BRITONS IN BALKANS

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 18, 22 January 1916, Page 13

BRITONS IN BALKANS

'EVENTS BEFORE THE RETREAT.

A very graphic picture of the spirits of our' men who are at the British front in Servia and of the way in which they take their British ways with them is sent to the press by Mr. G. Ward Price. "In a wild country of deep ravines, green and fertile valleys, and steep, irregular limestone hills, a country as different • from the polders of Belgium or the slagheaps of Lens as the Potteries are from the Highlands of Scotland, part of the British troops in the Balkans are now in the first line face to face with their enemy," he writes. OUR ENERGETIC MEN". "You need, to see the.British in this unfamiliar setting to realise why we are a gieat colonising Tace. Neither the grandeur of the. scenery nor ,the sombre history of the land distracts them- one moment from setting about their matter-of-fact military duties. Already they have made well-beateD paths, neatly marked out with stones, along the hillsides, where in all the centuries none of the earlier inhabitants of the Balkans had troubled to mark a track. For generation* untold the Turk and the Bulgar and the Greek have been driving their donkeys up and down the steep and rocky gullies that are the only roads from village to village, and more of those rocks have been cleared out of the way this last week than since the Balkans were made. "Where there was^ a ford before you will find that a party of sappers has already laid the foundations of a bridge, arid in the villages where some of the men are quartered the mud, hovels, whose floors were covered with a festering pile of rags, rubbish, and dirt a foot deep, have been scraped and scrubbed and disinfected, until a county council inspector would pass them without hesitation. DOING SOME GOOD. "Of all the wars, the Balkans have known ours will be the, only one that has done them some good instead of unadulterated harm." "If you took the Peak district and raised the hills, broadened out the valleys, and wrinkled the slopes into watercourses and gullies, so that the whole landscape took on a sterner, harsher, and more massive aspect, you would get a fair imitation of the country,where the first British engagements in the Balkans are being fought. A rich land, well watered, with a heavy and generous 50i1..: Partridges, hares, and woodcock are . everywhere. . The engineers with our forces have noticed traces of minerals, including gold ' Cotton grows there, and tobacco, and hemp. • There are orchards of mulberry trees for feeding the silk-worms, "The valleys are strewn with great yellow maize-pods, that ought to have been gathered in August, but were left to rot in the fields when .the peasantry had to abandon their villages under the ■familiar stress of war." ... • . IRAGIC RAVINES., "For though God made this part of the Balkans to be a garden where men might live at their ease with little labour, it was settled by such haphazard medley races and religions that feuds and massacres have always sprung up there, even . more ■ readily than crops, A and the villager while-he tilled his-fer-tile fields had his rifle ready to his hand. For years past, Bulgarian' free-booterg slaughtered Greek peasants in the name of the Bulgarian Church, arid the Greeks burnt the - Bulgarian villages to make converts to the Patriarchate; while their common masters,• the Turks, .massacred :both impartially whenever reasons1 of State made such measures desirable. Much blood has: flowed down these ravines, and it is > strange "but only a" fitting climax to restless history of the Balkans that .this last and greatest war of all should bring the khaki of the British and the French blue-grey _ to campaign among their wild mountains."