The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel 2. ALBANIAN PRELUDE STRANGE TO REMEMBER NOW how nearly I missed it all. In February 1938 I was planning a trip round the world to study youth questions -always my greatest interest-when I was offered a good fee to go to Albania to photograph the wedding of its King Zog. I went-very grudgingly. "Ten days-that will be enough, quite enough," I told the editor of the London weekly Illustrated. "I'm not interested in the Balkans. The East is what draws me-first the Near East, then the Far East; by boat to Constantinople, then Syria, Persia, Afghanistan, India. But ten days-yes, I'll take ten days out and no more, for the Balkans, if you insist." This was a year before Albania became news with the Italian occupation. Except that it was "somewhere in the Balkans," no one seemed to know where the little country lay. Even Cook's, the tourist agency, was quite uncertain as to how one could get there. It is curious how much stranger the Balkans appeared to us than even the least-known parts of Asia. This is still true. We take the strangeness of Asia for granted, but the Balkans tease us with their mystery. They are just across a little sea, no larger than one of our American Great Lakes, from tourist-haunted Italy. They constitute the narrow land bridge from Europe to the Near East, and so to Africa and Asia, which has been fought over by uncounted races and powers. They are closely bound to us by trade. Yet to most of us the Balkans still remain unreal as a mirage. And of all the Balkan countries, Albania was the most unknown of all. Even how to get there was a problem. At last over the telephone the cultivated voice of the First Secretary of the Albanian Legation in London provided the answer. So off I went, with an irreducible minimum of luggage and a maximum of light photographic equipment: train to Rome and Bari, by boat across the narrow sea to Durazzo. Well I remember the rosy dawn when I came up on the deck of that fussy little tub that had bounced me across the stormy Adriatic. Perhaps it is a good thing that we can't foresee the future. If I had known then what was coming, if I had had an inkling of the mad world, the outrageously absurd, the thrillingly splendid world I was stepping into, if I had guessed the discomforts and the miseries, the meannesses and the incredible cruelties that were lying in wait for me-would I have turned back? Would I have run down again into my "royal cabin" and sailed away, far away, to safer, saner, cleaner, quieter, more comfortable lands? The answer is a completely certain: No! For with the discomforts were to come unforgettable beauty; with the absurdities, Homeric laughter; and despite the horrors, a splendid satisfaction. If I had not seen with my own eyes and myself experienced the cruelties, I might never have known the simple glory to which men's hearts and women's strength can rise. For that experience almost no price could be too heavy. The tall minaret of Durazzo Harbor was the first note of that swelling symphony, with all its delicate and its grand motifs, its clashing discords, its rumbling undertones and laughing trebles, that was soon to catch me up and sweep me away to-well, to brotherhood with the toughest men in Europe and then to eleven agonizing prisons; to that and to so much more. The minaret, slim as a lady's finger against the rose-red dawn-why did not that white finger shake in solemn warning? To me it seemed, that morning, only to beckon in welcoming beauty. Close at hand, Durazzo looked like almost any other small Mediterranean harbor. But over toward the far eastern horizon lay what I thought at first was a bank of heavy white clouds flushed by the rising sun. But they were not clouds. There, suspended as by invisible chains from heaven, hung the fabled mountains of Albania. I felt a momentary pang of regret. Too bad, I thought, that I would not have time in my ten days to make their close acquaintance. Ten days! How funny that sounds now! I stayed in the Balkans for three and a half years. And I came to know those mountains as perhaps no foreign woman has known them before. I seem to have inherited my American pioneer grandmother's zest for simple, primitive living. To me sleeping on a sheepskin on the floor, washing in a snow-fed brook, eating with fingers from a central dish, trailing for days on horseback across almost pathless mountains are not hardship. That is my idea of a good way to live. I like heroic songs and minds fed on ancestral deeds of glory. Tenacious love of old tradition, of custom and dress handed down by forebears arouse my respect and admiration. I believe, as these people do-as my own ancestors believed-that liberty and personal and national honor are worth all one's possessions and one's life: that the life of a slave is not worth living. Better, far better, to fight even a hopeless battle and, if one must, to die. Everywhere among these mountain peoples I found these values to be the unconscious mainsprings of action, motivating men, women, and children of all classes. The more I saw of them the more they filled me with affection and admiration . . . I forgot the Far East. I never got to Constantinople. Previous Chapter | Content | Next Chapter The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel