With Montenegrins at Petch

1. The American Unit at Petch

To get to Petch you have to pass over the plain of Kossovo. Serbs who come there for the first time fall on their knees and kiss its sacred soil, and I felt ashamed to be an outsider, but I enjoyed its yellow corn and tall shining maize leaves and the distant mountains. I crossed it in a Turkish carriage. This is pleasant in the heat of the day with its canopy that conceals you from the sun as well as the eyes of men, and one can lie down in it and sleep.

There is no railway over the plain from Mitrovitza, though Petch, formerly Ipek, was till I9I2 an important frontier town of the Ottoman Empire. In I920 it was still-to look at-almost completely Moslem. It had eleven minarets and no Christian church, though the old Patriarchate Monastery is a couple of miles outside it. From the hills above, it seemed full of gardens. There were many poplars in it, taller than the minarets and almost as slender. When you were inside it, it was cool and clean, because there were streams rushing through every cobbled street. On market days it was crammed with mules and ox carts, white-capped Albanians and fezzed Turks selling watermelons, sweetmeats, grain, timber, red leather sandals (which they made while you waited), bowls and belts, and even carpets. The mountains they had warned me about were there indeed, giant rocks that leapt out of the plain, but they were not sullen as I had expected-green trees clung to their sides. Their highlands had never been conquered; they wore a panache of glory and defiance.

I found the Friends living in tents in the garden of a house that had once belonged to an Aga. Drew Pearson, now a well-known American publicist, was in charge of the Unit, and explained to me what they were doing. It all sounded most Tolstoyan. The Austrians had wanted a military road over the plain, and in order to force the Montenegrins to make it, they had burnt a number of their cottages and forced the homeless inhabitants to come down and work for them. They were housed in miserable barracks and left stranded when the war ended. Around them were great stretches of land. The plain had had a bad name for centuries because of the brigands, and had been left untilled. The Government was offering holdings to all families that wanted them. But who can plough without tools and without bread to eat while they are waiting for their harvest? The American Friends had sent their Unit to build villages for the stranded Montenegrins, to help them to break up the waste land, plough and sow it, and to feed them until they could reap their first harvest. It was a very tough job. It meant pulling thorn bushes and dynamiting tree stumps out of the hard ground, sinking wells for water, making thousands of mud bricks, as well as doors and window frames and simple furniture, and teaching the Montenegrin mountaineers to do all these unaccustomed tasks. The Americans were nearly all boys of twenty-two or so, either Friends or Mennonites, a sect that has kept up its old Puritan customs and still live as their ancestors did, keeping the Sabbath and abjuring wine, tobacco, theatres and dance-halls. They were of good, pioneer stock, some of them farm lads, others engineers, carpenters or plumbers. They came from all over the States-some from Kansas, Ohio, Virginia and Kentucky, while others had been raised along with apples (and were as wholesome to look at) in Washington State and the far West. It was a self-sacrificing task. They none of them spoke Serb, they were all of them homesick: they missed the foods they were used to, the waffles with maple sugar, the yams, clam chowders and roast bananas, and the salads made with pineapple and mayonnaise. They were most of them shy, but one of them, called Cloud, was more communicative. After I had been there a day or two he said to me, "And what is your reaction, Ma'am, to this one-horse town?" I said I liked it, but he said these folks got his goat-they wouldn't step on the gas. They were lazy skunks and mean to their women-they left them to do all the work while they sat pretty. I told him that the Montenegrins were eagles-they had lived free for five hundred years in their mountain eyries; you couldn't expect them to sweat and dig like common peasants, but he wasn't impressed. They talked wistfully -most of them-about how things were back in their home town, or "back where I come from in the Middle West where we have an automobile to every four and four-fifth inhabitants, including infants in arms." It was more honour to them that they stuck in at their hard task as they did. The houses were already going up and the Albanians were bringing down ox-waggon loads of timber felled in the mountains. This was remarkable, as the Albanians in this region had only been annexed to Yugoslavia since the Peace, and hundreds of them preferred the life of the brigand to military service and the payment of taxes to their new overlords. Every now and then shots rang out on the mountainside, or even in the streets of Petch, and we knew that some noble brigand was killing or being killed. One evening two of them jumped over the wall into our garden and frightened our Serbian cook and serving maid into hysterics, but they ran away when they heard the shrieks.

The reason we lived in the Aga's garden in tents was because his house was so very rickety. This was characteristic of Turkish houses in the Balkans. Sir Charles Eliot gives a reason for this in his delightful book,"Turkey in Europe." He says that the Turks were by nature nomads and did not expect to stay long in one place. True, they had been in the Balkans for five hundred years, but they were there as an army of occupation and never forgot that they were really tent-dwellers. The very look of a Turkish house suggested that it was not going to be permanent. On the ground floor there were stables and stores, an outside stairway led to the upper storey, the entrances to the rooms were closed by curtains, not doors. There were holes in the planking of the passages and spiders' webs and swallows' nests in the rafters. No preparation was made for the winter, although that might last for six months of the year. Moreover, none of the rooms had a particular purpose. If you wanted to go to bed, you took a rug and curled up on the floor; if you wanted to eat, a bowl was placed on the floor; if you wanted to write, you did it on your hand. Our Mennonite carpenters and engineers had to do a great deal to the Aga's house to make it habitable for the winter. But the interiors of some of the houses I visited were delightful. There was no furniture in them, except divans with rich carpets thrown over them and a shelf on which there were copper pots, glowing against walls washed whits or blue. It seemed luxurious for tent-dwellers. But after all, in the Grand Vizier's camp at the siege of Vienna, the tents were of green silk, and there were carpets, pea cocks, monkeys, and flower gardens, rare Oriental foods and luxurious seraglios.

In spite of the Puritanism of the American boys, we had a gay time in the Aga's garden. Pearson was a man of the world, and a bright American woman had somehow turned up to play hostess to the Unit, while their regular housekeeper was on leave. She wasn't young, but she was still glamourous. She told me that she spent two hours every morning massaging her face: she had a lovely complexion, quite apart from the cosmetics, still uncommon in those days, which she used with great skill. She told risque stories at table about the private life of Presi dent Wilson and the night clubs she had visited in Paris and made the Mennonites blush and look at their plates, and she got up dances at week-ends for all the notables of Petch, with gipsy bands, and torches hanging from the trees, and plenty of plum brandy and wine.

II. Montenegrins and Turkish Harems

I had a curious experience with one of these. He asked me to see his sick wife. He was not the heroic type of Montenegrin-I had seen these about, tall, with blazing black eyes and fierce moustaches, wearing embroidered waistcoats and yatagans in their multi-coloured belts. He wore shabby army clothes, was undersized and drooping. His name was Milan. When he got home after the war he decided to bring his wife and baby down to Petch. He sold his cottage and left his brother Jovan to follow with his horse and his savings-2,000 dinars, partly in gold. Jovan set out on the feast of Sveti Ivan, the saint of their slava, but as he passed through the mountain gorge near Petch he had been fallen upon by brigands, who had killed him, stolen the horse and the money, and thrown his body into the stream. This was ssudbina (fate), but the worst was that his wife had been taken very ill and could no longer feed her baby.

They were living in one room in an old Turkish house, which was even more flimsy and dilapidated than our Aga's mansion. There were a dozen other families there. I followed Milan up the outside stairway into a miserable kitchen, where there was not even a stove, only a hole in the floor with a cauldron hanging above it. Milan's wife was lying on a straw mattress. Her hands were as thin as birds' claws, her cheeks hollow and her eyes bright with fever. A baby lay in a cradle beside her-a lovely infant of seven months, still fat and dimpled, though Milan told me that he had had no nourishment for some days. The mother's breasts were dry. The child wailed, but with Montenegrin obstinacy refused to be weaned. Milan wanted me to find a wet nurse.

I went to the Mayor. He shook his head, but said he would make inquiries. I went to the police and to the priests-I would have gone to the Patriarch if he had been there. In the end a wet nurse was found, but she was a bulla (a Turkish woman). My heart sank, but I took her to the Montenegrin house. I left her on the verandah and went into Milan's kitchen, saying with forced brightness, "I have found a wet nurse for your baby, Milan. His life is saved. She is outside, if you want to see her." He came back, clouded. "But she's a bulla," he said. "I can't give my child to a bulla." "You prefer him to die?" "Wait a moment," he muttered, "I will ask." He opened the door and in a second the room was full of excited women, all gesticulating and shouting at once. "He can't give his baby to a bulla, sestro, it would be a sin." "But she is a good woman," I said, "and clean, and she's got lovely milk, for her own child has just died, and she lives in a nice house with carpets in it and a garden round it." "It is true, sestro. The Turks are much richer and cleaner than we are. But it is the Faith. The child will go to Hell if he takes the bulla's milk. Let him die, let him die. What does it matter?" "This is woman's talk," I said, turning to the father and betraying my sex in my despair. "This is foolish woman's talk. You are a man-you have seen the world. You have fought in wars and sailed beyond the seas. You have been blessed with wisdom and intelligence-you know that the bulla has been sent to you to save your child." Milan hesitated a moment-then he squared his shoulders, lifted his baby out of the cradle and carried him out to the veiled woman, who was still standing, motionless, on the verandah.

A few days later Milan's wife died, but the baby survived, and after some weeks became the pet of the S.R.F. Orphanage.

The Americans had a dispensary, run by an elderly woman doctor from the Middle West. She was a homoeopathist and doled out pills in a manner that much impressed the Albanians and Turks who formed the bulk of her patients. Their own methods of healing were mostly confined to wearing texts from the Koran next whatever they believed to be the source of their illness. I used to interpret for her sometimes, though I wasn't sure if the pills were more efficacious.

Moslems often invited us to go into the harems to see their wives. We had to take a Turkish gendarme who knew Serb with us, as interpreter, and hide him behind a curtain. Often the trouble was that the woman had not yet had a child. "She's afraid I will divorce her," the husband would explain. The doctor from the Middle West used to recommend a sea voyage. As the inhabitants of Petch had never heard of the sea, I translated this as a month at the "baths," for there were good baths in the neighbourhood. Often the women were consumptive because of their confined lives.

Once we went into a harem on the feast of Bairam and found all the women hideously painted, not only with henna, but bright green, and their eyebrows charcoaled so that they met together. They were chattering like cockatoos. It was repulsive. I was sorry for the children brought up by these wretched women, who were kept like animals in cages. Kemal Pasha had not yet torn away their veils and set them free. And even to this day the Old Turkey remains mummified and embalmed in Yugoslavia, as though for the benefit and the warning of students of the past. The Serbs treated their old oppressors with a kind of amused tolerance, and the pious among them preferred to remain where they could practise their faith and customs, rather than return to their motherland and be reformed. Already in I920 their lands were passing into the hands of their Christian rulers. They were not taken from them by force, but the Turks had to sell them since they could no longer exact feudal dues and service from the rayah, and were too grand to dig themselves. Moreover, they lacked the cheap labour that every Balkan peasant has in wife and daughter.

In Skoplye and Monastir one could see former effendis and agas driving cabs or selling sweetmeats in tiny shops. They were still haughty and dignified though a little shabby. Many became gendarmes. I used to have discussions with our gendarme-interpreter on the position of women.

He told me that he had sent away his first wife after the marriage ceremony because he didn't like her face-he had not, of course, seen it before. "Why don't you choose your own?" I demanded. "That would never do," he replied. "I wouldn't know how to choose. I would be carried away by some foolish prettiness. No, my mother knows best -she made a little mistake that time. No matter, it was soon rectified." "But your present wife is always ailing," I said, for she was one of those we visited. "How often does she go out?" "Why, two or three times a year," he said, surprised at the question. "But don't you know it is bad for her to be sitting all day-that she needs movement and air and change of scene. She has her veil, after all." "A veil is not enough, sestro-I can't trust her. Besides it would dishonour me if it were said that my wife was always gadding about the place." "But we go about quite free," I said, "and it's all right." "That's not the same, you are half men. Our women are different-we can't trust them out of our sight, and we can't trust each other where women are concerned." "Is that why your houses turn blind eyes to the street and your gardens have high walls and huge doors barred with iron?" "Of course-and tell me, you who go everywhere. My brother's wife, is she pretty? Has she as good milk for her baby as mine?" "Why don't you go and look at her if you are so interested?" I said. "If I looked at my brother's wifc he would have to kill me," he said solemnly. "He would be dishonoured. I would do the same in his place." "To hell with honour," I said. "You told me yesterday that it worried you to see your mother ill, but you didn't mind a bit about your wife, because you could get another at once if she died. Now you are ready to kill your brother for her sake." "Not for her sake, sestro," he said patiently, "for my own- for my honour."

Before I had lived in Petch I had had a certain respect for Moham medanism, but now I felt that Moslems could never advance beyond a certain limited stage of civilisation because of the degradation of women. I did not know that soon the veils would be torn from their faces and their barred doors battered down, both in Asia Minor and on the steppes of Siberia and Turkestan, though not in Yugoslavia.

III. Excursion into Montenegro

We passed the Patriarchate Monastery and saw the stables where Dot Newhall had spent a night on the Retreat, and the close where she had hung up her washing, to the scandal of the monks. We came to the gorge and began to climb the narrow path along which hundreds of thousands had passed less than five years before. I thought of Drago, ill with typhus, driving the mule that carried his precious books, and Bogosav and the hundreds of others who had described to me the martyrdom of that journey. There was no sign of it now. The mountains were free of snow-the stream that dashed through the gorge was green and clear, feathery acacias and ash trees clung to the sides of the rocks and high up one caught sight of meadows, where very white sheep were grazing in charge of Albanian shepherds dressed in white homespun braided with black. "Look," said Mirko, our Montenegrin guide, in a hoarse whisper. "There they are, the devils-brigands all of them. Let us keep close together. They daren't attack when they see a lot of people." By this time we had become a long caravan; merchants were lashing mules laden with watermelons, paprika, tomatoes and kegs of wine, the treasures of the plain. All were anxious to keep close and pass the danger zone as fast as possible. I was on a pony, but when our path mounted away from the stream, he terrified me by walking at the outer edge of it-a false step and we should have both rolled down the precipice. Mirko assured me that the beast knew best, that their packs were often so huge that they would strike the rocks at the other side of the track unless they went at the extreme edge. The French had lost many mules on the Retreat because they loaded them up too much. It was at this point that Novitsa stepped out of the procession and began to lead my horse. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed and dressed in the uniform of a Serbian gendarme but, in spite of all this, he was a Montenegrin.

We began to talk about the brigands. "I ought to know all about them, sestro," he said gaily, "for I was a comitadji myself for three years. I know all the hide-outs in these mountains and all the secret fords. That's why they made me a gendarme-we're in great demand for the service. You see, we Montenegrins, we have always been an independent people. When we get higher up you will see a fort. The Turks built a ring of them round the highest peaks of our country, and inside that were the Haiduks whom they never conquered. My ancestors were free men, and when our King Nicholas betrayed us and invited the Austrians into the country I left my home with my comrades and lived in the forests and the holes of the rocks, and was as free as they had been."

"But wasn't it difficult in the winter?" I asked. "Oh no," he said, "the winter was best of all. We built ourselves huts-we knew no one could get at us as long as the snow lasted. We had great stores of sheep and cattle from the summer raids-we killed them off because of lack of fodder, but the ice kept the meat good. There was plenty to do in the winter-trees to cut down for firewood, harness to repair and sandals to make. We had hides from the oxen-untanned, of course, and rather rough. We used to carry down the wool from our sheep at night for our womenfolk to weave into cloth for us. The worst time of all was the spring. Then you are lucky if you don't starve. Stores begin to run short, but the rivers are too swollen to pass." "Do they take the bridges away at the ice-breaking as they do in Russia?" I asked. "Bridges? But my God, sestro, the comitadji can't use bridges. They are too well guarded. There are about two months of that, and then the rivers go down and we pass over our secret fords. The leaves come out and conceal us on the forest slopes. A gorge like this is the best of all. We often operated here. You see, the Austrians had to pass this way- it is the only track into Montenegro from the East. All their stores came this route and their ammunition. We did some good work in this valley. Twilight is the best time. You can creep down those mountain sides then without being seen, and we were all good shots in my detachment. Of course, we couldn't tackle them when there were a lot together, but they were careless, and often a few got behind the rest. And there were traitors amongst our people who traded with them-it's sad, sestro, but it is true. They suffered heavily when they passed along here with their flocks and herds. It was the animals that we were after-not small beasts like those"-he looked scornfully at a herd of wild-eyed goats that were crushing each other to get past us-"but bullocks and sheep and, above all, horses." "On the whole it wasn't a bad life?" "No-not on the whole," he replied reflectively, "except for one thing, and that one thing essential-. bread. I have known many lives lost for the sake of a sack of flour. Disguise yourself as you will, they capture you when you come down to the market to haggle for grain. That's how we get them now, you know. Of course, we had peasants who helped us, but they were poor themselves, and it was risky for them."

When we came to the top of the pass he said good-bye to me, explaining that the next valley was a danger zone for him. "I once had occasion," he said, "to burn down a house there. A woman of my family, a cousin, had given herself to an Austrian and they were living together." "So you killed them and burnt the house ? " "Not the woman," he said, crossing himself in horror. "I left her for God to punish, but the Austrian and her father, and now the relatives want to avenge him. It's the blood feud, you know. But come to my hut on your way back, sestro. There is excellent fish in our river: I will give you a fine meal." "Bread too?" "Yes," he said reverently, "bread too."

It began to rain and we were glad to come down into a valley and dry ourselves at a Han, as the Montenegrins call their inns. It was just a log cabin with a steep thatched roof. There was no chimney, and when we went into it we could scarcely see for the smoke, but at last made out a young woman stirring a cauldron that hung over the fire in the middle of her mud floor. She was very pretty, with a clear skin, delicate features and bright black eyes. She made us a soup and an omelette and gave us straw mattresses to lie on. She was a widow-her husband had fallen in the war, but she was not going to marry again, she said, because she had three children and a new husband is never good to his step-children. That was why she kept a Han and that, thank God, made her independent. And her eldest son said she mustn't marry again and he was eight and would soon be earning his keep.

After the Han, our track was very steep and to right and left and in front of us there was nothing but naked rock. On the whole I was not sorry when we got back to the rich plain of Petch.

IV. A Cambridge Student

Dimitri had been a student in Belgrade and had been mobilised in I9I4. In spite of wounds and typhus he had survived the Retreat, and spent the rest of the war studying literature in a peaceful college close at Cambridge. He was intelligent and had an individual approach to life which interested me. When Pearson invited him to Petch he came willingly, although he had told me that the only place where he felt real harmony with his surroundings was in his peasant home in Mitrovitza. But even perfect harmony becomes monotonous to an educated man in a village.

It was with difficulty that I persuaded Dimitri to come up the mountains with me. Though he looked a gentle, dreamy Slav, he was a realist, and he came unwillingly. First, it was a sweat to get up such high mountains in the hottest month of the year; second, it was dangerous because of the Albanian brigands; and third, we might get lost. But when I had dragged him up five thousand feet he couldn't deny the extraordinary exhilaration of it. The air was wine, and we had the whole shimmering plain infinitely far below us. We had scrambled up over slag and falling rocks and through pathless bush, but what Dimitri disliked most was the open spaces of meadowland. He ran quickly from tree to tree with the speed and grace of a roebuck, taking cover, he told me, from brigands. "It is all right for you," he explained, "because Albanians never kill women, but it is selfish of you to bring me here because I am fair game and have no gun. Besides, I was wounded once and my leg hurts me." I felt remorse when I heard that, and we hid in a copse of mountain oak and acacia trees, which he called a gipsy house, and drank wine and ate the meat and rice rolled up in vine leaves, and the watermelon we had brought with us, and he was happy again. "How did you get your wound?" I asked. "It isn't very interesting," he said. "It was after the Bulgarian attack on the Eastern front. One night the commander of our platoon ordered me to take a trench. Like most students, they had made me a sergeant, though I was quite inexperienced, because they were so short of officers. It was impossible to take the trench-we were hopelessly outnumbered. 'Do you mean make a demonstration?' I asked. 'No, take it,' he said. Then he asked my name and said he knew it-that was a trick, of course, to put me in a good humour. So I told my men to stick their bayonets into their rifles and steal up in the dark. What do we do next, I wondered, when we had got there-shout hurrah and rush, or is it too soon? I told a man to start machine gunning-then the Bulgarian ra-ta-ta-ta began. Suddenly I heard somebody shouting. Who is that damn fool, I wondered: then I realised it was myself. I was wounded in the leg. I did not feel anything, but I couldn't move. I would have died there, but a soldier to whom I had once given my pocket knife (and I didn't want it, I had another) carried me to the rear. 'Who is this?' said the commander, and heard the same name he had heard a few hours before, but he didn't know it this time. 'All right,' he said, 'carry him to the First Aid Station.' We gained our freedom in the end by fighting, but at the time it seemed a series of hopeless tasks, a vast, shapeless confusion, where nobody knew what he was doing. You act because you are afraid not to. You don't remember why you are fight ing-evcrything is blurred. The danger you are in is what you are conscious of-you feel yourself a target, terrifically exposed. Besides that, there is the feeling that you don't want to let your comrade down. That doesn't always operate, but it's the highest point you achieve.

"In hospital I was infected by typhus-it was a filthy place, and the living lay among the dead. I was unconscious most of the time, but I remember a lovely dream I had. I said to my mother, 'we are fighting against the Austrians and the Bulgars.' But she said, 'my son-that is only an allegory your father has told you.' I felt happy then and from that moment I got better-well enough for the Retreat."

That made me realise the associations these mountains had for Dimitri, and I felt remorseful again. We read from the books we had picked up in the Unit's library-Oscar Wilde, which I, unlike most English people, enjoyed, and which he, unlike most foreigners, despised, but which I agreed was most unsuitable for that intoxicating air. We tried Browning: that was better; and then Isaiah. That suited the altitude and our mountain mood best of all. Dimitri, though a pious mem ber of the Orthodox Serbian Church, had never heard of it before.

When we got down in the dusk into the gorge, we heard a throb bing sound. It was as though someone were driving an engine somewhere on the cliff face. Looking up we saw, on a ledge of the rocks, an eagle beating its wings. In another moment it soared into the air and flew out of our sight.

V. Salonika

I wrote in my diary-"there is something undignified about such a motley population as this. The place does not belong to itself. There are Jews, Greeks and Turks, and the remnants of the war influx. The people live in hovels under the fortifications and their streets are like moun tain mule-tracks. Their houses look temporary, as though they were bivouacking like bedouins and were expecting something else. A terrible wind blows, bringing the dust of the desert that surrounds Salonika, and the brown hills round it are dreary. At sunset you forget this if you climb to the fortifications above the town. Then you have the splendid gulf and the town with its red roofs and minarets and white buildings and bits of green-the fig trees and planes and vines that grow in the gardens-and in the distance the desert hills turned into purple clouds, and very far to the right, the white top of Olympus. . . . The desolation of the burnt port of Salonika is terrific-just a few broken walls and dust, dust like the sand of Sahara. I hadn't expected it. There is dignity in it-it seems the epitomised memory of all the tragedies of the city-the massacre of Theodosius (because they complained of his tax-gatherers), the attack of the Saracens (who sold 20,000 of their young people into slavery), the devastations by the tribes of the North, and then by the Turks, and after that the succession of fires and plagues until this greatest fire of all. It is remarkable to see Greeks all round one-all like the Greek officer at Gerdalitza. I have never been in any place that seems so old-for not even Rome and Utica and Carthage seem so old. I can imagine the apostle Paul breaking into it-feverish, fiery, impatient, terrifically convinced. In these days of bitter hatreds, his internationalism is a challenge. 'He hath made of one blood all the nations of men.' Even Isaiah did not get to the 'one blood' conception. The Gentiles come, but only to make the glory of Israel greater. They are still outside."

In 1920 there still hung over Salonika the disillusion of the war when, for nearly three years, it had been like a prison camp for half a million Allied troops and infected most of them with malaria. But when I returned to it in 1929 it had been rebuilt and become the most brilliant city in Greece.

VI. Permanent Work in Yugoslavia

The orphanage at Nish was in a fine building especially designed for its purpose and built out of S.R.F. funds, and was for fifty boys and girls between the ages of five and twenty. It was run by Miss Maw whose vivid smile and quaint, gay manner had so much impressed me when I took over from her at Gerdalitza. She was helped by one or two other English women. The orphanage had a high reputation and was the only co-educational Home in Yugoslavia. Many of its boys and girls went on to the university and technical schools, but they used to come back to it for their holidays, for they regarded it as their home. The English women who ran it had a great influence in the region of Nish and were consulted by officials on all sorts of problems. Mrs. Carrington Wilde visited it every second year and brought it all the support it needed from the English end. Dot Newhall used to go out and camp with the children in the hills above Nish in the summer holidays. It is a striking illustration of the prestige English women had gained for themselves in Serbia and also of the paradoxical gentleness of Serbian boys that the Home and camping holidays should have been run without the help of men-teachers.

After working with the Friends in France, Dr. Katharine MacPhail had gone back to her Ser-rbs and worked with the S.R.F. in Corsica and then in Salonika. She got up to Belgrade immediately after the Armistice and found the problem of unattended sick children there so terrific that she opened a hospital for them in an abandoned military hut. She did this as a free-lance, as an act of faith, but she soon received help from a dozen voluntary societies, notably the Save the Children Fund, and in 1921 bought and moved into a proper building and received a regular grant from the Yugoslav Government.

I was struck by the atmosphere of this hospital; though very orderly it was more informal and human than in most of our hospitals at home. Dr. MacPhail had a thousand difficulties to overcome, but she had the confidence of the Yugoslavs and the devotion of the people who worked with her. In 1934, as other children's clinics had been established in Belgradc, she sold the hospital to the Yugoslav Government and with the money built a Home at Sremska Kamenitza for children with tubercular diseases of the joints and bones. Here she remained until taken prisoner by the Italians in April, 1941 She was subsequently released and returned to Scotland, where she was able to tell us the record of her hospital. It had been the first and only children's hospital in the whole of Yugoslavia. It had had fifty beds and a large out-patients department. Altogether by 1934, 170,000 children had passed through it either as in- out-patients and hundreds of Yugoslav girls had received in it their training in the nursing of sick children, under the supervision of herself and her British sisters. The Home at Sremska Kamenica was even more ideal as it had been built specially for its purpose. As it was on the direct line of the enemy's advance, the children had to be sent back to their homes in April, 1941 (After the war she hopes to return to Yugoslavia and continue and extend the work for tubercular children.)

Dr. MacPhail has sometimes been attacked for devoting her talents to a foreign people. A Scotsman said recently, "There are terrible slums and poverty in Scotland. We are a small nation-there are only five million of us. We must conquer our nostalgia for foreign countries and stay and clean up our own towns and villages." But Dr. MacPhail felt herself an ambassador to those who are untouched by our official representatives, to the common man of Yugoslavia, the picks and hoes of the old Karageorge ballad, and she would not leave them.

Margaret McFie was also a Scotswoman in origin and she too made a permanent contribution to the Yugoslav social service, by creating its first Blind School. The nucleus of it had been formed in Bizerta. Ramadanovitch brought out the equipment and the school was reconstituted under his directorship at Semlin. After some years it made a profit out of its industries: basketry, shoe repairing and opankamaking. A printing-press was set up, run by the blind themselves and produced braille books for the whole country. Two hundred men blinded in the war were re-educated-many of them were later established in a successful community, each with his house and garden at Novi Sad. By 1930 the Semlin Institute was transformed into a Blind School for children. Sir Arthur Pearson and the British gave the first help to the scheme, but it was a gift of œ3,øøø from an American donor that set it on its feet.

Americans were exceedingly generous in their gifts to Serbia and yet they did not leave as much trace in the country as they had hoped to do. I asked Magavee, who worked for a while with the Serbian Child Welfare Association of America, why they did not achieve more. "I think it was," she said, "because their ideas were too grand: Serbia was not ready for them. They came over in I9I9 and 1920 with high hopes and plans for setting up a model Child Welfare Service all over the country. While they were on the Atlantic they decided where all their centres would be. They drew red and blue circles on their maps and plotted the whole thing out. They intended to have ten different centres with outposts dependent on them, clearing-houses for aban doned children, model orphanages, Infant Welfare Centres, even Voca tional Guidance Clinics and Homes for the deaf and dumb-they forgot nothing. But they were dissatisfied with the buildings which the Serbs gave them. Their workers did not learn the language and were unable to give the personal touch without which nothing goes in the Balkans. They were a disciplined, well-trained body, but when their scheme collapsed they did not know how to take up something else: they were not adaptable. I must say they did very good work in setting up clearing-houses of destitute children in outlying centres. After a while relatives turned up and adopted the children-but it tided over a crisis. Other Americans did valuable emergency relief in remote parts of the country like the Sandjak of Novibazar and Bosnia. And there were two excellent orphanages supported by a private American donor, John Frothingham. But on the whole they were disappointed. The trouble was they wanted to do things too much as Americans, and the Serbs were bursting with energy and national pride and did not want anything imposed from without." "The Americans had at least a wellthought-out scheme to their credit," I commented. "We English are often muddle-headed in our relief work and act as the whim takes us. We haven't shaken off the Victorian idea of social work, which is rich people doing good according to their lights, endowing a hotch-pot of charities like the Baroness Burdett-Coutts: a ragged school here, a donkey home there, some useful pioneer projects like workman's flats, with churches and bishoprics to make weight. But of course the Belgrade Government was quite right. In any case they probably thought that charity, national or foreign, should not usurp the duties of the State."

Later on Dr. Stampar, as Minister of Health, established an excellent Child Welfare and Public Health system throughout Yugoslavia.

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In the margines of chaos, Francesca M. Wilson