Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle. By AL Edith Durham. (G.
Allen and Unwin. 16s. net.)—" What is Truth ? asked jesting Pilate, and stayed not for an answer." Pilate was doubt- less accustomed to an atmosphere like that of the Balkans, where Truth never cornea out of her well. Miss Durham has set down in this lively volume her impressions of what she saw and heard in the Balkans from 1900 to 1914. How much of what she was tokl was true we do not know. Her point of view " course, that of the Albanian. She detests the Slays, and especi- ally the Serbs and Montenegrins, and she has no liking for the Greeks. In the Balkans these racial feuds seem to be infectious and to attack even the stray visitor, so that English people who go there become pro.Bulgars, Serbophiks, Philhellenes, and so on, and are no more to be trusted as witnesses than the natives. Miss Durham says many hard things about the Serbs. She is firmly convinced not merely that the Archduke was " removed " in June, 1914, by a Serbian p]ot, but that Serbia wanted war. She quotes a Montenegrin official as saying that the Montenegrins delivered up the reputedly impregnable fortress of Lovtchen above Cattaro to the .Austrians, whom they welcomed "even with enthusiasm." Miss Durham may be right about these and other controversial matters, but her book should be read with caution.
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