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The difficulty comes when we attempt to give the racial character of Central Macedonia, which is equally remote from Greece, Bulgaria, and Servia. I travelled through this district last summer. On June 29, when the war broke out between the Allies I found myself in Uskub. Through the courtesy of the Servian authorities I was permitted to ride on the first military train which left the city.
This cut the main Bulgarian communications with Prilep on the west and Doiran on the east, and compelled a general retreat along a hundred miles of front. On the 23rd the French occupied Prilep; on the 25th the Serbians captured Veles and Ishtip and pressed on towards Uskub, while their cavalry were at Kotchana almost on the Bulgarian frontier.
Think of what their news from the Balkans will be in the course of another ten or fifteen years. Socialist Congress at Uskub, election riot at Monastir, great dock strike at Salonika, visit of the Y.M.C.A. to Varna. Varna on the coast of that enchanted sea! They will drive out to some suburb to tea, and write home about it as the Bexhill of the East. "War is a wickedly destructive thing."
At the Foreign Office I begged protection for the Balkan Moslems, who were being barbarously exterminated, and stated that until it was seen that the Balkan conquerors were capable of just rule, the Capitulations should remain in force. Those with whom I spoke admitted that the consular reports from Uskub and Monastir were very bad, but that it was not advisable to publish them.
With Bulgaria, a nation of Slavonic speech and culture, though not wholly Slavonic in origin, Serbia had quarrelled for years over the ultimate destiny of the Üsküb district in north-western Macedonia, which was still subject to Turkey; but in the summer of 1912 the two states compromised in a secret treaty upon their respective territorial ambitions, and agreed to refer the fate of one debatable strip to the arbitration of Russia, after their already projected war with Turkey had been carried through.
That he, too, expected war was evident, for he appointed the military commandant Hussein Riza as Vali. The Albanians of Kosovo again rose in revolt. Ise Boletin again led them. They triumphed everywhere, and this time entered Uskub, where their conduct was admitted to have been exemplary by the Foreign Consuls.
A friend, who was doing relief work at Uskub, told me that there the Serb officers talked incessantly of their next war with Austria, and were savagely extirpating the Bulgarian and Albanian populations from the newly annexed districts. As for M. Krajewsky, the French Consul, he now "outjuggered" the Jugoslavs. "Never," he declared, "would France allow independent Albania to exist."
Each town had its captain. . . . Where complaints were made to the regular authorities they pretended to know nothing, or, if the person were obscure, punished him. If he were a personage, as for example the Archbishop of Veles, the bands were sent from the town down to the villages, only to be replaced immediately by bands from Uskub."
Howell who had the Thiepval task in hand I had first known at Uskub in Macedonia in the days of the Macedonian revolution, when Hilmi Pasha was juggling with the Powers of Europe and autonomy days which seem far away. A lieutenant then, Howell had an assignment from The Times, while home on leave from India, in order to make a study of the Balkan situation.
In older days they had been part of the great Serbian empire of Stephan Dushan, who early in the fourteenth century had defended western Europe against the invasions of the Turks and whose capital of Uskub had been a centre of civilisation one hundred and fifty years before Columbus discovered the new lands of the west. The Serbians remembered their ancient glory as who would not?
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