Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  Gerda threw up her arms and shouted to the sky, ‘Now he has insulted my people! He has insulted my whole people! It ought to be published in the newspapers that English people say such things, just to show what sort of people they are. But we Germans don’t do such things, because we are too kind, and we want to be friends with England! But think of it, here I am, far from my home, and he insults my blood, the German blood!’ Her face was crimson and she was weeping. Slowly and heavily she began to run down the hill. Below her a checker-board of green and crimson hills tilted towards the wooded mountains, on a straight road beside a winding river cattle and carts trod slowly among jets of sunlit mud, the well-bred town sat white under its red roofs among its shady gardens. We saw Dragutin, who was standing beside the car, look up, catch sight of her, and fold his arms, tilting his head on one side. Constantine breathed, ‘The Germans are all like this. They are a terrible people.’ My husband said, ‘Nonsense, many Germans are not a bit like this,’ and then, being an exceedingly polite man, stopped in great embarrassment, since what he had been going to say must obviously have been something like, ‘Your wife is indeed terrible, but that’s because she’s herself, not because she’s German.’ Instead he said, ‘I am very sorry that I have offended your wife.’ Constantine said miserably, ‘Oh, it is all right, everybody knows that you English cannot help being tactless,’ and began to walk downhill, kicking the stones in front of him, like an unhappy child.

  ‘Oh, why did you say it?’ I complained, as wives should not, while we followed him. ‘God knows I was making the most hideous faces at you.’ ‘I could not help it,’ my husband said. ‘I knew that she would go on and on insulting both of us till she got the truth out of me, so I let her have it. But how disgusting it all is! To create a scene over a war cemetery! Over a lot of dead boys! It is worse than the Bishop’s feast.’ ‘It is all part of the same thing,’ I said. ‘Religion and death are not so important as being a German, nothing must exist except Germanity.’ When we came to the foot of the hill, Dragutin was sitting at the wheel with a discreet expression and Gerda was walking round and round the automobile. My husband went up to her and said, ‘I am sorry that I offended you,’ but she flung away from him, crying, ‘Do you suppose that words can heal the wound you have dealt me! How can you expect me to tolerate hearing the German people being called tactless?’ She said to Dragutin, ‘Open the door, I am going to sit beside you,’ but paused to tell us, ‘And this car in which you can hardly bear me to travel, you will be more comfortable in it henceforward, because I am going back to Belgrade. I cannot stay any longer with people who insult me and my people.’

  Dragutin asked for no orders, and we were too shaken to realize that we had given him none. He drove us through the town to the ruins of Heracleia, the Roman city which lay a mile or so beyond it on the Via Egnatia, the Roman road that ran from the Adriatic through Albania to Salonika and Constantinople. Its excavations are at a stage that can interest only dogs and archaeologists, and my husband and I went and sat for a few minutes in the Orthodox cemetery, which straggles over the hillside near by. I have a deep attachment to this cemetery, for it was here that I realized Macedonia to be the bridge between our age and the past. I saw a peasant woman sitting on a grave under the trees with a dish of wheat and milk on her lap, the sunlight dappling the white kerchief on her head. Another peasant woman came by, who must have been from another village, for her dress was different. I think they were total strangers. They greeted each other, and the woman with the dish held it out to the new-comer and gave her a spoon, and she took some sups of it. To me it was an enchantment; for when St Monica came to Milan over fifteen hundred years ago, to be with her gifted and difficult son, St Augustine, she went to eat her food on the Christian graves and was hurt because the sexton reproved her for offering sups to other people on the same errand, as she had been wont to do in Africa. That protocol-loving saint, Ambrose, had forbidden the practice because it was too like picnicking for his type of mind. To see these women gently munching to the glory of God was like finding that I could walk into the past as into another room.

  I had liked it, too, on that first visit, when our guide had looked over the plains towards the town and had said, ‘Look, there’s a funeral coming. But it’s only someone old.’ ‘How can you tell that?’ I had asked. ‘There are so few people following the hearse, and they walk so slowly,’ the guide explained. ‘When somebody young dies then the whole town thinks it a pity and comes to the funeral. Look, here is the tomb of Anastasia Petrovitch. She was only twenty and you can see from the photograph on her cross how beautiful she was. Everybody in Bitolj turned out for her, the road from the town was still black with people when she had been carried into the chapel. But when old people die, it is natural, and nobody cares except a few other old people.’ And presently the hearse and the procession arrived, and truly enough all the mourners were old. We went with them into the chapel and held lit tapers in its darkness and heard the unfalsified grief of the Orthodox Church office for the dead. ‘What a parting is this, my brethren! What a lament is made of this happening! Come then, embrace him who is still for a little while with us. He is to be handed over to the grave, he is to be covered by stone, to dwell in the shadows, and to be buried with the dead. All of us, his kin and his friends, are to be separated from him. Let us pray the Lord to grant him rest.’

  We saw Constantine coming along the woodland path, through the leopard patches of shadow and sunlight. ‘There is one thing,’ I said to my husband, ‘you were awful, unspeakably awful, not to have held your tongue by the German cemetery, but at least we have got rid of Gerda.’ ‘There you are wrong,’ said my husband. ‘I am not,’ I said. ‘Did you not hear her say that she would go to Belgrade tomorrow rather than stay with people who have insulted her?’ ‘I heard her,’ said my husband, ‘but she will not keep her word. Think of it, tomorrow we are going up Kaimakshalan, the mountain where the Serbs drove out the Bulgarians and won the decisive battle of the Eastern Campaign. It is evidently a pleasant expedition. She will certainly stay for it, and she will certainly be no more agreeable. But at Skoplje, if you and I have to get up in the middle of the night and go away in secret, this thing must end.’ When Constantine got to us he was beaming. ‘Now you will see that my wife is really a very sweet woman,’ he said, ‘she has said that to please you she wills that we all go now to the French war cemetery.’ In embarrassment, therefore, we drove to what is one of the most affecting places in the world. It lies out on the plains among flat fields edged with willows and poplars, and it is a forest of flimsy little wooden crosses painted red, white and blue, each with a name or number, and each with its rose tree. It must have cost as little as such a cemetery could cost, and it must be a comfort to the kin of the dead to see that they lie so neatly and apart. There are seven thousand of them, and they have not yet stopped coming, for the shepherds still find skeletons up in the mountains and bring them down next time they go to market. Thus had Gérard Michel just returned to the plains after twenty-three years. He had been tied up in a linen bag, and it could not be believed how pitifully light he was in the hand. When we set him down in the little outhouse where he awaited a priest and the grave-digger and went out into the open air, that seemed now to smell more strongly of life than is commonly noticeable, the snow peaks were red in the sunset, and every cross had its long slanting shadow. ‘Think,’ said Gerda, as we looked on the wide field of graves, ‘think of all these people dying for a lot of Slavs.’

  Kaimakshalan

  ‘Today we go to see where my people saved civilization,’ said Constantine, halting at the table where we were breakfasting in the sun, three red roses in his hand, ‘today we go to see where Serbia won the war for all you other peoples. I have been to buy a little flower for my wife, because she is very sweet this morning; she is in such a good humour that she has said she will stay today and go to Kaimakshalan with us.’ When he had gone I said, ‘We must make the best of it,’ and my husban
d said, ‘I wonder if there is anything we can do to rob the day of its horror.’ ‘There is,’ I said, ‘the hotel people say that they can only give us sucking-pig or lamb paprikasch for the picnic lunch, and she has told us she does not like either. Let us give her that glass of tongue we have been keeping for an emergency.’ ‘Yes, that looks a friendly offering,’ said my husband, ‘we will produce it on the picnic ground, for she may be embarrassed when we first meet.’ In this he was wrong, for Gerda, when she came down, showed no sign of knowing that any unusual situation needed to be bridged.

  Our drive took us over the plains, past earth-coloured villages and through lands cut into extraordinarily small divisions, mere tastes of fields, which were marked off by animals’ skulls mounted on posts. We saw fifteen people ploughing on what looked to us to be no more than five acres of ground. Some nomads passed us, taking their herds of cattle and horses and sheep from the winter to the summer pastures. On one village green a party of gipsy women sat with their brilliant aprons thrown over their heads, silently rocking to and fro; some of their men, we were told, had been fetched up to the Town Hall for a breach of the law. Over the Greek border we saw villages of white square houses, shining like loaf sugar, built for the refugees the Turks drove out of Smyrna. We came at last to a little house, like any other village house, set on an insignificant little hill, which was the headquarters of King Peter and Prince Alexander during the Macedonian campaign. It has two rooms and a little garden full of irises. We walked uneasily about it, because the imagination can do nothing with what happened here. It is too strange. Here King Peter and Prince Alexander sat and looked at an amphitheatre of low hills before a wall of mountains and reflected that who took the peak called Kaimakshalan, which is to say the Buttertub, dominated the plains, and that it must be taken, though it could not be taken. Their performance of this impossible task puts them among the great men of the world; and the other event which came to pass in this cottage also puts them in some prodigious category, but it is not known what. The Salonika conspiracy proves that history has no authority, because there are secrets of the first importance that can be kept, and motives so complicated that they cannot be discovered by guess-work.

  It was here that in 1917 Alexander ordered the arrest of a number of people, including ‘Apis’ (Dragutin Dimitriyevitch), and Tankositch and Tsiganovitch, the two minor members of the ’Black Hand’ who gave Princip the arms for the Sarajevo attentat, and Mehmedbashitch, the Moslem boy who failed to throw his bomb at Franz Ferdinand and then rushed to the station and took train for Montenegro. They were charged with conspiring against Alexander’s life. ‘Apis’ and the Black Handers were sentenced to death and shot; and Mehmedbashitch was condemned to twenty years’ imprisonment. Not one soul in the length and breadth of the Balkans believes that they were guilty; and it is now an offence against the law for a private person to possess a report of the trial. It cannot be mentioned in a newspaper and would not be mentioned in a speech, and I have met intelligent young university graduates who had never heard of it.

  The commonest explanation of this mystery is Byzantine in flavour. It is said that Alexander had lost heart and become convinced that he would have to sue for a separate peace from the Central European powers, and that he therefore wanted to be able to say, ‘Yes, the people who conspired to assassinate Franz Ferdinand were shocking scoundrels, but they had nothing to do with me. In fact, they later tried to assassinate me also.’ And if when he said this the conspirators were already dead or in prison, he would be saved the embarrassment of being asked by the Central European powers to hand them over, which he could not have done without alienating his people. This theory is supported by some words repeated to me by a German friend of mine as having been uttered some years ago by a Serbian in Berlin. This man, who was an ex-officer and had been for many years in exile, said to him, ‘Yes, I would like to be back in Serbia, but “Apis” was my chief, and “Apis” warned me that I must fly at once, because they meant to kill all our group, and only “Apis” was going to stay, because he himself thought it would be for the good of our country if he died.’ My German friend had no idea of the event to which these words referred, and had remembered them only for their odd Slav suicidal spirit. The complicity they attribute to ‘Apis’ is not at all incompatible with his character as we know it, dominated as it was by an obsession with violent death unleashing historical crises.

  Yet that solution is not satisfactory. I have met a Moslem Herzegovinian, now middle-aged, who was an intimate friend of Mehmedbashitch, and he tells a story which compels belief that there were yet other elements controlling Alexander’s action. He had a command in the Salonika campaign, and one day after the trial he received a smuggled letter from Mehmedbashitch asking him to go and see him in a Serbian prison on a Greek island. He contrived a visit to him and found the boy in a pitiable state of anguish and bewilderment. He had been arrested in France, and before he went back to Greece the French had treated him not only as if he were guilty of a serious crime, but had made repeated efforts to compel him to confess something, he did not know what. Now, it is obvious that the French cannot have been sympathetic accomplices in a scheme by which the Serbian royal family was attempting to make a separate peace. Nor can the Serbian authorities, who knew that the charge which was going to be made against Mehmedbashitch was false, have pressed the French to obtain a confession from him. But the mystery did not stop there. Now that the Serbian authorities had had him tried and sentenced for conspiracy to murder Alexander, he was still being asked to confess to something. The Herzegovinian had no doubt that Mehmedbashitch was not only innocent of conspiracy to murder, but was also ignorant of the matter, whatever it was, to which he was expected to confess. He was a worthy but unimpressive youth of no importance, in whom people in charge of dangerous enterprises would be most unlikely to confide. When the Herzegovinian returned to the front he went to Alexander and told him that in his opinion Mehmedbashitch was being badly and foolishly treated. He did this without fear, because he had a record of honourable service to the Serbian cause. It is odd that a monarch should be suspected of putting his subjects to death and imprisoning them on false charges, and at the same time should be trusted to respect a young officer who had shown fidelity to the national ideal. Alexander listened to him intently and then put to him a series of questions which he found completely incomprehensible. ‘I am sure he had something in his mind,’ he said, ‘but I have no idea what it was, and he was very unhappy about it; he was desperate and very angry.’ A short time afterwards, and apparently in consequence of this conversation, Mehmedbashitch was released, and is still living in Sarajevo, a carpenter with a marked disinclination to discuss politics.

  There is no hypothesis that fits these facts into a recognizable pattern. Sometimes it seems to me possible that they relate to a story of which rumours are heard, though now only faintly, in Sarajevo. There were obviously two crimes committed against Franz Ferdinand: one active, by Princip and his associates, one passive, by the royal guards who did not guard. It is said that yet a third had been prepared, and that there were people in Sarajevo on that St. Vitus’s Day who had expected the guilt to be theirs. Nobody will state quite clearly who is supposed to have inspired these people, but the guess would be that it was an Austrian influence too malignant to remain passive. It might be that this is correct, but that there had also been involved as cat‘s-paw some indiscreet foreign personage, capable of being tempted to this rashness by an ambition that had been inflamed by frustration. If the assassination should turn out to have fruitful consequences he might have made a bid for power which, backed by the army, might have come near to success. This is simply guess-work. But it has the recommendation of explaining why Alexander should feel an intense interest in the crime of Sarajevo long after it had been an accomplished fact. It must be remembered that Alexander, like the rest of the world, had never seen the records of the trial and therefore would not be aware that Mehmedbashitch was a medioc
rity with the most tenuous connexion with the crime. This makes the mystery more impenetrable by historic method, for Alexander was probably working on totally false clues. He was also one of the most secretive men that ever filled high places. Among the purple irises I thought of the long shelves of university libraries, their striation under lofty vaults, the reflected light that shines from historians’ spectacles, and I laughed.

  Thereafter our road ran up into the mountains, where the Black Drin, a river which many British and French soldiers will recall with loathing, tumbles between bouldered hills. Then grass banks, studded with cowslips, rose to beechwoods, and later we came to firwoods carpeted with yellow pansies, violets, and very large forget-me-nots. These flowers gave one less pleasure than we could have believed because of Gerda’s effort to discover why Kaimakshalan was famous. Constantine explained that the Germans and Bulgarians had held the mountain, and had fortified it with heavy artillery and machine-guns, and that the Serbians had climbed up the mountains and taken the fortifications. ‘But,’ objected Gerda, ‘if the Germans and the Bulgarians were up there with machine-guns, why did they let you Serbians get up there?’ Constantine said, ‘Well, that is just the point, they couldn’t prevent us.’ She asked, ‘But how did you get up?’ He answered, ‘We climbed up, we walked up.’ ‘Nonsense,’ she said, ‘a man cannot climb up a mountain where people are shooting machine-guns down on him.’ Constantine answered—and it sounds so well in German that I will leave it in that tongue—‘So dachten die Deutschen und so dachten die Bulgaren, aber so dachten nicht der König Alexander und die Serben!’