Serbia by her ex-enemies being hopelessly out of repair
and always in trouble. And in these villages you see the bare-footed
war-waifs, skulking about in bits of old ruins, children who have lost
father and mother and kith and kin, the kind care at best of American
relief societies. There is said to be no actual want anywhere in
Serbia now, but no nation ever had so many orphans.

At Belgrade, despite many foreign elements, the most constant
impression is one of a multiplied body politic. Belgrade is said to
have more cripples than any other capital of Europe. And Berlin comes
second. It is a one-eyed city, a city of one-legged men, a city of men
with beetling brows and contracted eyes, a city of unrelenting
cobble-stones and broken houses.

You go into the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and the door-keeper
cannot write; you go to the Foreign Office and are shown about
laboriously by a one-legged man. In fact, the one-legged man might be
taken as the type and symbol of the new Serbia. In commerce it is as
in politics. Shop windows are one-third full of goods, the most
ill-assorted goods, mostly coming through the old channels from Austria
and Germany. There has not been enough energy left in the nation to
find the means of making new trade connexions--as for instance, with
England. A curious anomaly, surely, that there should be a glut of our
own products on the home market whilst in Serbia, even taking our
exchange into account, prices range much higher. Thus politics and
trade. You see the new recruits of the conscripted army struggling
along in sixes and sevens, men of all shapes and sizes apparently in
one shape and size of war boot, causing such sufferings to young men.
There are no feather-bed soldiers here. In the schools and
universities, however, you see the rare earnestness of the Slav.

Such is Serbia. And if Germany had won it would have been impossible
to have seen her even in as fair terms as that. But some one outside
of the machine has intervened and the dead has come to life. Serbia
still lives.

One has to show a difference between Serbia and Jugo-Slavia, or the
Kingdom of Serbs, Hrvats,[1] and Slovenes, "S.H.S." as it is commonly
called. The new country is three times as large as the old one, and
the two new parts of Croatia and Slovenia are well-built, fruitful,
prosperous, with all the glamour of Austrian civilization resting on
them. On the one side of the old frontier the