ingly devoted to the Tsar. His regiment would
have made a mountain of its dead rather than let them take the Tsar.
If the Tsar had even been in the Crimea when Wrangel was there they
would never have given him up.
"Whom have you hope in now?" I asked. "General Wrangel cannot do any
more."
"There's only one man."
"Who is that?"
"That man is Burtsef."
What an extraordinary conjunction of sentiments!--devotion to the Tsar
and belief in Burtsef! But here it was. The bourgeois were to blame
for all Russia's troubles, and yet he was a soldier in the army that
wanted to restore the bourgeois. Such paradoxical attitudes are no
doubt responsible for the current official opinion in Serbia that all
Russians tend to become Bolshevik, and that they may be a dangerous
element in the State.
The soldier had three glasses of tea and then inverted his glass and
got up and was most profuse in thanks, and for the present of a few
dinars actually got down on his knees in thankfulness.
"You are going back to your hospital camp--how will you go?" I asked.
"On foot?"
"No, by train. They give us a free pass on the railway. Some say
they'll soon give us a free pass back to Russia!"
He looked very woebegone. He showed me his Georgian cross given for
bravery in the field, and then once more the ikon his mother had given
him. "Seven years, and I haven't once been home," said he.
"Seven years," he repeated mechanically, and began stumbling out of the
room.
He was a strange and touching witness of the power of the human
eruption in Russia. As it were, a clod of earth had been lifted from
the province of Tambof and flung as far as the Balkans. Another
witness of another kind was the old Archbishop of Minsk whom I found in
the monastery of Ravanitsa.
The Secretary of State for Religion very kindly facilitated my journey
to the shrine of St. Lazar, where I saw Serbia's mediaeval prince lying
headless before the altar. Strange to say, it seemed as if the body
had a head. The shroud was raised to disclose his brown and wizened
fingers and shrunken middle, and where the head should be were the
contours of a head under a veil. At my desire the cloth was lifted,
and I saw instead of a head a large jewelled mitre.
The monks showed me "bulls" and charters and proclamations and
manuscripts, mostly eloquent now of the ill-faith of Serbia's
neighbours. They were, however, humorous and vivacious and well-fed
monks who
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