Henri Pozzi, 1935
Author's Preface to the English Edition << Contents >> The Croat Problem - II. The Opinion of a Chief
War is coming again to Europe! The storm will come from the Balkans--that historic tinder box of the world which has now been made even more inflammable by the incorporation into Serbia of Croatian, Macedonian, Hungarian, Slovakian and Dalmatian1 territories, under the name of Yugoslavia.
I have made many friends in Serbia, but since July and December 1923 I have been unable to hide even from them my fears of a coming conflagration.
Yugoslavia was born out of the chaos of the Great War in a flurry of acclaim, but alas, none of the aspirations and ambitions for which Serbia went to war are likely to be realised: she is slipping irresistibly towards an unknown abyss, and we French are bound to her by bands of steel.
Even going back ten years it was easy to see something gripping Yugoslavia by the throat. But in the years since then the grip has been tightened, and tightened in my opinion by the dictatorship established by King Alexander Karageorgevitch. This dictatorship, however much it may claim a temporary success, must inevitably have the effect of poisoning all the Yugoslav organism. Whether the poisoning is incurable or not is the question for which I have sought an answer during two months in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Central
Europe.
Belgrade says: "The difficulties through which we are passing are nothing more than a simple growing pain. They will disappear of their own accord when we have suppressed their causes, that is to say, finished the material and moral unification of our country and definitely reduced our internal and external adversaries to a state of impotence".
Opponents of the dictatorship say: "There is no remedy: those who have seized power in Yugoslavia to-day, and who maintain that power by inhuman violence are leading her, and Europe with her, to a bloody catastrophe".
Between the men who proclaim these two points of view lies a gulf that every day widens, and all the men in Europe who are in touch with affairs know it. The man in the street does not know, for the press is kept out of the inner circles.
Oh, yes! The Press has made "special investigations" of Yugoslav conditions; but what have they amounted to? What "special representative" has drawn attention to the occupation of one half of Yugoslavia by troops and police recruited from the other half; troops that are not even able to speak the language of their "compatriots" in the occupied zones?
In what European newspaper has it been stated that in all the cities of Croatia (even at Zagreb, the seat of the government in Croatia) all the Croat-owned coffee-houses had to be closed to the troops because of the terrible fights that continually broke out between the Croats and the Serbs?
Not one!
And yet, if Europe only knew, its every corner is tied up with the financial and political unity of Yugoslavia.
I know that I am in danger of being accused of exaggeration by those few special correspondents who have passed an agreeable day or two in the company of Serbian local government agents; who have been taken among the middle-aged women and gigolos at Sarajevo or across the aged stone of a Dalmatian quay?
How I should like to believe that they are right!
But the peril towards which Europe is heading by way of Yugoslavia is a mortal peril. Everything that strikes or menaces Yugoslavia strikes or menaces France; because militarily and politically since 1918 France's destiny has been bound to that of Belgrade.
There can be no catastrophe in the Balkans that will not sweep into France and thence through Europe; and there can be nothing else but catastrophe in the Balkans!
This fact must not be forgotten.
I passed over the Yugoslav frontier in the dark hours which precede the dawn, and it is significant that the first person I saw once I had passed the frontier was a soldier, half-hidden though he was behind a clump of trees, which his hands crossed upon his rifle. He was one of a group of men who were guarding the railways, bridges, switches, tunnels and stations. I saw thousands of these patrols from Susak to Ljubljana, from Zagreb to Sarajevo: entire regiments of them fully equipped for the field; rifles loaded, cartridge belts filled.
Literally they infested the international train. They questioned, verified, rummaged and searched. We were forbidden to leave our compartments. We might have been criminals. Soldiers with fixed bayonets made a minute inspection of the train from end to the other. Valises, sacks, hat-boxes, provision baskets, benches, cushions, partitions, roofs, floors, and springs, even to the linings of clothing, all were scrutinised, turned upside down and sounded. All foreign newspapers were confiscated.
"What are they hunting for?" I asked the guard. "Bombs!" he replied simply.
At Zagreb soon afterwards I was told that malcontents had been more active and more audacious than ever. In less than a week more than twenty-two railroad coaches had been demolished by bombs on Slovene lines, and fourteen on Croat. In one month more than fifty bombs had been discovered under the coal of locomotives or in the casing of cars. Not only property but lives had suffered. Three gendarmeries had been dynamited! One of the bombs currently used by the terrorists was given to me for inspection in a little Zagreb coffee house. It was not made by Communists, but by Croat and Slovene revolutionaries in Austria. It was about the same size and shape as a cigarette packet - charged with a terribly powerful new explosive, cheap and easy to handle.
I was given the exact formula of its ingredients and an agent of the Croat railroad even told me how to use it. It would not be in the public interest to publish these details here.
And these Slovene lands, where bayonets bristle and the war-dogs strain, what are they like? To the north, the mauve mountains, vegetation of a tremendous richness and variety, splendid forests and innumerable torrents, make a land of pure enchantment. To the south, sunshine makes them almost incredible.
But as one penetrates into Croatia, the landscape changes little by little, the wild rugged scenery of the north is left behind, and gives place to sober country, which though beautiful, takes on an ordered, civilised air.
The forests are less expansive; great plains roll into the distance, peopled, fruitful and entirely given over to agricultural exploitation; the magnificent and savage crags which everywhere penetrated the Slovene woodlands and prairies now disappear. Divided by little clusters and green hedges, the meadow-lands, where glossy cattle and great bands of horses graze, remind one of the richness of the French Normandy farms. Interminable vineyards, interspersed with
thousands of fruit trees, cover rounding hillocks of red soil. Expansive villages press their comfortable, violet-tiled houses around low churches with high, tapering belfries. Among the immense fields of maize and sunflowers, of sugar beet and grain already in sheaves, great farms are hidden in the verdure of opulent orchards. In all directions, over roofs and fields, a network of electric wires gleams in the sunshine. Wide macadamised roads, leading across news steel bridges abound everywhere, and the whole scene is one of strength, of richness, of industry and of ordered civilisation.
Yet here, even more than in Slovenia, on the roads and paths which stretch out across the country; on the village squares, along railways, near bridges at the foot of which women wash their linen in the bounding waters of torrents, everywhere are armed men; the outward and visible sign of the dictatorship. Beauty, plenty and industry are here in state of siege!
Our train stopped at a little station, and as I sat looking curiously at a detachment of infantry in marching order going down the street, a voice said in my ear: "Serb troops."
As if it were necessary to tell me! As if it were not enough to look at those spare, flat faces, with the black drooping moustaches and the close-set eyes! Every man of them was a Serb from Old Serbia. And so it was throughout Croatia; Serb sentries mile after mile along the railway; Serb gendarmes and police searching the trains and patrolling the country; Serb officers to verify my passport three times in six hours; Serb horsemen to halt my car later with an imperious signal.
Not a Croat nor a Slovene carried arms, or wore a uniform, or shared even a minute part of all this pomp and power, despite the fact that one third of the Yugoslav army is made up of Croats and Slovenes. The Croatian soldiers are among the best in Europe for their discipline, their endurance and their military spirit: yet all their military service is done far from their own country, either in Macedonia, or in Choumadia on the other side of Belgrade.
"And it's preferable," Colonel T. said to me as we were dining with some Serb friends at Hotel Esplanade. "In ten years or so this generation will be replaced by the young generation which will have been 'Serbianised' to the core: then we shall be able to permit local recruiting. Until then, impossible! The young Croats are still imbued with pre-War ideals!"
All the important government employees are Serbs from Old Serbia. I mentioned this to a Croatian merchant to whom I had brought a letter from his parents in Paris. I pointed out that not only were the really important posts filled with Serbs, but also all those government jobs in which there was something to direct or to command, to superintend or to learn.
"That is nothing," said the merchant. "If you take our postal and telegraph services you will find that every single one of them is a member of the police. All my foreign letters without exception are opened before I get them."
The Orient Express takes twenty hours to go from Milan to Zagreb in the heart of Croatia. It takes seven to go from Zagreb to Belgrade. Yet the difference, moral and material, is greater between Zagreb and Belgrade than it is between Milan and Zagreb.
There in lies the root of all the trouble between this Balkan Belgrade and this European Zagreb. Yugoslavia is the scene of a conflict between two mentalities and two civilisations, between which there could be no agreement except by mutual goodwill, patience and reciprocity in face of a common task.
The forceful energy of Serbia and the cultured intelligence of Croatia supplementing each other could do great things. They could create between the Adriatic and the Danube a great monument to world peace--a nation of southern Slavs.
Of this new people Serbia would have been the arms and Croatia the brains. But instead of this new nation there is an unnatural yoking of unlikes who, because of their false alliance, are fast becoming bitter and irreconcilable enemies.
These two people are typified in their two chief cities. Zagreb by its atmosphere, the lay-out of its streets and homes, by its churches and stores and its cafes and hotels, is occidental. Belgrade, despite its transformation since the War, its modernism, and its tremendous growth in population, remains an oriental city. Centuries of barbarous domination, plus the Asiatic and Slavonic influences, have impregnated it with Balkanism.
The Serbs are Balkan to the marrow.
How different is Zagreb and the whole of the Croat lands! Their spacious and solid homes, orchards and prairies as well kept as gardens, are monuments to the method, harmony and intelligence applied everywhere!
Think, then, of these two warring mentalities thrown together into this cockpit of a country. The Serb, filled with Slav mysticism and Ottoman brutality; the Croat, emancipated by a long association with the Western world. Unity, under such conditions, is but an empty dream. It might have been possible; for the Croats, detached at the end of the War from Hungary, which for nearly ten centuries had been almost a second home to them, were ready to forget the past and build a new future with the co-operation of the Serbs. Despite the fact that their Slav ancestors were lost in the mists of time, undiscoverable in the passage of the centuries, the Croats were ready and willing, for the sake of prosperity, to have them reborn. They proclaimed themselves Southern Slavs with enthusiasm. They called themselves Yugo-Slavs, and they meant it literally and whole-heartedly.
Unfortunately the Serbs thought differently!
Pasitch, credited with the genius of a Bismarck, but in reality a Serb-obsessed politician with the skill of a horse-trader, knew that his countrymen thought differently. His life was dedicated to the grandeur and apotheosis of Serbia. His was the frenzied vision which started the ball rolling in the way it is rolling to-day--towards war.
He saw, as did the other leaders at Belgrade at the end of the War, that Serbia's territorial acquisitions meant fabulous personal profits; opportunity for fraud and pillage. To them the Croats were not long-lost brothers to be welcomed back into the fold, they were sheep leading themselves willingly to the shearing. To them Yugoslavia was no Serb-Croat-Slovene kingdom that had happened along miraculously, it was merely an enlarged Serbia!
That was all!
Today the same brutal blindness persists. Not a Serb talks of Yugoslavia or Yugoslavs. They talk always of Serbia and Serbians.
The Croatians, deprived of the administrative rights they had enjoyed under Hungary, protested immediately, and the Slovenes joined with them, but Serb magistrates and agents rapped them on the knuckles. By the beginning of 1920 Croatia and Slovenia were shaken by an intense political agitation against Serb domination.
Belgrade became all the more brutal. The Croat and Slovene peasant organisations, the backbone of the opposition, were declared illegal and at once dissolved. Their founders and their leaders were imprisoned or forced to leave the country.
Then arose a great new chief with an ardent soul and a voice of bronze. Stephan Raditch!
Raditch was produced by the need of the moment. But he was not allowed to interfere too much with the power of Belgrade. Arrested, condemned, put behind bars, he still threw his immense personality beyond and stirred his people to such a pitch that King Alexander, to stay insurrection, offered to make peace and to have Raditch for a minister. That was in June 1925; through the agency of Raditch the Croats and Slovenes saw themselves on the brink of political justice again. But they rejoiced too soon; for in June 1928, Raditch fell in
the Yugoslav Parliament, mortally wounded by the bullet of a Pan-Serb representative, and six months later came the coup d'etat, especially aimed against the Croats and Slovenes, by which parliamentary government in Yugoslavia was ended, and the military dictatorship set up.
And now, after years of this regime, crushed by new and ever-new taxation, under the military heel, bowed but not broken, Croatia dreams only of freedom from the Serbs. She is a nation of outlaws. Her outlaw bands (university men, workers, peasants) roam from one frontier to another, fighting Serb volunteers and troops, blowing up military posts and public buildings, shooting gendarmes.
A merciless guerilla warfare goes on in the forests and the hills day after day. From July 1932 to the end of February 1933, more than 200 soldiers and police were killed, over 20 posts and gendarmeries were destroyed, and the insurgents lost over 300 men.
The dream of a unified South Slavdom has withered and died in less than sixteen years, and now its corruption stinks across the length and breadth of Europe.
Author's Preface to the English Edition << Contents >> The Croat Problem - II. The Opinion of a Chief
1Dalmatia was an autonomous Croatian region under Austrian
administration at the time within the Habsburg monarchy.
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