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Either, then, it was somehow unusually prolonged, or else the clash of the Ottoman war revived it. The case of Servia is interesting in another way. The songs about the battle of Kossovo describe Servian defeat defeat so overwhelming that poetry cannot possibly translate it, and does not attempt it, into anything that looks like victory.
The rising pillars of the Skupstchina, Serbia's new Parliament House at the foot of Kossovo Street, point to the future of some great new State. The Croats say "When you go to Zagreb you will see the difference. Ah, there is a city; there is civilization." They kiss their hands to show what they mean. The Croats are Home Rulers. Like the Irish, they are Catholics.
I made a pilgrimage some years ago to Vrdnik, a retired monastery in the Frusca Gora, where his mummy is preserved with the most religious care, in the church, exposed to the atmosphere. It is, of course, shrunk, shrivelled, and of a dark brown colour, bedecked with an antique embroidered mantle, said to be the same worn at the battle of Kossovo.
It was nothing less than the capture of Constantinople and the union of Serbs, Bulgarians, and Greeks into an empire which might defend Christendom against the rising power of Islam. Dushan was within forty miles of his goal with an army of 80,000 men when he died suddenly in camp on the 20th of December, 1355. Thirty-four years later Dushan's countrymen were annihilated by the Turks at Kossovo!
The tents of the Prince, the chiefs, and the attachés were pitched in a circle, in the centre of which at night was a huge camp-fire, round which we sat and listened to stories or discussions, or to the Servian epics sung by the Prince's bard, to the accompaniment of the guzla, to which the assembly listened in a silence made impressive by the tears of the hardened old warriors, most of whom knew the pathetic record by heart, and never ceased to warm with patriotic pride at the legends of the heroic defense, the rout of Kossovo, and the fall of the great empire, of which they were the only representatives who had never yielded to the rule of the Turk.
The rest of Prince Leopold's army were making the Kobryn-Minsk railroad their objective and were fighting on September 9, 10, and 11, 1915, for possession of the station at Kossovo.
It was successful to that extent, and when at one moment the Serbs temporarily broke the Bulgarian front, a junction seemed possible with the French advance from Veles. But both Allies were too weak for the solid Bulgarian wedge. The Serbs had to fall back from Kossovo and the French to their entrenched camp at Kavadar.
But at last we were allowed to take seats in the train, and off we went. We passed through the plain of Kossovo where old Serbian culture was prostrated before the onrush of the Turk, and whence Serbia has drawn all its legends and heroes; possibly the most unromantic looking spot in all Europe, save only Waterloo.
They carry themselves with a princely air, and their picturesque costume is a model of good taste; for Montenegro is, as Mr. Gladstone has remarked, the beach on which was thrown up the remnants of Balkan freedom. After the battle of Kossovo, all the Serb nobility who would not submit to the Turk fled to Crnagora, and the traces of heredity are easily to be recognised in their superb carriage.
Their blood is of the purest and noblest in the Balkans, for they are largely descended from the noble families of the old Servian Empire who fled to the Katunska after the bloody field of Kossovo, which destroyed the might of the Serbs for ever. It is probably from these ancestors that their noble bearing and perfect manners, in even strange and unaccustomed surroundings, are derived.
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