wild homelessness of the
mountains, on the other side park-like country, model towns, and broad,
fruitful plains. Hard-bitten, bookless Serbs, and softened bookish
Croats. As a responsibility of the peace Serbia has taken over large
tracts of smitten Austria. Looking at the new territory, one might
reckon it a rich spoil of war. But comparing Serbia as she is with
this ex-Austria, one cannot but be struck with the disparity between
them.

Croats and Slovenes are Slav by race, but strongly Austrian by
education. They were glad to come into the new confederation and
escape some of the penalties of defeated Austria. But once they were
definitely absorbed into the new State they did not feel so
comfortable. The vanity and quarrelsomeness of the Slav soon began to
speak. They hated Austria. But modern Austrian civilization was a
comfortable and well-oiled machine. The Slavs derived enormous
material benefits from their citizenship of the Austrian empire. Here
despite all the feuds was a well-kept home of nations.

Left to themselves the Croats would not have made a better State than
the Slavs usually make. But it is easy for them to imagine that the
good schools, good trains and railway service, and good municipal
administration, and the rest, were due to their own genius and not to
that of the German.

Between Serbia and the new territories stands Belgrade, the capital of
the whole. It is strikingly situated on the cliffs above the winding
Save which glimmers like silver in the evening. From the
shell-splintered fortress one looks forth over the vast fruitful plain
that was southernmost Austria. Here the Kaiser had a seat made for
himself in 1915 that he might look homeward in the evening. Thus he
turned his back on the Balkans and his scheme of the world.

Belgrade below the fortress wall is extensive but poor. Its tired main
street stretches out a long way with flabby houses on each side of its
cobbled wildness. There are as yet no buildings corresponding to the
dignity of a great capital. The old Parliament House is a little place
like a town-school, the temporary one is a converted whitewashed
barracks; the Cathedral is a parish church on a site suitable for a
mighty edifice; the Moscow Hotel looks like a seaside boarding
establishment; the Franco-Serbian Bank is housed in a place which might
pass for an old clothes warehouse in Whitechapel. There is a pleasant
little white stone Post-office. B