Books: Heaven and Earth in the Balkans

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At Kossovo Author West heard that song which Serbian boys learn as soon as they can speak:

There flies a grey bird, a falcon,

From Jerusalem the holy,

And in his beak he bears a swallow. . . . The grey falcon comes to Tsar Lazar at Kossovo and says:

Tsar Lazar, of honourable stock,

Of what kind will you have your kingdom?

Do you want a heavenly kingdom?

Do you want an earthly kingdom? If you want an earthly kingdom, says the grey falcon, saddle your horses and drive out the Turks. If you want a heavenly kingdom, build a church at Kossovo,

For all your soldiers shall be destroyed,

And you, prince . . . with them. . . . Lazar chose a heavenly kingdom since

An earthly kingdom lasts only a little time,

But a heavenly kingdom will last for eternity and its centuries. . . . Then the Turks overwhelmed Lazar, And the Tsar Lazar was destroyed, And his army was destroyed with him, Of seven and seventy thousand soldiers. All was holy and honourable And the goodness of God was fulfilled. The song annoyed Novelist West. Her first remark was: "So that was what happened, Lazar was a member of the Peace Pledge Union." To herself she said: "Lazar was wrong, he saved his soul and there followed five hundred years when no man on these plains, nor anywhere else in Europe for hundreds of miles in any direction, was allowed to keep his soul. He should have chosen damnation for their sake."

Later Author West tells how from be leaguered England she watched the Yugoslavs struggle against themselves to save their soul and meet certain defeat at the hands of the Nazis. "In this hour the Yugoslavs often repeated the poem of Tsar Lazar and the grey falcon. . . . 'All was holy, all was honourable,' they quoted, looking down from the tall tower of prescience on the field of their coming fate, 'and the goodness of God was fulfilled.' " Then she was sure that it was a poem of life, not of death.

She was surer when in Marseille the conquered French, hearing of Yugoslavia's defiance, gathered the flowers in their gardens and took them down to the Cannebiere. The police guessed what was up, hustled them off the street. But they hopped on the streetcars. The motormen drove very slowly so that the people were able to heap their flowers on the spot where Alexander of Yugoslavia was murdered.