Frank Fox

“ Among this nation of peasant proprietors—sturdy, abstemious, moral, living in the main on whole-meal bread and water—illness was so rare that the medical service was but little regarded. Up to Chatalja confidence in the rude health of the peasants was justified. They passed through cold, hunger, fatigue and kept healthy. But ignorant of sanitary discipline, camped among the filthy Turkish villages, the choleraic dysentery passed from the Turkish trenches to theirs. There are 30,000 cases of illness and the healthy for the first time feel fear as they see the torments of the sick. ”

“ Austria, dreaming of one day marching down to the Aegean, saw that that hope would be shattered if a strong Balkan Federation held the Balkan Peninsula. Italy was afraid of another Power on the Adriatic—an unwise fear, because her true national policy should have welcomed a new check to Austria. Russia was not eager to welcome a Balkan Federation, in which possibly the Slav element would not predominate and which, in any case, would get to Constantinople inevitably in the course of events. ”

“ Delighted to march once more under the generalship of one of the bravest of men, and to exchange the prospect of death by hunger for death on the battlefield, the Goths at once rose in arms. Lupicinus, with no proper preparation, joined battle with them at the ninth milestone from Marcianople, was defeated, and only saved himself by a shameful flight. The barbarians equipped themselves with the arms of the slain legionaries, and in truth that day ended in one blow the hunger of the Goths and the security of the Romans ”

“ That in cases of Balkan massacres and outrages the Bulgarian people have not been always the victims, and have not been always blameless, I know. It is impossible to shut one's eyes to the fact that something survives of the traditions of cruelty and reprisal existing in the Balkans of the Middle Ages. In this Balkan peninsula there is always a smell of blood in the nostrils, a mist of blood in the eyes. The Bulgarians have taken their part in many incidents which seem to deny the existence of Christian civilisation. ”

“ If one could imagine the Powers of Europe reformed as regards their foreign policy, and genuinely anxious to smooth away the troubles of these sorely vexed Balkan peoples, the chief danger left to tranquillity would be the religious intolerance which grows so rankly in the Peninsula—between Christian and Christian more than between Moslem and Christian. There needs to be put up in church or mosque of every Balkan village the inscription of Abul Fazl:
O God, in every temple I see people that see Thee, and in every language I hear spoken, people praise Thee. ”

“ For this Bulgarian nation, so frugal, industrious, persevering and courageous there must be a splendid future. It has all the essential elements of greatness and must overcome in time the misfortunes of the past. If but the Fates will shield Bulgaria for a time from the desperate policy of attempting any new war of revenge or of enterprise, her growing economic strength, her superiority in industry and in application to other peoples of the Peninsula will in time assert themselves, and give her a strong position in the Balkans. ”

“ The Turk is not a religious persecutor to anything like the extent to which the Christian has been a religious persecutor. On coming into Europe he never sought, for example, to destroy the Greek Church, and I do not think that there is any clear evidence that Turkish misrule was founded at any period on intolerance carried to the degree of murder for faith's sake. ”

“ I am not now prepared to take up the view of the fanatic Bulgar-worshippers who must not only exalt the Bulgarian nation as a modern Chosen [12] People, but must represent Servian, Greek, and Turk as malignant and devilish in order to throw up in the highest light their ideas of Bulgarian saintliness.
The Balkans are apt to have strange effects on the traveller. Perhaps it is the blood-mist that hangs always over the Balkan plains and glens which gets into the head and intoxicates one: perhaps it is the call to the wild in us from the primitive human nature of the Balkan peoples. ”

“ The Danube-shore teems with fortresses, the fortresses with soldiers, the soldiers with arms, the arms both beautiful and terrible. Luxury is banished from the legions, but there is an abundance of all necessary stores, so that there is now no need for the soldier to eke out his deficient rations by raids on the peaceful villagers. There was a time when the legions were terrible to the provincials, and afraid of the barbarians. Now all that is changed: they despise the barbarians and fear the complaint of one plundered husbandman more than an innumerable multitude of Goths. ”

“ If your paper wants picturesque stories hot off the grill it is much better not to be with the army (which means, in effect, in the rear of the army) , but to write about its deeds from outside the radius of the Censorship.
Perhaps, though, your paper has old-fashioned [111] prejudices in favour of veracity and will be annoyed if your imagination leads you too palpably astray? In that case do not venture to be a war correspondent at all. If you do not invent you will send nothing of value. If you invent you will be reprimanded. ”

“ Instead of an actively benevolent there was an actively malevolent Europe.
The plans of the Balkan League contemplated a division of the territory which is now Albania between Greece, Servia, and Montenegro. The decree of the Powers, issued because Austria made a "bluffing threat" of war if Servia were allowed territory on the Adriatic, was that Albania should be an independent kingdom. It had at the time no cities, no railways, no roads worthy of the name, no civilised organisation, no basis at all of national life. Several different racial types and religions found a shelter within its area. ”

“ Children respect their parents, wives look at their husbands almost as gods, and at the tent door elders administer what they imagine justice, stroking their long white beards, and as impressed with their judicial functions as if their dirty turbans or ropes of camels' hair bound round their heads, were horse-hair wigs, and the torn mat on which they sit a woolsack or a judge's bench, with a carved wooden canopy above it, decked with the royal arms. ”

“ At first with some aid from an interpreter, afterwards mostly by signs and broken fragments of language, I got to be able to converse with this Turk. (In the Balkans the various shreds of races have quaint crazy-quilt patchworks of conversational language. Somehow or other even a British citizen with more than the usual stupidity of our race as to foreign languages can make himself understood in the Balkan Peninsula, which is so polyglottic that its inhabitants understand signs very well.) My Turk friend, from the very first, filled my heart with sympathy because of his love for his horses. ”