One hundred years ago

Today I rode a skewbald mare from a place that once lay in Yugoslavia across the chalk hills of southern England. I could have ridden from her birthplace to Sarajevo in a couple of weeks, as a man might have done a hundred years ago. Plenty to think about. 

I lived almost a decade in Transylvania, just over the Danube and the Carpathian mountains from the Balkans, and practically everything I experienced was in some way moulded by the First World War. The nation in which I lived was formed from the remnants of Austro-Hungary. A national group received their own nation, a minority became foreigners on land once theirs. One deadly war led to the genocide and destruction of a second, followed by four decades of state socialist plague. Fascists murdered on a racial basis, communists upon social status. Even as I loved the peculiar, exotic mixture of hospitality, bucolic villages, monasteries, mountains and forests that epitomise Romania, I mourned the grievous losses of two world wars, pogroms, prisons, labour camps and socialist construction programmes. I knew enough history to begin to understand, and too much to acquiesce to local opinion. 

Riding in the mountains we crossed trenches dug during both world wars, facing east and west. We rode along old military roads. We discovered shell craters, occasional monuments, and once a piece of discarded ordnance. 

A couple of bullets, the petulance of a few arrogant leaders and the jingoism of the masses. All set in motion by one man who thought he was striking a blow for freedom. 

What is the truth? If Austro-Hungary hadn't existed then it would have needed to be created? Or an empire enslaving people thirsting for freedom? 

I look upon Austro-Hungary as a necessary transitional phase that should not have ended so abruptly been severed so arbitrarily. 

Austro-Hungary brought order to Middle Europe. Clumsy, bureaucratic, centralised order perhaps. But order was needed in the wake of Ottoman retreat. Bosnia just didn't want the kind of order that Austria brought. And empires didn't govern with a light touch in those days. 

Riding through the woods I thought of how very much has been lost thanks to those shots. I thought of what those events mean to different people: freedom to some Serbs, a war that cost millions of lives to many more people. To a few of us, most of what went wrong between 1914 and 1989, and a fair amount of what has gone wrong in the Balkans since. It's not as if Princip meant all that to happen. He was a youth of his time, in a poor country that hadn't been free for centuries. Is it a surprise that a young Slav pointed a gun at an Austrian official? No. But with power comes responsibility, and those with it - Europe's leaders - for the most part failed. 

Even my horse is a metaphor for Balkan confusion. Or confusion in Western minds, at least, because people out there have their individual and collective certainties. A Slovenian horse of Austrian breed, bred by a citizen of former Yugoslavia in a place that has - almost within living memory - been Ottoman, Austrian, Yugoslav and Slovene. 

I thought of so much that had been lost. And I wondered what can be built. Something better needs to be built. But what does better mean? A century on we still need to think that one through. 

 

 

Comments

[Shirley]

Thanks for the reminder that WW1 started 100 years ago. One can only hope that everyone learned a lesson from all the wars in the 20th century, but sadly, I am sure they have not.

[White Horse Pilgrim]

I'm grateful that we haven't sleep-walked into a conflict over the Ukraine, through the European Union has appeared woefully naive at times. As for the Middle East, the West almost repeated the mistakes in made in the 1980s arming the Taliban's predecessors. So maybe our leaders aren't totally blind? Syria reminds me of the Spanish Civil War where, awkward as it might be to admit this, Franco might just have been a better victor than Soviet-sponsored Republicans. For Franco read Assad, for the USSR read Islamic extremists. As for Iraq, we'd better read medieval history, the situation looks worryingly similar to the wars of religious reformation that our distant ancestors experienced. Maybe enough lessons have been learned that our leaders haven't rushed in headlong?