f the War" 252

THE NEW FRONTIERS OF FREEDOM

CHAPTER I

ACROSS THE REDEEMED LANDS

It is unwise, generally speaking, to write about countries and peoples
when they are in a state of political flux, for what is true at the
moment of writing may be misleading the next. But the conditions which
prevailed in the lands beyond the Adriatic during the year succeeding
the signing of the Armistice were so extraordinary, so picturesque, so
wholly without parallel in European history, that they form a sort of
epilogue, as it were, to the story of the great conflict. To have
witnessed the dismemberment of an empire which was hoary with antiquity
when the Republic in which we live was yet unborn; to have seen
insignificant states expand almost overnight into powerful nations; to
have seen and talked with peoples who did not know from day to day the
form of government under which they were living, or the name of their
ruler, or the color of their flag; to have seen millions of human
beings transferred from sovereignty to sovereignty like cattle which
have been sold--these are sights the like of which will probably not be
seen again in our times or in those of our children, and, because they
serve to illustrate a chapter of History which is of immense importance,
I have tried to sketch them, in brief, sharp outline, in this book.

Because I was curious to see for myself how the countrymen of Andreas
Hofer in South Tyrol would accept their enforced Italianization; whether
the Italians of Fiume would obey the dictum of President Wilson that
their city must be Slav; how the Turks of Smyrna and the Bulgarians of
Thrace would welcome Hellenic rule; whether the Croats and Slovenes and
Bosnians and Montenegrins were content to remain pasted in the Jugoslav
stamp-album; and because I wished to travel through these disputed
regions while the conditions and problems thus created were still new,
we set out, my wife and I, at about the time the Peace Conference was
drawing to a close, on a journey, made largely by motor-car and
destroyer, which took us from the Adige to the Vardar and from the
Vardar to the Pruth, along more than five thousand miles of those new
national boundaries--drawn in Paris by a lawyer, a doctor and a college
professor--which have been termed, with undue optimism perhaps, the
frontiers of freedom.

Some of the things which I shall say in these pages wi