the Balkans began with blood, and we all believed it must finish with
blood. In our bloody conflict with the Turks we, the Christians, lost
three kings--one of them was King Constantine of Byzantium, and two were
the Serbian kings, Vukashin and Lazare--during a period of seventeen
years. As well as Serbia and Greece, Roumania also offered great
resistance to the Turks. It is a historic fact, that after the decisive
Balkan battle on the field of Kossovo, the Roumanians also fought
against the Turks. In the battle of Rovina between the Turks and
Roumanians, our epic Serbian hero, Marko Kralevich, the last king of
Macedonia, called Marko of Prilep, also participated, and was killed
there. He was the third Serbian king killed in the defence of Christian
freedom in the Balkans. That was the time when the Albanians, too,
showed their virtues more than ever before. Under Skenderbeg, the
prince from Croya, they resisted the Mussulmans very bravely. But they
fell into slavery in the same way as Serbia, Greece, Roumania and
Croatia. The only country in the Balkans which surrendered without any
resistance was Bulgaria. The only country in the Balkans that never was
conquered by the Turks was Montenegro. Poor Montenegro, a skeleton of
rocky mountains, has shown during five hundred years more heroic beauty
and idealistic enthusiasm than many great empires in Asiatic and
European history, which fought their selfish battles for power and
comfort, and have been respected and adored merely because of their
numbers and dimensions.

Now, in the year of our Lord, 1912, two Serbian kingdoms, Serbia and
Montenegro, with two other Christian kingdoms, Greece and Bulgaria,
declared war on the Turks. The Roumanians were with their sympathies on
the side of the Christian allies. The Albanians, degenerate and
disorganised, very different from Skenderbeg's contemporaries, standing
now under the influence of Austria, were pro-Turks and against the
Christian warriors.

Shall I remind you of the results? I suppose the surprising fact is
fresh in your memories even now that only two months after the Balkan
war had been declared the delegates of the belligerents for peace stayed
in Hyde Park Hotel in London. Turkey lost and the Christians won.

The Serbian troops crossed the frontier and fighting proceeded in three
different directions, towards Skoplje and Prilep, towards Adrianople
and towards Scutari. A foreigner never can realise what a Serbian
so