ia, and others even bring in Austria's Slavic provinces, Bosnia and
Herzegovina.

The most noticeable feature of this vast war-ridden region is its
mountains. Those same Carpathian Mountains, which form the natural
boundary between the land of the Magyars and the Russian plains, take a
sudden turn westward at the Rumanian frontier, then sweep around in a
great semicircle, forming a shape resembling a scythe, the handle of
which reaches up into Poland, the blade curling around within the Balkan
Peninsula. Behind the handle, and above the upper part of the blade,
stretch the broad plains of Hungary, through which flows the great
Danube, the largest river in Europe next to the Russian Volga--a river
which flowed with blood during the Great War. Just in the middle of the
back of the blade this great river bursts through the mountain chain,
swirling through the famous Iron Gate into the great basin within the
curved blade. On the south of its farther course to the Black Sea lie
the plains of northern Bulgaria.

The curving chain of mountains below the Iron Gate is the Balkan Range.
But excepting for the plains of Thrace, lying south of the Balkans, over
toward the Black Sea and above Constantinople, the rest of the peninsula
is almost entirely one confused tangle of craggy mountains, interspersed
throughout with small, fertile valleys and plateaus. This roughness of
surface becomes especially aggravated as one passes westward, and over
toward the Adriatic coast, from Greece up into the Austrian province of
Dalmatia, the country is almost inaccessible to ordinary travelers.

What is the political value of this beleaguered domain? The broad,
significant fact is that any road from western Europe to the Orient must
pass through the Balkan Peninsula, and that these mountains almost block
that road. From north to south there is just one highway, so narrow that
it is really a defile.

This road stretches from the seat of the war at Belgrade on the Danube
down a narrow valley, the Morava, thence through the highlands of
Macedonia into the Vardar Valley to Saloniki, on the AEgean Sea. At Nish,
above Macedonia, another road branches off into Bulgaria across the
plains of Thrace and into Constantinople. This was the road by which the
Crusaders swarmed down to conquer the Holy Land. This was the road by
which, hundreds of years later, the Moslems swarmed up into the plains
of Hungary and overran the south of Europe, until they were f