THROUGH SERBIAN SPECTACLES

Serbia and Europe, 1914-1920. Edited, with a Preface, by Dr. L. Marcovitch . (Allen and Unwin. 16s. net.)

Dr. Marcovitch has collected a number of articles which appeared during the course of the war in La Serbie, a journal of exile, which though published in Switzerland by men unable to remain in their own country by reason of the force majeure exercised by a conquering enemy, was yet able to preserve a continuous optimism, and at times to strike just such a note of triumph as might have been expected in the publications of victors writing from the capital of a free kingdom which saw its foes at its feet. As the articles are grouped according to subject, and are not necessarily in chronological order, it is difficult to trace the change or development of ideas exactly; yet it is apparent that this process took place. Naturally, in all circumstances, La Serbie presents its case from the natinal and patriotic point of view, and, in the true spirit of Balkan logomachy, deals shrewd verbal blows at intrusive or short-coming neighbours. On one occasion The Times is taken to task for having suggested that Serbia in victory should beware of imperialism; and the rebuke contains the statement that there is „no room for secret combinations“ in that country, although various foreign observers have noted a distinctly opposite tendency. 

People who live in an island must be tolerant of the sensitiveness of races less happily situated in the matter of their neighbours and their landmarks, but the Western public has become weary of statements as to the ethnographic identity of this or that Balkan village – the more so as it has unfortunately become apparent, from the frontiers drawn by the Peace Treaties, that the ethnographical pretensions of defeated countries were as unjustifiably ignored as those of the victors were exaggerated. Consequently, Dr. Marcovitch might well have omitted certain passages in his book dealing with this subject, which, serviceable as a peg upon which to hang an argument at the time, cannot but appear tedious now. Much solid history is to be found in these pages, but the average reader will find some difficulty in keeping track of it amid its ephemeral surroundings, and there is no index.