BOOKS.

THE STRUGGLE FOR SCUTARI.•

THIS is a depressing, although a brilliant, book. Miss Durham is well known as an extraordinarily courageous woman who hesitates at no self-sacrifice or danger in order to help the Albanians. She is devoted to them, and they respond by calling her the " Queen of the mountain men." They regard her as almost omnipotent, and imagine that she has only to speak the word for the Powers to intervene and end all the troubles of Albania. Her authority among the Albanians must be great indeed for her to be able—as she was—to induce them to accept terms which they had sworn never to accept, and for her to be appealed to three times by the Montenegrin leaders to pull them out of the messes in Albania in which their policy bad involved them. All this is • The Struggle for Scutari (Turk, Slay, and Albanian). By M. Edith Durham. Illustrated by Photographs and Sketches by the Author. Loudon: Edward Arnold. Ll4s,

good reading, and Miss Durham has such a power of present- ing scene after scene, in staccato sentences which are extremely vivid for all their carelessness, that the reader feels he is in the very middle of the havoc, intrigue, brutality, and stench of Balkan warfare.

Experience tells us, however, that persons capable of heroic acts of tenderness and consolation are sometimes also capable of unjudicial vehemence in their relations with others. It may be that only the independence of character which is expressed by such vehemence makes the heroism possible. Miss Durham, at all events, is vehement. Her account of the doings of Montenegrins and Servians, and in a lesser degree of Greeks, is an accusation of horrible atrocities when it is not a derisive narrative of incompetence, paltriness, or meanness. She was an eyewitness of much of what she describes, and the present writer was not. It would not be possible, therefore, for him to contradict any single assertion that Miss Durham makes; but it may be useful to point out that, where there may be supposed to be degrees of culpability in the acts of an accused person, the gravity which the charge assumes depends a good deal on the temperament of the accuser. We judge from internal evidence that when Miss Durham has a " down " on any nation she is scarcely able to exercise lenity. We might give several reasons for our conclusion, but two will be enough. Miss Durham makes great play with the remark of a diplomatist that the "ethnographic question" was not taken into consideration in drawing a frontier-line. She then writes on the assumption that the Powers are indifferent to ethno- graphical considerations. But of course the whole difficulty is this very ethnographic question. If it were not for that there would be good hope of the Powers agreeing. We defy anyone to draw ethnographic lines in the Balkans that will satisfy any two States. The greatest experts in Balkan affairs dis- agree hopelessly as to whether particular districts are, say, predominantly Bulger or predominantly Greek. Again, Miss Durham asserts that England gives help only where she expects gain—a libel on the motives of the Foreign Office.

Having confessed our misgivings as to Miss Durham's judicial capacity, we may summarize the more important of her statements. Even if she unconsciously exaggerates, she is certainly as honest in her convictions as she is fearless in her conduct. She never believed in the Young Turk move- ment, and she predicted that the collapse of Turkey was near when the Young Turks, by their policy of general Ottomaniza- tion, united the various tribes and races of the Empire in a sense of an overwhelming common grievance. The Young Turks were guilty of a cardinal error of policy which Abd-ul- Hamid had always been clever enough to avoid. When they were suppressing the Albanian insurrection Miss Durham dis- tributed relief among the refugees who had swarmed across the Montenegrin frontier. The Montenegrin Royal Family paid such marked attentions to her that she suspected a motive. What was she to deduce except that, since she was the trusted friend of the Albanians, the Montenegrin Govern- ment wished to win through her the confidence of the Albanians and use them for a purpose ? That purpose

gradually unfolded itself. The Albanians were to be cat's- paws in the policy of Montenegro against Turkey. The

meanness of the Montenegrins was meanwhile proved by their attempt to charge Miss Durham double price for the medical necessaries which she used. At length the Albanians reached the conclusion which she had already come to by her own perception. The Montenegrins had promised to stand by the Albanians till they got European guarantees that the Turkish promises would be fulfilled. The Montenegrins, however,

threw over their protegcls before any guarantees had been obtained. Miss Durham was furiously indignant, but when

the Montenegrins offered the Albanians rifles and ammunition as a substitute she counselled the acceptance of them. The alternative, as she pointed out, was for the Albanians to return to their homes not only without guarantees but without arms.

At first Miss Durham bad no reason to doubt the sincerity of the horror which the Montenegrins had expressed at Turkish atrocities in Albania, but she was gradually dis- illusioned. Whatever turn events took, the truth apparently never came out of Montenegro. She accuses Prince Danilo of

having made a public statement in the Morning Post to the effect that the Montenegrin Government had never aided the Albanian insurrection and was not preparing for war with

Turkey, when in fact "his stout cousin, Yanko, was actively engaged in supplying arms, keeping up the revolt, and pre- paring war." The statement was "so impudent as to border on the sublime."

When the Balkan War came later the Montenegrins com- mitted the very horrors which they had previously denounced. The Albanians, on the other hand, all proved themselves angels in comparison (as we understand Miss Durham) with the pitiless fiends all round them. We must say that we find it difficult to believe that the Albanians have a vastly higher standard than their neighbours, as there does not seem to be any sufficient reason why they should. The charge of mutilation is brought against the Montenegrins ,again and

again. We will quote only a few instances :- "Professor Kovachevitch, teacher of French and German at the Gymnasium at Podgoritza, was anxious that I should employ him as assistant in any corresponding work I might do. Being lame, he was not liable for active service. Soon,' said he, 'you will see the noses come in. We shall not leave many a Turk with a nose.' 'If you do any such winery,' said I, 'you will rightly lose all European sympathy.' He was very angry. 'It is our old national custom,' he declared; 'how can a soldier prove his heroism to his commander if he does not bring in noses ? Of course we shall cut noses ; we always have."

A little later Miss Durham saw the abomination for herself in a captured Turkish hospital:— " The Turkish doctor, furious, demanded in broken German proper treatment for his wounded, and refused to help, saying he was not now responsible. I made a bonfire, and worked a long time burning dirty dressings and carrying out the blood-cans. He then saw I really wanted to help, and put on some orderlies to work also. The engineer brought bread and water, and we made some sort of order in the place. I had till then been too busy to investigate the actual wounded. The doctor now pointed out eight men with bandages round their faces, close and flat. There was no nose or lip. He imitated slicing. 'Look ! Montenegrin work !' Eight men, not otherwise wounded, had been deliberately caught and mutilated. Kovachevitch's words had come true. The doctor wished me to tell Europe. I was in a painful position. When acting as correspondent, I had undertaken to reveal no secrets detrimental to Montenegro, and had cheerfully promised, believing this to mean the position of troops, guns, &c. But to hide such foul deeds was another thing. I worked the whole day, sweeping, and burning, and wrestling with the disgusting problem of the mutilated men. At night I returned to Podgoritza, and, having decided that honesty is the best policy,' I found Jovitche- vitch, the late Montenegrin Consul in Scutari, and told him in strong terms what I had seen and what I thought of it. I would not report it this time, but there must not be any more. The result was that the correspondents, a mixed squad of whom were collected at Podgoritza, were not allowed to go forward till the mutilated men were hidden."

Again

" Some warm partisans of Montenegro have declared that they do not see anything very horrible in the mutilation of dead bodies, and if the dead alone had been mutilated, we might dismiss it as the dirty trick of a barbarous people; but the men's own account was that they mutilated the wounded before giving them a final bayonet prod. After the war I had this corroborated by a young Moslem from Playa, who came down to Scutari to beg surgical help. He told that he and some dozen comrades were all shot down in fair fight. As they lay bleeding on the field the Montenegrins came round and bayoneted the lot, who all succumbed but himself. He fainted. Later he came to, tried to rise, and by so doing, poor wretch, drew the attention of a Montenegrin officer and some men. They fell on him, wounded and helpless, hacked off his nose and upper lip, threw him down, and gave him another bayonet stab, and left him. Such is the superb vitality of these people, that in the night he revived and managed to crawl to shelter and friends, and recovered. Two surgeons examined him in my presence at Scutari. The scars and the bayonet stabs attested the truth of his story. Great force bad been used when mutilating. The nasal bone was hacked right through between the eyes, and the whole of the upper lip sliced away to the corners of the mouth."

The Servians are represented as being as brutal as the Monte- negrins. Montenegrins seem to have told Miss Durham so frankly that the extermination of enemies was a natural and

proper policy that we are almost surprised that other Monte- negrins should have been at pains to affect indignation.

What does Miss Durham want for Albania? When she wrote she apparently believed that autonomy and the appointment of a Prince would bring peace and content- ment. Now Albania is independent and is ruled over by a Prince. We know the results. We read of them day by day in the newspapers. It is a sad fact that it is very much easier at any given moment to castigate the Powers for what they have done in the Balkans than to say what

they could have done that would have been conspicuously better.