My lot had been cast with the Serbian forces and, by great good fortune, I was able to join the First Army as it poured through the defiles of the Kara Dagh into the region called “Old Servia.” At Belgrade the talk had been of a war of liberation from economic thraldom, of a conflict between the Crescent and the Cross; with the armies it was otherwise. No thought of policy or secret treaties, or even of religion, confused the minds of Servia’s peasant soldiers; they marched like men called to fulfil their country’s destiny, singing the story of their race, making the mountains echo with their martial songs. There was no need to understand their language to catch the meaning of these singers; they sang of sorrow and tribulation, of centuries of helplessness in oppression, but the note of defiance was never absent; defeat was admitted but never despair. Something unconquerable was in their hearts, stirring their blood and nerving every muscle--the spirit of revenge. Bacon, in his famous essay, says: “The most tolerable sort of revenge is for those wrongs which there is no law to remedy.” The Serbs had five centuries of wrongs to avenge, and the Great Powers had produced no law as a remedy, except the law of force; by force these peasants, in their turn, meant to obtain “a kind of wild justice.” For them, the plains of Kossovo were sacred; there had been made the last heroic stand against a cruel and implacable foe; there had occurred the dreadful rout, whose few survivors told the tale, at first in frightened whispers, then in songs--long, wailing songs, like dirges. Songs are the chronicles of Slavonic races, they pass into the nation’s ritual and permeate its life. Succeeding generations sang these songs of Kossovo, and so the legend grew, and spread to all the Balkan lands; each humble home, even in far Rumania, had heard of Lazar, a Tsar who led his people and gave his life up for them on a battlefield known as “the Field of Blackbirds.” When princes perish thus, servility conspires with pity to make them martyrs. The dead Tsar led his people still, and far more potently in death than life; his legendary form, looming gigantic through the mists of time, beckoned them, irresistibly, to blood-soaked fields, where, once again, the Turks and Serbs would meet in mortal strife.