street, for no reason in the world, it seemed, than because he liked to hear the noise! Dead bodies are found nearly every morning. Murders are so common that they do not provoke even passing comment. In the night there comes a sharp bark of an automatic or the shattering roar of a hand-grenade (which, since the war proved its efficacy, has become the most recherché weapon for private use in these regions), a clatter of feet, and a "Hello! Another killing." That is all. Life is the cheapest thing there is in the Balkans.
The only really clean place we found in Monastir was the American Red Cross Hospital, an extremely well-managed and efficient institution, which was under the direction of a young American woman, Dr. Frances Flood, who,with a single woman companion, Miss Jessup, pluckily remained at her post throughout the greater part of the war. The officers who during the war achieved rows of ribbons for having acted as messenger boys between the War Department and the foreign military missions in Washington, would feel a trifle embarrassed, I imagine, if they knew what this little American woman did to winherdecorations.
It is in the neighborhood of one hundred and fifty miles from Monastir to Salonika across the Macedonian plain and the road is one of the very worst in Europe. Deep ruts, into which the car sometimes slipped almost to its hubs, and frequent gullies made driving, save at the most moderate speed, impossible, while, as many of the bridges were broken, and without signs to warn the travelers of their condition, we more than once barely saved ourselves from plunging through the gaping openings to disaster. The vast traffic of the fighting armies had ground the roads into yellow dust which rose in clouds as dense as a London fog, while the waves of heat from the sun-scorched plains beat against our faces like the blast from an open furnace door. Despite its abominable condition, the road was alive with traffic: droves of buffalo, black, ungainly, broad-horned beasts, their elephant-like hides caked with yellow mud; woolly waves of sheep and goats driven by wild mountain herdsmen in high fur caps and gaudy sashes; caravans of camels, swinging superciliously past on padded feet, laden with supplies for the interior or salvaged war material for the coast; clumsy carts, painted in strange designs and screaming colors, with great sharpened stakes which looked as though they were intended for purposes of torture, but whose real duty is to keep the top-heavy loads in place.
Though the slopes of the Rhodope and the Pindus are clothed with splendid forests, it is for the most part a flat and treeless land, dotted with clusters of filthy hovels made of sun-dried brick and with patches of discouraged-looking vegetation. As Macedonia (its inhabitants pronounce it as though the first syllable weremack) was once the granary of the East, I had expected to see illimitable fields of waving grain, but such fields as we did see were generally small and poor. Guarding them against the hovering swarms of blackbirds were many scarecrows, rigged out in the uniforms and topped by the helmets of the men whose bones bleach amid the grain. In Switzerland they make a very excellent red wine calledSchweizerblut, because the grapes from which it is made are grown on soil reddened by the blood of the Swiss who fell on the battlefield of Morat. If blood makes fine wine, then the best wine in all the world should come from these Macedonian plains, for they have been soaked with blood since ever time began.
Our halfway town was Vodena, which seemed, after the heat and dust of the journey, like an oasis in the desert. Scores of streams, issuing from the steep slopes of the encircling hills, race through the town in a network of little canals and fling themselves from a cliff, in a series of superb cascades, into the wooded valley below. Philip of Macedon was born near Vodena, and there, in accordance with his wishes, he was buried. You can see the tomb, flanked by ever-burning candles, though you may not enter it, should you happen to pass that way. He chose his last resting-place well, did the great soldier, for the overarching boughs of ancient plane-trees turn the cobbledstreets of the little town into leafy naves, the air is heavy with the scent of orange and oleander, and the place murmurs with the pleasant sound of plashing water.
Beyond Vodena the road improved for a time and we fled southward at greater speed, the telegraph poles leaping at us out of the yellow dust-haze like the pikes of giant sentinels. At Alexander's Well, an ancient cistern built from marble blocks and filled with crystal-clear water, we paused to refill our boiling radiator, and paused again, a few miles farther on, at the wretched, mud-walled village which, according to local tradition, is the birthplace of the man who made himself master of three continents, changed the face of the world, and died at thirty-three.
Then south again, south again, across the seemingly illimitable plains, until, topping a range of bare brown hills, there lay spread before us the gleaming walls and minarets of that city where Paul preached to the Thessalonians. To the westward Olympus seemed to verify the assertions of the ancient Greeks that its summit touched the sky. To the east, outlined against the Ægean's blue, I could see the peninsula of Chalkis, with its three gaunt capes, Cassandra, Longos, and Athos, reaching toward Thrace, the Hellespont and Asia Minor, like the claw of a vulture stretched out to snatch the quarry which the eagles killed.
Salonika is superbly situated. To gain it from the seaward side you sail through a portal formed by the majestic peaks of Athos and Olympus. It reclines on the bronze-brown Macedonian hills, white-clad, like a young Greek goddess, with its feet laved by the blue waters of the Ægean. (I have used this simile elsewhere in the book, but it does not matter.) The scores of slender minarets which rise above the housetops belie the crosses on the Greek flags which flaunt everywhere, hinting that the city, though it has passed under Christian rule, is at heart still Moslem. Indeed, barely a tenth of the 200,000 inhabitants are of the ruling race, for Salonika is that rare thing in modern Europe, a city whose population is by majority Jewish. There were hook-nosed, dark-skinnedtraders from Judea here, no doubt, as far back as the days when Salonika was but a way-station on the great highroad which linked the East with Rome, but it was the Jews expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella who transformed the straggling Turkish town into one of the most prosperous cities of the Levant by making it their home. And to-day the Jewish women of Salonika, the older ones at least, wear precisely the same costume that their great-grandmother wore in Spain before the persecution—a symbol and a reminder of how the Israelites were hunted by the Christians before they found refuge in a Moslem land.
There are no less than eight distinct ways of spelling and pronouncing the city's name. To the Greeks, who are its present owners, it is Saloniki or Saloneke, according to the method of transliterating theepsilon; it is known to the Turks, who misruled it for five hundred years, as Selanik; the British call it Salonica, with the accent on the second syllable; the French Salonique; the Italians Salonnico, while the Serbs refer to it as Solun. The best authorities seem to have agreed, however, on Salonika, with the accent on the "i," which is pronounced like "e," so that it rhymes with "paprika." But these are all corruptions and abbreviations, for the city was originally named Thessalonica, after the sister of Alexander of Macedon, and thus referred to in the two epistles which St. Paul addressed to the church he founded there. Owing to the variety of its religious sects, Salonika has a superfluity of Sabbaths as well as of names, Friday being observed by the Moslems, Saturday by the Jews, and Sunday by the Christians. Perhaps it would be putting it more accurately to say that there is no Sabbath at all, for the inhabitants are so eager to make money that business is transacted on every day of the seven.
Besides the great colony of Orthodox Jews in Salonika, there is a sect of renegades known as Dounmé, or Deunmeh, who number perhaps 20,000 in all. These had their beginnings in theAnnus Mirabilis, when a Jewish Messiah, Sabatai Sevi of Smyrna, arose in the Levant. He preached a creed which was a first cousin of those believed in by our own Anabaptists and Seventh Day Adventists. The name and the fame of him spread across the Near East like fire in dry grass. Every ghetto in Turkey hadaccepted him; his ritual was adopted by every synagogue; the Jews gave themselves over to penance and preparation. For a year honesty reigned in the Levant. Then the prophet set out for Constantinople to beard the Sultan in his palace and, so he announced, to lead him in chains to Zion. That was where Sabatai Sevi made his big mistake. For the Commander of the Faithful was from Missouri, so far as Sabatai Sevi's claims to divinity were concerned.
"Messiahs can perform miracles," the Sultan said. "Let me see you perform one. My Janissaries shall make a target of you. If you are of divine origin, as you claim, the arrows will not harm you. And, in any event, it will be an interesting experiment."
THE ANCIENT WALLS OF SALONIKATHE ANCIENT WALLS OF SALONIKABefore us we saw the yellow walls and crenellated towers of that city where Paul preached to the Thessalonians
Now Sabatai evidently had grave doubts about his self-assumed divinity being arrow-proof, for he protested vigorously against the proposal to make a human pin-cushion of him, whereupon the Sultan, his suspicions now confirmed, gave him his choice between being impaled upon a stake, a popular Turkish pastime of the period, or of renouncing Judaism and accepting the faith of Islam. Preferring to be a live coward to an impaled martyr, he chosethe latter, yet such was his influence with the Jews that thousands of his adherents voluntarily embraced the religion of Mohammed. The Dounmé of Salonika are the descendants of these renegades. Two centuries of waiting have not dimmed their faith in the eventual coming of their Messiah. So there they wait, equally distrusted by Jews and Moslems, though they form the wealthiest portion of the city's population. But they live apart and so dread any mixing of their blood with that of the infidel Turk or the unbelieving Jew that, in order to avoid the risk of an unwelcome proposal, they make a practise of betrothing their children before they are born. It strikes me, however, that there must on occasion be a certain amount of embarrasment connected with these early matches, as, for example, when the prenatally engaged ones prove to be of the same sex.
I used to be of the opinion that Tiflis, in the Caucasus, was the most cosmopolitan city that I had ever seen, but since the war I think that the greatest variety of races could probably be found in Salonika. Sit at a marble-topped table on the pavement in front of Floca's café at thetea-hour and you can see representatives of half the races in the world pass by—British officers in beautifully polished boots and beautifully cut breeches, astride of beautifully groomed ponies; Highlanders with their kilts covered by khaki aprons; raw-boned, red-faced Australians in sun helmets and shorts; swaggeringchausseurs d'Afriquein wonderful uniforms of sky-blue and scarlet which you will find nowhere else outside a musical comedy; soldiers of the Foreign Legion with the skirts of their long blue overcoats pinned back and with mushroom-shaped helmets which are much too large for them; soldierly, well set-up little Ghurkas in broad-brimmed hats and uniforms of olive green, reminding one for all the world of fighting cocks; Sikhs in yellow khaki (did you know, by the way, thatkhakiis the Hindustani word for dust?) with their long black beards neatly plaited and rolled up under their chins; Epirotes wearing the starched and plaited skirts calledfustanellas, each of which requires from twenty to forty yards of linen; Albanian tribal chiefs in jackets stiff with gold embroidery, with enough weapons thrust in their gaudy sashes to decorate a club-room; Cretan gendarmes wearing breeches which are so tight below the knee and so enormously baggy in the seat that they can, and when they are in Crete frequently do, use them in place of a basket for carrying their poultry, eggs or other farm produce to market; coal-black Senegalese, coffee-colored Moroccans and tan-colored Algerians, all wearing the broad red cummerbunds and the high red tarbooshes which distinguish France's African soldiery; Italianbersaglieriwith great bunches of cocks' feathers hiding their steel helmets; Serbs in ununiform uniforms of every conceivable color, material and pattern, their only uniform article of equipment being their characteristic high-crownedképis; Russians in flat caps and belted blouses, their baggy trousers tucked into boots with ankles like accordions; officers of Cossack cavalry, their tall and slender figures accentuated by their long, tight-fitting coats and their high caps of lambskin; Bulgar prisoners wearing the red-banked caps which they have borrowed from their German allies and Austrian prisoners in worn and shabby uniforms of grayish-blue; Greek soldiers bedecked like Christmas trees with medals, badges, fourragéres and chevrons, in the hope, I suppose, thattheir gaudiness would make up for their lack of prowess; Orthodox priests with their long hair (for they never cut their hair or beards) done up in Psyche knots; Hebrew rabbis wearing caps of velvet shaped like those worn by bakers; Moslem muftis with their snowy turbans encircled by green scarves as a sign that they had made the pilgrimage to the Holy Places; Jewish merchants and money-changers in the same black caps and greasy gabardines which their ancestors wore in the Middle Ages; British, French, Italian and American bluejackets with their caps cocked jauntily and the roll of the sea in their gait; A.R.A., A.R.C., Y.M.C.A., K. of C. and A.C.R.N.E. workers in fancy uniforms of every cut and color; Turkish sherbet-sellers with huge brass urns, hung with tinkling bells to give notice of their approach, slung upon their backs; ragged Macedonian bootblacks (bootblacking appeared to be the national industry of Macedonia), and hordes of gipsy beggars, the filthiest and most importunate I have ever seen. All day long this motley, colorful crowd surges through the narrow streets, their voices, speaking in a score of tongues, raising a din like that of Bedlam; thesmells of unwashed bodies, human perspiration, strong tobacco, rum, hashish, whiskey, arrack, goat's cheese, garlic, cheap perfumery and sweat-soaked leather combining in a stench which rises to high Heaven.
On the streets one sees almost as many colored soldiers as white ones: French native troops from Algeria, Morocco, Madagascar, Senegal and China; British Indian soldiery from Bengal, the Northwest Provinces and Nepaul. The Indian troops were superbly drilled and under the most iron discipline, but the French native troops appeared to be getting out of hand and were not to be depended upon. To a man they had announced that they wanted to go home. They had been through four and a half years of war, they are tired and homesick, and they are more than willing to let the Balkan peoples settle their own quarrels. They were weary of fighting in a quarrel of which they knew little and about which they cared less; they longed for a sight of the wives and the children they had left behind them in Fez or Touggourt or Timbuktu. Because they had been kept on duty in Europe, while the French white troops were being rapidly demobilizedand returned to their homes, the Africans were sullen and resentful. This smoldering resentment suddenly burst into flame, a day or so before we reached Salonika, when a Senegalese sergeant, whose request to be sent home had been refused, ran amuck, barricaded himself in a stone outhouse with a plentiful supply of rifles and ammunition, and succeeded in killing four officers and half-a-dozen soldiers before his career was ended by a well-aimed hand grenade. A few days later a British officer was shot and killed in the camp outside the city by a Ghurka sentinel. This was not due to mutiny, however, but, on the contrary, to over-strict obedience to orders, the sentry having been instructed that he was to permit no one to cross his post without challenging. The officer, who was fresh from England and had had no experience with the discipline of Indian troops, ignored the order to halt—and the next day there was a military funeral.
Salonika is theoretically under Greek rule and there are pompous, self-important little Greek policemen, perfect replicas of the British M.P.'s in everything save physique and discipline, on duty at the street crossings, but instead of regulating the enormous flow of traffic they seem only to obstruct it. When the congestion becomes so great that it threatens to hold up the unending stream of motor-lorries which rolls through the city, day and night, between the great cantonments in the outskirts and the port, a tall British military policeman suddenly appears from nowhere, shoulders the Greek gendarme aside, and with a few curt orders untangles the snarl into which the traffic has gotten itself and sets it going again.
Picturesque though Salonika undeniably is, with its splendid mosques, its beautiful Byzantine churches, its Roman triumphal arches, and the brooding bulk of Mount Olympus, which overshadows and makes trivial everything else, yet the strongest impressions one carries away are filth, corruption and misgovernment. These conditions are due in some measure, no doubt, to the refusal of the European troops, with whom the city is filled, to take orders from any save their own officers, but the underlying reason is to be found in the indifference and gross incompetence of the Greek authorities. The Greeks answer this by saying that they have not had timeto clean the city up and give it a decent administration because they have owned it only eight years. All of the European business quarter, including a mile of handsome buildings along the waterfront, lies in ruins as a result of the great fire of 1917. Though a system of new streets has been tentatively laid out across this fire-swept area, no attempt has been made to rebuild the city, hundreds of shopkeepers carrying on their businesses in shacks and booths erected amid the blackened and tottering walls. All of the hotels worthy of the name were destroyed in the fire, the two or three which escaped being quite uninhabitable, at least for Europeans, because of the armies of insects with which they are infested. I do not recall hearing any one say a good word for Salonika. The pleasantest recollection which I retain of the place is that of the steamer which took us away from there.
Before we could leave Salonika for Constantinople our passports had to be viséd by the representatives of five nations. In fact, travel in the Balkans since the war is just one damn visé after another. The Italians stamped them because we had come from Albania, which isunder Italian protection. The Serbs put on their imprint because we had stopped for a few days in Monastir. The Greeks affixed their stamp—and collected handsomely for doing so—because, theoretically at least, Salonika, whose dust we were shaking from our feet, belongs to them. The French insisted on viséing our papers in order to show their authority and because they needed the ten francs. The British control officer told me that I really didn't need his visé, but that he would put it on anyway because it would make the passports look more imposing. Because we were going to Constantinople and Bucharest, whereas our passports were made out for "the Balkan States," the American Consul would not visé them at all, on the ground that neither Turkey nor Roumania is in the Balkans. About Roumania he was technically correct, but I think most geographers place European Turkey in the Balkans. As things turned out, however, it was all labor lost and time thrown away, for we landed in Constantinople as untroubled by officials and inspectors as though we were stepping ashore at Twenty-third Street from a Jersey City ferry.
There were no regular sailings from Salonika for Constantinople, but, by paying a hundred dollars for a ticket which in pre-war days cost twenty, we succeeded in obtaining passage on an Italian tramp steamer. ThePadovawas just such a cargo tub as one might expect to find plying between Levantine ports. Though we occupied an officer's cabin, for which we were chargedMauretaniarates, it was very far from being as luxurious as it sounds, for I slept upon a mattress laid upon three chairs and the mattress was soiled and inhabited. Still, it was very diverting, after an itching night, to watch the cockroaches, which were almost as large as mice, hurrying about their duties on the floor and ceiling. Huddled under the forward awnings were two-score deck passengers—Greeks, Turks, Armenians and Roumanians. Sprawled on their straw-filled mattresses, they loafed the hot and lazy days away in playing cards, eating the black bread, olives and garlic which they had brought with them, smoking a peculiarly strong and villainous tobacco, and torturing native musical instruments of various kinds. At night a young Turk sang plaintive, quavering laments to the accompaniment of a sort of guitar, some of the others occasionally joining in the mournful chorus. I found my chief recreation, when it grew too dark to read, in watching an Orthodox priest, who was one of the deck-passengers, prepare for the night by combing and putting up his long and greasy hair. Another of the deck-passengers was a rather prosperous-looking, middle-aged Levantine who had been in America making his fortune, he told me, and was now returning to his wife, who lived in a little village on the Dardanelles, after an absence of sixteen years. She had no idea that he was coming, he said, as he had planned to surprise her. Perhaps he was the one to be surprised. Sixteen years is a long time for a woman to wait for a man, even in a country as conservative as Turkey.
The officers of thePadovatalked a good deal about the mine-fields that still guarded the approaches to the Dardanelles and the possibility that some of the deadly contrivances might have broken loose and drifted across our course. In order to cheer us up the captain showed us the charts, on which the mined areas were indicated by diagonal shadings, little red arrows pointing the way between them along channelsas narrow and devious as a forest trail. To add to our sense of security he told us that he had never been through the Dardanelles before, adding that he did not intend to pick up a pilot, as he considered their charges exorbitant. At the base of the great mine-field which lies across the mouth of the Straits we were hailed by a British patrol boat, whose choleric commander bellowed instructions at us, interlarded with much profanity, through a megaphone. The captain of thePadovacould understand a few simple English phrases, if slowly spoken, but the broadside of Billingsgate only confused and puzzled him, so, despite the fact that he had no pilot and that darkness was rapidly descending, he kept serenely on his course. This seemed to enrage the British skipper, who threw over his wheel and ran directly across our bows, very much as one polo player tries to ride off another.
"You —— fool!" he bellowed, fairly dancing about his quarter-deck with rage. "Why in hell don't you stop when I tell you to? Don't you know that you're running straight into a mine-field? Drop anchor alongside me and do it —— quick or I'll take your —— license awayfrom you. And I don't want any of your —— excuses, either. I won't listen to 'em."
"What he say?" the captain asked me. "I not onderstan' hees Engleesh ver' good."
"No, you wouldn't," I told him. "He's speaking a sort of patois, you see. He wants to know if you will have the great kindness to drop anchor alongside him until morning, for it is forbidden to pass through the mine-fields in the dark, and he hopes that you will have a very pleasant night."
Five minutes later our anchor had rumbled down off Sed-ul-Bahr, under the shadow of Cape Helles, the tip of that rock, sun-scorched, blood-soaked peninsula which was the scene of that most heroic of military failures—the Gallipoli campaign. Above us, on the bare brown hillside, was what looked, in the rapidly deepening twilight, like a patch of driven snow, but upon examining it through my glasses I saw that it was a field enclosed by a rude wall and planted thickly with small white wooden crosses, standing row on row. Then I remembered. It was at the foot of these steep and steel-swept bluffs that the Anzacs made their immortal landing; it is here, in earth soaked with their own blood, that they lie sleeping. The crowded dugouts in which they dwelt have already fallen in; the trenches which they dug and which they held to the death have crumbled into furrows; their bones lie among the rocks and bushes at the foot of that dark and ominous hill on whose slopes they made their supreme sacrifice. Leaning on the rail of the deserted bridge in the darkness and the silence it seemed as though I could see their ghosts standing amid the crosses on the hillside staring longingly across the world toward that sun-baked Karroo of Australia and to the blue New Zealand mountains which they called "Home." It was a night never to be forgotten, for the glassy surface of the Ægean glowed with phosphorescence, the sky was like a hanging of purple velvet, and the peak of our foremast seemed almost to graze the stars. Across the Hellespont, to the southward, the sky was illumined by a ruddy glow—a village burning, so a sailor told me, on the site of ancient Troy. And then there came back to me those lines from Agamemnon which I had learned as a boy: