The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel 59. A DREAM STRONGER THAN TANKS So, ON AUGUST 3, 1941, I passed in the German prison train via Zagreb through almost the whole breadth of what now calls itself the Independent State of Croatia. The carriage had wide windows which we were allowed to have open. I watched carefully. To my surprise, all the innumerable small stations at which the slow train stopped were crowded with soldiers, laughing, skylarking, waiting for trains to take them away. They were fully armed. They all wore the Yugoslav army uniform, unmistakably different both in color and cut from the German. I saw not a single German soldier among them: they were commanded by their own officers who looked quite as cheerful as their troops. These were Croat soldiers who by thousands were mobilizing to fight for the Axis. Our Gestapo guards spoke of it as if it were so well known as hardly to be worth comment. Said one of them with satisfaction: "Nichet nur gegen die verfluchten Kommunisten sondern gegen die verdammten Serben-Schweine couch. [Not only against the cursed Communists but against the damned Serb swine too.]" Nothing less coerced than these Croat soldiers could be imagined. If ever men were doing what they were willing and glad to do, it was these. When I say that I was surprised I mean that, though I should have known that this would happen, I had subconsciously tried to put away the thought. Though I myself when with the Serbian troops had been repeatedly ambushed by Croat soldiers on the sixth night of the war, yet I had tried to think of it as something sporadic, due to local ill feeling of small disaffected groups. Here was the proof that when the Croats went over to the Germans it was the real expression of a people as a people, forced upon them neither from outside their own frontiers nor from inside by new rulers of their own race. These Goats were going willingly to give their lives fighting against our allies, the Russians, and against our allies and their "brothers," the Serbs. And now what now lay ahead for the Serbs? After all their splendid history were they now at last doomed to extermination? I knew that Germany, in her hatred and fury, would this time stop at nothing less. And these traitors to their one-time "brothers" would be a tool ready to her hand. Only twenty-three years ago the Serbs, at a heavy cost of blood, had freed these very Croats from hated Austrian oppression and had been thanked with fervid protestations of "undying" gratitude and love. But Croats have short memories. Like weathercocks, they turn to every wind that blows. This Croat army would now be equipped with the finest weapons of the great German war factories to turn upon the pitifully ill equipped remnant of Serb troops-the few left outside German prison camps-and upon my relatively unarmed Chetniks. Enclosed as Serbia was by a tightening steel band of German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian armies, could not these Croats, as they certainly meant to do, give her the last fatal stab in the back? They knew the terrain almost as well as the Serbs. They spoke almost the same language. That should make it easy for them to work their way in behind our lines. They would be directed by the highest trained military minds of Europe. They would be given every help, every incentive to kill. They would have food-when ours was gone; the textile factories of all Europe to draw upon for clothing, when in the fearful Balkan winter we had-rags. They would have transport with an inexhaustible supply of bullets-when ours would be all shot away. They would have bombers, fighters, gas, the heaviest blasting and incendiary bombs, they would have tanks and armored trains and heavy guns of every caliber, while we had-none. How could the Serbs withstand, what could they oppose to all this crushing strength? Those were my miserable thoughts that night as I was carried off into the silence of long months in German prisons. I could not foresee the future. I could not know what has since been proved: that the Serbs did have something, something that their enemies had not taken into account; something they could never be prepared for, never understand-and never overcome. The Serbs had this: they had a dream. They had a dream which through the centuries had crystallized into a great tradition, into a national purpose and a national will. That dream had turned into an armor which no plots, mass murders, or atrocities, no bombs, planes, guns, or tanks could ever pierce or conquer or destroy. The Serbs had a dream of liberty. That dream, now as ever in their history, would lead my Chetniks, would teach them all that they needed, to survive and hold. That dream, that passionate love of freedom, gave them strength and wisdom. As it had made them tough, the toughest men in Europe, it gave them speed, alertness, cunning, an indomitable valor. It gave them power, superhuman power, to endure. Mihailovich, a young and untried leader, surrounded by a world of bloodhounds, with a price of a million dollars on his head, Mihailovich, the embodiment of a race's fighting spirit, Draja Mihailovich and his Serbs would stand alone-but STAND. Ready, my Chetnik brothers? They were ready! And from the thousand nameless deeds of unsung heroes, men and women, and not the least of children, an age-old dream of freedom will surely soon, yes, soon again be fact. Previous Chapter | Content | Next Chapter The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel