-all these names
were well known by every Serbian soldier. In their childhood and boyhood
they sang these very names, they sang them and knew the historical
events and heroes connected with them. And so they came now not as
guests and strangers, but they returned home after a long absence. It
seems to every one of them like a dream: the land which has been for
generations and generations the topic of poetry now stood before the
Serbian warriors as a reality. The Serbian brothers from Austria-Hungary
came to Macedonia, kissed the sacred soil, and each one took a handful
of the sacred dust from the tombs of our kings and heroes of old. Two
months after the outbreak of war King Peter returned to Topola and
prayed gratefully in his white church to God and to Saint George. This
democratic king, who has been elected by the Serbian Parliament
(_Skupshtina_), thanked God that he with his people had finished the
work of liberation from the Turkish yoke, which work was started by
Karageorge, his grandfather, who also was elected by the people to be
their leader.

IN SUMMER 1913.

The war with the Turks was a short one. Yet the war with the Bulgars was
still shorter. The Bulgars attacked us in a dark night. Austria
suggested such an attack, and this quite suited the Bulgarian spirit. It
is a slavish spirit, full of slavish ambitions and slavish abject
methods.

When I tell you that, believe me, I tell it neither as a chauvinist nor
even as a Serbian patriot, but as a man who has studied very carefully
the history and psychology of the Balkan peoples.

The Bulgarian attack against the Serbian army was resisted not only by
the Serbs, as the Bulgars hoped, but by the Greeks and Roumanians as
well. I visited the battlefield afterwards. I have been in Stip, a town
on the Bregalniza river, where the attack began. I saw the tree on the
bank of the river, under which the Serbian and Bulgarian officers rested
together the very day before the treacherous night. The Bulgarians
smiled and chatted with their Serbian colleagues; they spoke about the
everlasting brotherhood between the Serbian and Bulgarian nations; they
ate and drank from the same plates and glasses with the Serbs, their
allies, while the order of the night attack lay in their pockets. It
happened nineteen hundred years after a treacherous apostle ate and
drank in the same manner with his Master.

The unnatural ambitions of the Bulgars were repudiated by all the Balka