THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, JANUARY 19, 1918. THE TRAGEDY OF SERBIA.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 17216, 19 January 1918, Page 6

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, JANUARY 19, 1918. THE TRAGEDY OF SERBIA.

"It can seldom be the lot of an his torian," writes Captain H. W. V. Temporley in his recently published "History of Serbia," "to find that the nation whose story ho has written no longer exists when his book is completed." Captain Temperley, who was called from a tutorship in history at Cambridge University to play his part in the great war, had for many years made a special study of the problems of the Near East in the light of political history. To this end he had travelled extensively in those troubled and perilous regions. His "History of Serbia," interrupted by his call to the colours, was completed during a period of enforced retirement from the front, and of convalescence, and the book now appears most opportunely when the future of the Serbian people and their existence as an independent nation would seem to hang v in the balance. The history of Serbian freedom stands out as a picture of dark tragedies set in almost unrelieved gloom.. Nor has the end yet been, reached. According to a Serbian manifesto, the effect of. which has been cabled to us this week, Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria are conspiring together for the virtual annihilation of the Serbian race. There are reports of wholesale deportation of Serbian youths and young children to concentration camps in Germany and Galicia; Serbian girls and children have been despatched to Turkish harems in Asia Minor; and the Bulgarians are said to be put-ting the final stroke to this policy of annihilation by deporting whole Serbian families and by removing the priests, schoolmasters, and doctors. A gleam of hope in tliis grim and terriblo enactment is to be found in Captain Temperley's confident declaration that "if the history of Serbia teaches anything, it is that her spiritual forces have always been stronger than her national ones." Disaster, 110 says, has sometimes created and lias always intensified national feeling in Serbia. "So long as the songs of Ivossovo are sung and a Serbian exists in any land to sing them, so long there will always be a Sei - bia."

The intense interest which attaches to the present history of Serbia arises directly from the fact that in that history are to he found many of the main causes which led directly to the war, and also from the fact that in the after-war settlement of Europe the future of Serbia v must play an important part. The Jugo-Slav movement ccntrcs around the Serbs of Serbia; and if ever the great JugoSlav or Southern Slav federation takes permanent shape as one of tho Powers of the New Europe the modern Serbian nation is destined to head that federation. Tho six great divisions of the Jugo-Slav race are the Serbo-Croats ot Croatia, the Serbs of Dalmatia, tlie Skrvxsnefi who inhabit Carniola and part of Styria eaafc of the Tyroloso Alpa.

the Bosnians, the Montenegrins, and the Serbians of Serbia proper. " Slavonic nationalities," says Captain Temperley, " are the despair of the historian. Their story is complex beyond ordinary complexity, and bloody beyond ordinary bloodiness. To write the history oven of that part of the Slavonic races known as the, Southern Slavs or Jugo-Slavs is like threading a labyrinth." These primal difficulties decided Captain Temperley to restrict his researches to the history of the Serbians of Montenegro and of Serbia, contenting himself with tracing the fortunes of that specific race and relating them to the other nationalities of that region. "The history of the Serbian race in Montenegro and Serbia is the most important because these lands are the coro of that rugged stock which has preserved an achieved freedom and thus become a hope and a lesson to the Slavs enslaved under other rulers or imprisoned in other lands."

The history of Serbia furnishes a striking illustration of the working of the principle of freedom and its ultimate triumph over every effort to cripple or enslave it. The most astonishing fact about the whole Serbo-Croatian history," says Captain Temperley, " is that the differences created by nature Ix;tween the Serbo-Croat races, differences increased and made permanent by Austrian and Turkish diplomacy, have never yet succeeded in destroying the feeling of unity of nationality and sympathy between these long dispersed fragments of the Serbian race. Why was the Serbo-Croat race never broken by the barrier of rivers, mountains, seas, by 'Turkish force And Austrian fraud'? The answer is not to be found in geography, it is to be found in history." The Slavs were a potent force ita. the destruction' of Roman civilisation, and in the sixth century they came from the shores of the Black Sea, and, pressing southwards, crossed the Danube and invaded the Balkans. They came not as a nation but as a race, and their advance was irresistible. By the middle of the seventh century their migrations, and settlements were complete, and the Southern Slavs split up into the groups which approximately are those of to-day. At first enlisted as mercenaries in the Byzantine armies, they eventually flung off their dependence on the Eastern Empire and developed governments of their own. Since there was no attempt at the union of the entire Jugo-Slav race, one by one the groups fell under the sway of their conquerors. During the early middle ages the two great Powers in the Balkans were the Bulgarian kingdom and the Byzantine Empire, and for a while these powerful warring elements gave oppoi'tunity for the Serbian State to flourish, but in the ninth century, when Bulgaria, under Czar Simeon, had grown exceedingly formidable, Serbia was invaded, her armies annihilated, the country devastated, and the inhabitants transported. "Only the death of this savage tyrant in 927," writes Captain Temperley, " saved the Serbian race from extermination." The Byzantine Emperors once more becoming powerful, the Serbians made alliance with the Magyars, and laid the foundation of that national greatness in the Middle Ages synchronising with the Nemanyid dynasty, which ruled over Serbia from 1190 to 1321, and attained its greatest power and highest fam®- under Stephen Dushan. All too quickly after Dushan's death came the Turkish conquest, consummated on June 15, 1389, when the two armies met on the fatal "Field of Blackbuds" in the plain of Kossovo and when victory declared itself for the Turks. "To the Serbians," writes Captain Temperley, " Kossovo was much more than what piodden was to the Scots, a defeat in which king and army perished; more even than Hastings was to England, a defeat which enabled a conquering race to impose its will on the conquered. The Normans were civilised kinsmen and men of the same faith as the English. But the Ottomans were alien barbarians, with a lesser civilisation and a religion totally different from thSt of the conquered. Hence the terrible effect which Kossovo produced on the Serbs, in the overthrow of their language, civilisation, nationality, religion, of all that they held dear." The Turkish occupation of Serbia lasted until well into the seventeenth century, when the military might of the Ottoman began to wane and that of Austria to assert itself. At first the Serbian peasants welcomed the Austrians as their deliverers from the Turkish yoke, but " the plumed helmets of the Kaiser's soldiers and the black robes of the Jesuits who came with them soon became as hateful in their sight as the turbans and the muezzins of the infidel," and " the Serbian peasants soon learnt to prefer the capricious cruelty and contemptuous tolerance of the Turks to the systematic orthodoxy and severity of the Austrians." It thus came about that when war broke out again in 1738, the Serbians did little or nothing to help their new masters, the Austrians suffered shameful defeat, and Serbia passed onco more under Turkish control. .

Kara-George was the hero of the first great Serbian insurrection against Turkish rule in 1804-13; whilst Milosh Obrenoviteh was the prime mover in the second insurrection of 1813-15. The mystery of the death of Ivara-George, who is said to have murdered the halfbrother of Milosh, was the beginning of that terrible blood feud/ between Karageorgevitch and Obrenoviteh, which culminated in June, 1903, in the brutal murder of King Alexander and Queen Draga and proved the prelude to tho Serajero tragedy of June 28, 1914. "Of the niue Nemanyid rulers in medieval times, six were deposed and one murdered ; of the ten modern rulers ot Serbia, four were deposed and three murdered." This in itself is sufficient commentary upon the history of the nation. Subsequent events go to show the extent to which Serbia has been treated as a pawn in the diplomacy of the Great Powers and the record, r,s set down in plain black and white by Captain Tempcrley, reflects credit upon not one of them. " There are three requisites for being a Balkan ruler," says Captain Temperloy, " the first is Personality, tho second is Personality, and tho third is Personality." If the Jugoslav Federation be the key to tho solution of the knotty Balkan problem then a New Europe awaits tho appearance of the Personality whose coining will remove one of the most fertile causes of Earoyeaii conflict.

THE MAN-POWER PROBLEM. Tiif, Man-power Bill which has been introduced in the House of Commons by Sir Auckland Geddes, Minister of National Service, is a war measure of the first importance. It is evidence in itself of the need in Great Britain of men, both for the army and for those departments which provide for the army, and it affords evidence also of the Government's determination to secure them • and to have the material with which to crush any false hopes that may at the present time be sustaining the enemy. Of the deepest interest is the explanation furnished by Sir Auckland Geddes of the requirements which the Bill is designed to meet. He tells us that man-power constitutes the central war probleni, and that the most urgent need at present is that of men for the British armyIt is open to us to draw the deduction that, but for the defection of Russia, which gives the enemy the opportunity of transferring anything up to a million and a-half troops from the eastern to the western front, Great Britain might not feel the spur of necessity requiring her to add 450,000 men to her army without delay. But the circumstances which have dictated the introduction of the Man-power Bill emphasise forcibly the immense responsibility that rests upon Great Britain for the maintenance of the solidarity of the Allied front, as well as the special burden laid upon her of nullifying desperate attempts on the part of the enemy, to secure a German peace, through a last great military effort, before the resources of the United States have been marshalled for the fray. It is a magnificent achievement on the part of the Empire that up to the present it has raised seven and a-half million troops. Of this number the United Kingdom has contributed over five and a-half million, and it is apparently the belief of the authorities that it should be quite equal to the task of providing another half-million. It is not the present intention of the Government alter the military age nor to introduce compulsion in Ir&» land, but it has offered the assurance that if the military'needs are not otherwise met it will not hestitate to adopt such measures. If Ireland alone were to furnish all the extra troops at present required she would merely be raising the proportion of her contribution to something like the level of other parts of the Kingdom. Apaft from the army's needs the Imperial Government is looking for a large increase, to the extent of about 550,000 men and women, in the labour available under the direction of its various departments. Sir Auckland Geddes depicts the British army as so far from dwindling that it is " stronger than ever," but he dwells upon the necessity ,of looking ahead and of providing for rearward services. He asserts confidently, moreover, that Germany is staking everything on our failure to solve the man-power problem of which the successful solution meana certain victory. There is certainly no lack of encouraging material in the facts which the Minister of National Service has placed before the nation. Speaking ■at Ply* mouth in November, Sir Auckland Geddes emphasised most impressively the duty that is awaiting discharge at the hands of the nation at this stage of the war. While expressing the belief that "in this war we have entered the straight, and the time lias come to pull ourselves, together for the sprint to victory," he declared that now is the time for effort, and that to his judgment it was physically impossible for the wax to end in 1918 unless our effort this autumn, this winter, and next spring should be unprecedented. He did not attempt to disguise the fact that the call for men was going to be heavy, or that the weight of the strain would come on almost at once. One of the methods of securing the numbers of men required would be, he said, that of combing out men from civil life, wherever they could be spared. The procedure he explained as follows:

To help to make some of them sparable we havo at present a gigantic bit of work actually proceeding. W© are card-indexing the whole of the array at home, and soon we hop© to begin to get back into civil life men who are permanently unfit for active service, but are still of practically full industrial value. Wo are arranging to bring back men whoso return will automatically a fit man for service. The work of indexing the men is going on, the machinery to handle their return is all ready, the wheels are turning slowly. Soon we shall be able to say that the work is woll Tinder way. I hop© to raise tens, nay hundreds, of thousands of men in this way for the armed forces of the Crown. .

Tn connection with the labour requirements of the Government as prescribed in the Man-power Bill, to which some opposition is being offered by unions, it is of interest to note that Sir Auckland Geddes, in his speech,at Plymouth, asked definitely for ten thousand men at once for aerodrome work, Admiralty work, and munitions work, and for an equal number of women for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. A feature of a speech that admitted of the widest and most pointed application to individuals and communities throughout the Empire at this time is found in that portion of it which emphasises the need for the conservation of the nation's energy and its direction into the channels that lead straight to victory. Lord Rhondda, we have learnt by cable, has ordered hundreds of prosecutions of foodhoarders. Food-hoarders and " food-hoo-s" deserve little sympathy at a time when it is being impressed upon every man, woman, and child in the Oldi Country that their first duty is so to order their lives that they may make the least possible demand at all times upon the energy of others. _ Sir Auckland Geddes deplored the activity of great organisations which exist to encourage waste. He described ladies' clothing as the grave of an enormous amount of human energy, and lamented that the work of millions of fingers was absorbed by the production of new hata alone, the effect of Vhich certainly did not contribute to the defeat of the enomy. In a telling passage he declared: "Till now we have done well in the big things; wo have not done well in the small. Wo have, I fear, woefully lacked imagination. We have not seen behind our little extravagances tho waste of human energy. . . .

Let your imagination have free play. Think about everything in terms of labour, and see where and how you can roduc-o your absorption of the energies

of your countrymen." The bearing of the convincing argument regarding waste of energy upon the man-power problem is sufficiently obvious. Sir Auckland Geddes still finds it necessary to exhort his countrymen to realise that it is upon the nation, in its backing of the army, that the solemn duty rests of carrying on the war to the point of victory. "It is the people's war," lie says. "We whom the fates have Hung into positions of responsibility cannot drive the nation. All we can do is to steer tho national efforts, the national will to victory, into proper channels. It is the drive of the people's determination to conquer that will see us through."