UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
The Road
By JOHN POOLS (Lincoln College, Oxford) T was our first day in Yugoslavia. The road was execrable— hardly noticeable, in fact, were it not for the little heaps of stones piled along it at intervals for future distribution to prove that at any rate it was paved with good intentions. Soon began a tiresome and repetitive process known as: " Better to stop and see what's wrong with the car," an old Morris Cowley which had just come of age. We stopped, stepped out with some rancour, and looked around. Behind us was a war- time blockhouse ; below, a ruined castle, lying smug and serene in the bend of a river, in the grey wisdom of age, the last of the day's sun falling upon it ; a little way off, pointing some undefined moral on our entrance to the country, a former country-house, built before the blockhouse but after the castle, following its predecessor into ruin. Around them were closing the hills, of marked beauty, swept with a vast surge of trees into which the falling evening was being quickly gathered.
As it fell, the outlines of the buildings became obscured and merged together in the night, and it was as if each century, as it darkened, sank into the others. It seemed, as we stood there, that the differences between each age became less acute than their contemporaries, could we have summoned them, would have admitted. It was a trite sentiment, of course. De Tocque- ville had put it slightly pompously when writing of the French Revolution: " One generation may anathematise the preceding genera- tion, but it is easier for it to condemn than to avoid resembling it."
So it was with the Yugoslav Revolution, or so it appeared to us as we travelled through the country. Time and again one was struck, not only by the extent of a change, but by the extent of a comparison. If there was much which was different, there was a lot which in spite of it remained the same. If the revolu- tion was a complete reversal of the existing order, it was some- times simply a reversal to an older order still.
One says that, but not with any wish to underrate the change being superimposed on the country by the new regime, an anxious loyalty to which is expressed by the slogans which have spread like a rash across mountain and village as outward signs of inward grace. Indeed, when in a remote part of Bosnia where they were still wearing the (later prohibited) veil, one encounters a banner slogan strung across the street entitled " Long Live the Central Women's Committee of The Communist Party of Bosnia and Herzogovina in their struggle for National Liberation and a Ten-hour Day," it is clear that something is afoot.
Though a change may be revolutionary. the disturbance it causes is always much the same. The cynic might say that in the Balkans a disturbance cannot be revolutionary simply because they are always disturbed. But if this is so, it has bred in its inhabitants, not so much cynicism as a strange spirit of resigna- tion—a resignation persistent, repeated, unchanging through the ages ; resignation such as that of the woman we talked to in Senj, one of whose sons fought with the Chetniks, one with the Partisans and one with the Italians. Was it not a fatalism, perhaps similar to hers, which had once led to that strange other- worldliness of the heretical Bogomils. driven in their puritanism from Dalmatia into the wilderness and karst land of Bosnia to meditate amongst its bare limestone on the iniquity of material pleasures? Was it not possible that through the monotonous vicissitudes of the history of these lands. whose sufferings were once thus described by Claudian, there ran some continuity, even if it was only that continuity of change and destruction which since his time has bred the ?esignation of the eternal peasant: "Jam nulli flebile damnum, Sed cursus sollenmis eral. campusque prod Expositus : sensumque malis detraxerat usus." To what extent, one repeated, as one motored along the new road, white and straight in the sun, between Zagreb and Belgrade. has the new revolution entered into the lives, and if the lives the mentality, of these peasants? To what extent do they receive it as just one more incursion? To them the revolution came with sudden power, flinging its new road across the plain, foster- ing and furthering, by an ingenious system of tolls and taxation, its collective farms. To them it must have come as a tidal wave, engulfing, for good or ill, their lives and lands. Yet to the visitor it appeared to have struck hardly a ripple over the paradoxical permanence of the soil or the precariousness of the living dragged from it.
Of this contrast between the immobility of the peasant and the impress, superimposed from above, of the revolution, the new road along which we were travelling seemed of itself a symbol. The fame of this road had permeated to the Italian policeman in Trieste, who had described it to us as a molt° bella strada. It has its dangers, for those who drive along it by night are apt to find stray things in the middle—an unlighted steamroller perhaps that has been left there in the course of operations, or a collapsed cart, its back-axle gone, its load of pumpkins distributed across the ntolto bella strada in random heaps, on the largest of which their owner is sitting in unaffected patience smoking a cigarette. But there is no denying that it is a good road.
It is Tito's great achievement. Something had to be built.
So like other rulers he built a road. It could be built• with enthusiasm where other projects would have needed more expen- sive or unobtainable materials. Now it is advertised in agencies. and made, with its workers and student camps, a symbol of Socialism and the new State. Yet it remains for the moment one of the world's best white elephants. Apart from Embassy officials and high-ranking Communists, no one uses it for motor- ing, for no one else has a car. For us it was a relief to reach its smooth surface. For the peasants, whether it was a molto bella or molto brutta strada, it was just the same. There had been some disturbance in their daily lives when it was built, but in the upshot it was for them just another road.
They move with a graceful if alarming agility as the car approaches them, the men in capes and black felt hats, the women in scarves and billowing dresses, to run their cattle from the road with waving sticks and shrieks and flaunting skirts. As one passes they turn and watch the dust subside, the appari- tion vanish in the distance. Then they drive their cattle back and continue their journey—a journey which is never-ending, a journey which is always the same. They are unperturbed, un- affected in appearance, by the changes around ; eternally peasant.
No, it is not surprising that Tito in a bravura passage described them as " the most stable foundation of the Yugoslav State." Was it true that his new regime was just another ripple over the surface of their lives, advancing and receding? Or was it a tidal wave? Or both? We turned and looked at them a ffain as we passed. They smiled, and flung us some grapes. e centuries which had not killed their generosity had deadened their sorrow, inured them to change. It seethed an appiopriate moment to repeat those words of Claudian. But Stephen, the car, forestalled us. A good road was no guarantee of safety. His progress was now like that of a Bren gun in training. He stopped, started and stopped again. We got out. But not with the rancour of that first occasion.
"Sensumque mans detraxerat usus."
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