the Great War, can cause us no surprise--is the
adhesion, after certain years, of Bulgaria to the Yugoslav State. I
wrote these words a few months ago; they are already out of date. The
general opinion in Serbia is voiced by a Serbian war-widow, who,
writing in _Politika_, one of the newspapers of Belgrade, replied to
Stambouluesky, the Bulgarian peasant Premier, who was always
uncompromisingly opposed to the fratricidal war with Serbia. He had
been saying that the Serbs and other Yugoslavs prefer to postpone the
reconciliation until "the grass grows over the graves of their women
and children whom our officials destroyed"; and this war-widow
answered that it was not necessary for the grass to grow, but that
they should condemn the culprits by a regular court, as prescribed in
the treaty. "Fulfil the undertaking you have assumed, for only so
shall we know that you will fulfil other undertakings in the future."
If it had not been for the Great Powers, especially Russia and
Austria, the union of Serbia and Bulgaria might have occurred long
ago. Wise persons, such as Prince Michael of Serbia and the British
travellers, Miss Irby (Bosnia's lifelong benefactress) and her
relative, Miss Muir Mackenzie, had this aim in view during the sixties
of last century. So had a number of other excellent folk, who
recognized that the two people were naturally drawn to one another.
"The hatred between the two people is a fact which is as saddening in
the thought for the future as in the record of the past, but it is a
fact to ignore which is simply a mark of incompetence. The two nations
are antipathetic ..." says Mr. A. H. E. Taylor in his _The Future of
the Southern Slavs_, a painstaking if rather clumsy book (London,
1917), in which we are shown that the writer is well acquainted with
general history. But in the opinion of an erudite Serb, to whom I
showed this passage, Mr. Taylor knows nothing of Serb and Bulgar under
the Turks. There is no single document nor anything else that speaks
of hatred between them. On the contrary, they were always on friendly
terms. The antagonisms of the Middle Ages, as Mr. Taylor surely knows,
were the work of rulers who paid no attention to the national will;
there was at that time no national consciousness, and just as a
Serbian would wage war with a Bulgarian prince, so would he do battle
with a Croat or with another Serbian ruler. Mr. Taylor talks of "the
almost constant state of warfare between Serbs