Part 11 (1/2)
”We have been at war for eleven months, only others are firing at us, but we are not firing at them. We are in a war that will decide our existence, but the soldiers dying to defend our rights, instead of being our soldiers, are soldiers of the Allies. The Allies will win, but if any one thinks that, having won without us, they will have won for us, he must be mad. Their victory without us may preserve our material life, but it will never save our moral life nor that of future generations.”
Mr. Ionesco and those who agree with him belong, it will be observed, with the romanticists--they are for the bright face of danger, great stakes, and, win or lose, putting all to the touch. Those who did not agree with them were men without souls, hagglers and traders, as if a nation could figure out the number of cannon-shots and prisoners, and go where the going's good! It made interesting reading as you sat at one of the cafe tables, with the crowd flowing by and the five-o'clock papers coming fresh from the press. The other side--and it included the King and most of the government, inasmuch as Rumania had not yet gone to war --had the more difficult task of making caution interesting. In their editorials and speeches Ionesco and his followers were jingoes trying to drive the nation to a Rumanian Sedan.
”A people is great, not only for its numbers of soldiers, but for its civilization, its artists, and intellectuals. A nation militarized is marked for eternal death, for a people lives by its thought and not by force.” There was an amusing retort, the afternoon I returned to Bucarest, to one of the fire-eating retired generals, picturing the quaint old fellow as thinking that people were born only to die bravely, and knowing nothing of Rumania's rule as the ”defender of Latinism” in the Balkans, ”tooting the funereal flute and showing us the mountains-- there is to be your tomb!”
There was a time, when the Russians were taking Przemysl, when Rumania's tide seemed to be at the flood--if ever it was going to be. That chance was lost, and Rumania found herself standing squarely in the track of the stream of ammunition which used to flow down from Duesseldorf to the Turks--when I was at the front with the Turks, practically all the ammunition boxes I saw, and there were hundreds of them, were marked ”Gut uber Rumanien”--and, later, in Russia's path to Bulgaria and Servia.
One of these days a hot thrill might run down the Calea Vittorei, and all at once Capsa's and the other little booths in this miniature Vanity Fair would seem strange and far-away. But until that day one could fancy the romanticists and realists lambasting each other in the papers, the soldiers grinding away in their dusty camps, the pretty ladies rolling gayly down the sprinkled asphalt, and the chanteuse singing over the footlights:
”Que pense le Premier Ministre? On n'sait pas--”
(”What thinks the Prime Minister? n.o.body knows--”)
”Is he for the Germans? Has he made a convention With perfidious Albion?
n.o.body knows...”
The Gate to Constantinople
Only the Danube separates Rumania from Bulgaria, yet the people--of the two capitals, at least--are as different as the French and Scotch. The train leaves Bucarest after breakfast; you are ferried over the river at Rustchuk at noon, and, after trailing over the shoulders of long, rolling plateaus, are up in the mountains in Sofia that evening. The change is almost as sharp as that between Ostend and Folkestone.
You leave French, or the half-Latin Rumanian language, for a Slavic speech, and the Cyrillic, or Russian, alphabet; names ending in ”sco” or ”ano” (Ionesco, Filipesco, Bratiano) for names ending in ”off”
(Radoslavoff, Malinoff, Ghenadieff, Antinoff, and the like), and all the show and vivacity, the cafes and cocottes of Bucarest, for a clean little mountain capital as determined and serious as some new town out West.
It seemed, though of course such impressions are mostly chance, that the difference began at the border. In Rumania, at the Hungarian border, they took away my pa.s.sport, which in times like these is like taking away one's clothes, and, though I a.s.sured the customs inspector that I was on my way to Constantinople, and in a hurry, it required four days'
wait in Bucarest, and innumerable visits to the police before the paper was returned. Every one, apparently, on the train had the same experience--the Austrian drummers looked wise and muttered ”baksheesh,”
and in Bucarest an evil-eyed hotel porter kept pulling me into corners, saying that this taking of pa.s.sports was a regular ”commerce,” and that for five francs he would have it back again.
There is a popular legend that the clerks in Bucarest hotels are supposed to offer incoming guests all the choices of a Mohammedan paradise, and the occasional misogynist, who prefers a room to himself, is received with sympathy, and the wish politely expressed that monsieur will soon be himself again. My own experience was less ornate, but prices were absurdly high, the waiter's check frequently needed revision, and one had a vague but more or less continual sense of swimming among sharks.
These symptoms were absent in Bulgaria. The border officials seemed sensible men who would ”listen to reason”; the porters, coachmen, waiters, and the like, crude rather than cleverly depraved, and the air of Sofia clear and clean, in more senses than one.
Modern Bulgaria is only a couple of generations old, and though all this part of the world has been invaded and reinvaded and fought over since the beginning of things, the little kingdom (it seems more like a republic) has the air of a new country.
The aristocracy had been wiped out before Bulgaria got her autonomy in 1878, and, unlike Rumania, where the greater portion of the land is in the hand of large proprietors, Bulgaria is a country of small farmers, of shepherds, peasants, each with his little piece of land. The men who now direct its fortunes are the sons and grandsons of very simple people. Possibly it is because we Americans are also a new people, with still some of the prejudices of pioneers, that we are likely to feel something in common with the people of this ”peasant state.” They seemed to me, at any rate, the most ”American” of the Balkan peoples.
There is, of course, one concrete reason for this: Robert College and the American School for Girls (Constantinople College) at Constantinople. It was men educated at Robert College who became the leaders of modern Bulgaria. The only Bulgarian I had known before--I met him on the steamer--had gone from a little village near Sofia to Harvard. His married sister had learned English at the American School for Girls; her husband, a Macedonian Bulgar, had worked his way through Yale. The amiable old general, who was always in the library at the Sofia Club at tea time, ready to tell how the Dardanelles and Constantinople could be taken, had learned English at Robert College and had a son there; the photographer who developed my films also had a son there--and so on.
Snow-capped mountains rise just behind Sofia, and the brown hills thereabout, like the rolling plateaus along the shoulders of which the train crawls on the way down from Rumania, are speckled with sheep.
Sometimes even in Sofia you will meet a shepherd patiently urging his little flock up a modern concrete sidewalk and stopping now and then for some pa.s.ser-by to pick up a lamb, ”heft” it, poke it, and feel its wool before deciding whether or not he should take it home for dinner.
These shepherds wear roomy, short box-coats of sheepskin, with the leather outside and the wool turned in, like a motor-coat; homespun breeches embroidered, very likely in blue, and laced from the knee down, and a sort of moccasin or laced soft shoe. They are as common in the streets of Sofia as are the over-barbered young snipes in the streets of Bucarest. On market days the main down-town street is filled with them-- long-limbed, slow-moving old fellows, with eyes and foreheads wrinkled from years of squinting in the bright plateau sun, faces bronzed and weathered like an old farmhouse, shuffling down the pavement and into and out of shops with the slow, soft-footed gait of so many elk. And if you were designing a stamp for Bulgaria you might well put one of these hard-headed old countrymen on it, just as in the other capital you would put the girl in the victoria pattering down the asphalt.
Two newspaper correspondents of the more or less continuous string that were filing from one Bulgarian leader to another to find out what Bulgaria was going to do, amiably permitted me to trail about with them, and thus to see and talk a little with some of those who are steering Bulgaria's exceedingly delicate course--men whose grandfathers very likely wore those sheepskin coats with the wool turned in.
None had the peculiar verve and dash of Take Ionesco, but one or two were decidedly ”smooth” in a grave, slightly heavy way, and all suggested stubbornness, intense patriotism, and a keen eye for the main chance.
There is little ”society” or formal entertaining in Sofia, little display and little, apparently, of that state of mind which, in Bucarest, is suggested by the handsome, two-horse public carriages at a time when there are not enough horses and carriages to go round.