The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel 13. "WELL AND WHY NOT?" MY HOUSE had a delightful little garden in which standard roses marched in battalions, fastened to white-painted staves. It also possessed that boon in Balkan summers, a wide-spreading tree. Here I sat and studied when not riding or tramping to keep fit-no easy thing in a large city. After one or two diplomatic parties, I became bored with the attitude of most of the English and Americans toward the Serbs. They looked upon them as "museum pieces" and apparently made no effort to understand them. I withdrew almost entirely from that social treadmill. I must confess that after a year alone in Montenegro, in the heart of that vivid struggle for existence, it was the foreigners, "superior" to the country, who seemed to me the unreal curiosities, the anachronisms. As one local would-be-cynic poet said to me: "They seem like moles blindly shoveling away at their pointless little courses, quite unaware of the contending forces of nature, the beauty, the triumphs, the tragedies and-the general mess above them." My house became instead a center of Montenegrin interests. It must be clearly remembered that those Black Mountain people are pure Serbs. If anything they are more stubbornly tenacious of the common tradition than any other Serbian people, because Montenegro has never in its history been completely conquered. Hence the tradition has never been broken. Few were the Montenegrins of high or of simple degree who came to Belgrade and did not make their welcome appearance at my house. I also saw something of that sad phenomenon, the foreign-educated, denatured Serb. When I first arrived there were acrid arguments in government offices as to whether I was or was not a British secret service agent. It was apparently the thing fiercely to take sides. At last the arguments became so violent that they led to actual fisticuffs. My leading champion, tired of it all, had a brilliant inspiration. "Well," he said suddenly one day, "well-and why not?" All looked at each other, amazed: no one had thought of that! "Well-and why not?" went whispering across the angry waves of suspicion. Softly they subsided-"England, little England!"-and all was peace and benediction. "Well-and why not?" became my household joke. Long and deep were our discussions there in the warm evenings over a bottle of fine Smederevo or Zemun wine and the ubiquitous slivovits (plum brandy) under my pleasant tree in my rose-filled garden, overlooked from not a single neighbor's window. I had a collection of stringed instruments ready for accustomed fingers; and though my neighbors could not see us, often they must have listened, charmed, to the strains of the well-loved nostalgic Balkan songs, in mellow close harmony, carried by the gentle breeze across my garden. "Tamo daleko . . . [So far, so far, my love . . .]" But soon a more martial note began to creep into my little gatherings. The whirlpool of horror in Europe was spinning ever faster. And slowly, slowly, but with fateful inevitability, Yugoslavia was being sucked toward the evil maelstrom. How could a little country of only sixteen million inhabitants, undeveloped, poor in resources and equipment, hope to resist this all-engulfing force? To the home-bred Serb, especially the little fellows, it appeared to present no problem at all. "We will fight, of course," they said, with a simple lightness that might have been deceptive to the casual eye. They would fight-and that seemed to settle it, that seemed to be answer enough for them. But for me it didn't seem quite so self-evidently sufficient. Looking at my merry and so polite singers (Montenegrins especially are instinctive courtiers, but with the taint of servility left out), I could not help wondering, suspecting, if this might not be just a stock answer handed down by history, its real force lost in more than twenty years of prosperous peace and spreading education. The bigger fellows "in the know" began to look serious, worried, distrait. This German war machine was something never before seen on earth! The Croats, the second partners in the Yugoslav combination, were openly admiring. Croatia was the most industrialized portion of Yugoslavia with an effective hold on the commerce of the country. For centuries the Croats had been the agitating-rather than actively rebellious-subjects of Austria and Hungary, from whom they had acquired a coloring of "Western civilization." In his heart every Croat considered himself vastly superior to the Serbs, who by ceaseless fighting, unaided, alone in the Balkans, had made themselves free. The Croats were impressed by German success, lured by German promises of material prosperity. Nothing impressed the Serbs, nothing at all, which threatened their dearest possession-their liberty. Previous Chapter | Content | Next Chapter The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel