The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 | Page 4

the persistence of the "v" for "u" and the final -l of the past participle, which have disappeared from Serbo-Croat, have been preserved in the dialects of Macedonia. The Bulgarian language, the south-eastern Serbian dialects, as well as Roumanian and Albanian, have certain grammatical peculiarities, through being influenced by the language of the Romanized Thraco-Illyrian peoples with whom they merged. Even Montenegro was to some degree influenced by this process, having lost one or two cases, such as the locative. In Serbia one uses seven cases, the Montenegrin generally contents himself with about five, and in some dialects they are all discarded.... The amount of Turanian, Petcheneg and other undesirable blood in the Bulgars does not--let the two or three eccentric Bulgars say what they will--prevent them being far more Yugoslav than anything else. Professor Cviji['c], the famous Rector of Belgrade University, has made personal examinations in Bulgaria, and is of the opinion that a great part of that people, for instance, at Trnovo in the middle of Bulgaria, is physically and spiritually very near to the Serbs. The Mongol influence, he thinks, is so scattered that it is very difficult to see.
Unhappily, however, in the last thirty or forty years an enormous amount of hatred has been piled up between Serb and Bulgar; things have happened which we as outsiders can more easily forget than those and the orphans of those who have suffered. Atrocities have taken place; international commissions have recorded some of them and non-Balkan writers have produced a library of lurid and, almost always, strictly one-sided books about them. I suggest that these gentlemen would have been better employed in translating the passages wherein Homer depicts precisely the same atrocities. Whatever may seem good to Balkan controversialists, let us of the West rather try, for their sake and for ours, to bring these two people together. We have good foundations on which to build; every Bulgar will tell you that he is full of admiration of the Serbian army, and the Serbs will speak in a similar strain of the Bulgars. Also the Serbs will tell you that, no matter what else they may be able to do, they are, as compared with the Bulgars, quite incompetent in the diffusion of propaganda; while the Bulgars will explain to you that in propaganda the Serbs are immensely their superiors. (Balkan propaganda does not confine itself to using, with violence, the sword and the pen. In its higher flights it will, in a disputed district, bury ancient-looking stones with suitable inscriptions. It will go beyond the simple changes in the termination of the surnames of those who come under its dominion; the name upon a tombstone will be made to end, according to circumstances, in "off" or "vitch," sometimes in the Roumanian "esco" or the Greek "opoulos." If this is known to the departed, one would like to learn how it affects them. A great deal of energy has been brought to bear in the production of official books which place on record the repugnant details of all the crimes that have ever been imagined by men or ghouls, which crimes, so say the books of nation A, have been committed by the incredible monsters of nation B. At times, from motives of economy, the same photographs have been used by both nations--an idea which in 1920 was adopted in Hungary, where an artist conceived a poster showing a child with uplifted finger saying to its mother in solemn warning: "Mother, remember me; vote for a Social Democrat." This poster was forbidden by the censor, and, a few days afterwards, appeared on all street corners as that of the Christian Socialist party. People of the Balkans found that Western Europeans were impressed by figures, so that they issued lists of schools whose pupils were more numerous than the total population of the villages in which they were situated. Frequently a village would be stated, on the sworn testimony of its most respected inmates, to be exclusively filled with persons say of nation A. Not for a moment would it be admitted that the population might perhaps be mixed. And very possibly, on going to investigate, the Western European would discover that the village was entirely uninhabited and had been so for many years.... We must also have some understanding of the old Balkan humour if we are not to resent, for example, that story which they tell of a Bulgarian Minister who happened to be sojourning last year in Yugoslavia at a time when a great memorial service was being held for ninety-nine priests whom the Bulgars had assassinated during their occupation of Serbia in the European War. This Minister cherishes the hope that his country and Yugoslavia will bury the hatchet. "How unfortunate," said he, "are these