Round About the Carpathians Part 2

The insurrection in Bulgaria had just broken out when I was in Servia: I cannot say I heard it much talked of; we, none of us, knew then the significance of the movement. But great uneasiness was felt in reference to the wide spread of certain communistic doctrines. A disturbance was stated to have taken place a few days before at Negotin. The foreign owners of property expressed themselves very seriously alarmed about the communistic propagandists who were going round the country. No one seemed certain as to the course events would take.

However--to resume my own simple narrative--after dining in the little village aforesaid, we set our faces again towards Maidenpek, returning by another route, which afforded us some very romantic scenery. I finished the difficulty about the horse by purchasing the one I had ridden that day. He was smaller than I liked, but he had proved himself strong and sure footed. I cannot say he was a beauty, but what can one expect for seventeen ducats--about eight pounds English?

The second day of our stay at Maidenpek was princ.i.p.ally devoted to inspecting some copper mines belonging to an English company. They appeared to be doing pretty well. We next arranged to ride over to Kucainia, a place some twenty-five miles off. It was settled that we were to start at seven o'clock in the morning, but a dense white fog obliterated the outer world--we might have been on the verge of Nowhere.

It was more than two hours before the fog lifted sufficiently to enable us to proceed. We went on our way some three miles when a drenching shower came on, and we took shelter in the cavernous interior of an enormous, half-ruined oak-tree. Natural decay and the pickaxes of the woodman seeking fuel for his camp-fire had hollowed out a comfortable retreat from the storm. Surrounding the tree was a bed of wild strawberries, which helped to beguile the time. When at length the clouds cleared away, we resumed our saddles with dry jackets. But, as it turned out, the half-hour we spent under the tree lost us the chance of some fun.

I must remark that our road lay the whole way through a majestic forest.

We were actually on the highroad to Belgrade, yet in many places it was nothing more than a gra.s.s-drive with trees on either side. Looking some way ahead when we found ourselves on a track of this kind, we observed in the distance two men on horseback standing their horses in the middle of the road, apparently waiting for some one to pa.s.s. One of the fellows, armed with the usual long Turkish gun, seeing our approach, came forward as if to meet us. We instinctively looked to our revolvers, but as he came up we saw that the stranger on the black horse (he must have been _once_ a splendid roadster) had no sinister intentions upon us. It turned out that he was the pope from a neighbouring village. He was in a great state of excitement, but shook hands with us all round before uttering a word. He then told us that the diligence from Belgrade had been stopped only half an hour ago by five brigands at the bottom of the very hill we had just pa.s.sed. The booty was by no means insignificant. The robbers had made off with 7000 florins in gold; but what seemed rather significant was the statement that though the driver and the conductor of the diligence were both well armed, they had offered but little or no resistance. They declared they were overpowered by numbers. If there had been a shot fired we certainly must have heard it.

Later we ascertained that the money belonged to the copper-mining company at Maidenpek; the loss was not theirs, however, as the Government would have to reimburse it. It was just like our ill-luck to wait out of the shower; but for that delay we should have come in for the affray. I have my doubts as to whether our a.s.sistance would have been particularly welcome to the driver of the diligence. Robbery on the highroad is a capital offence in Servia.[5]

Arriving at the next village, we found the whole place in a hubbub and commotion. The men were arming and collecting horses. We went straight to the post-office to hear the rights of the story; the facts were mainly as I have related them. The excitement appeared to increase as the crowd flocked in from the fields. Horses were being saddled, powder served out, and arrangements made for a systematic battue of the robbers. After amusing ourselves by watching the warlike preparations, we rode on to Kucainia.

We were hospitably received by a fellow-countryman who is working the mines there. We did justice to his capital dinner, and told our robber story, which our host capped with the rumours of a communistic rising down south.

After a short stay at Kucainia, we made arrangements for returning over the Danube; but this time we proposed to strike the river at Belo-breska, higher up than Milanovacz. We had dropped our other friend, so H---- and I hired a light cart for the thirty miles to Belo-breska, my new horse meanwhile being tied on behind, and so we jogged along. The road was good, but, like the good people in Thackeray's novels, totally uninteresting. We drove continually through fields of maize--I say _through_ the fields, for there was no hedge or fence anywhere. The soil appeared to be splendidly fertile and well cultivated.

Arrived at Belo-breska, our object was to get across the Danube, and luckily we found a large flat-bottomed boat used for cattle. The owner demanded a ducat (about nine shillings) for taking us across. I thought it a monstrous charge, but the fellow had us in his power. I do not think the Servians are much liked by those who have to do business with them. From all I heard, Canning's lines about the sharp practice of some nearer neighbours would apply very well to the Servians:--

"In matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch Is giving too little, and asking too much."

No sooner had we landed on the Hungarian side of the river than up came a customhouse official, who informed me that I must pay duty for my horse. Of course, as a law-respecting Briton, I was ready enough to comply; but the fellow could not tell me what the charge was, saying his chief was absent, and might not be back for some hours.

This was exasperating to the last degree; the more so that it seemed so stupid that the man left in charge could not consult a tariff of taxes, or elicit from the villagers some information. He was stolidly obstinate, and refused to let my horse go at any price, though I offered him what H---- and I both thought a reasonable number of florins for the horse-duty. In less than ten minutes I had worked myself into a rage--a foolish thing to do with the thermometer at 96 in the shade; but H---- was provokingly calm, which irritated me still more. There is an old French verse which, rendered into English, says--

"Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived; But what torments of pain you endured From evils that never arrived!"

Now, a little patience would have saved me a useless ebullition of temper. While I was still at white-heat up came the head official; removing the cigar from his lips with Oriental dignity and deliberation, he calmly answered my question, and having paid the money we went our way.

Our design was now to get to Weisskirchen, and sleep there, that place being the only decent quarters within reach. Our road was over the mountains--a lonely pa.s.s of ill repute. Several persons had been stopped and robbed in these parts quite recently. The Government had formerly a small guardhouse at the top of the pa.s.s; but it has been deserted since 1867, when the district ceased to be maintained as the Military Frontier. Since that time crime has been very much on the increase all along the border-country. The lawlessness that is rampant at the extremities of the kingdom shows a weakness in the Central Government which is very reprehensible. But for this laxity on the borders, the recent Szeckler conspiracy for making a raid on the Russian railway could never have been projected.

We arrived all right at Weisskirchen, which was good-luck considering the chances of an upset in the darkness, for night had overtaken us long before our drive was half over. Thoroughly tired, we were glad enough to draw up in the innyard, the same I had visited some weeks before; but great was our disgust at being told that there was not a bed to be had--every room was taken. We drove on to inn No. 2, where they had beds but no supper. We were nearly starving, for we had had nothing to eat since the morning, so back we had to go to No. 1 to procure supper. When this important meal was finished, we had to make the return journey once more. The streets were perfectly dark, and it was an affair of no small difficulty to find our way. It happened to me that I stepped into something soft and b.u.mpy. I could not conceive what it was. I made a long step forward, thinking to clear the obstacle, but I only stumbled into another soft and b.u.mpy thing. Was it a flock of sheep lying packed together? The skins of the sheep were there, it is true, but as covering for the forms of prostrate Wallacks. A lot of these fellows, wrapped in their cloaks, were sleeping huddled together at the side of the street.

I found afterwards that this is a common practice with these people. The wonderful _bunda_ is a cloak by day and a house by night.

[Footnote 4: Letters and Works, edited by Lord Wharncliffe, 1837, p.

351, 359.]

[Footnote 5: The robbers were subsequently taken and executed.]

CHAPTER IV.

Variety of races in Hungary--Wallacks or Roumains--Statistics--Savage outbreak of the Wallacks in former years--Panslavic ideas--Roumanians and their origin--Priests of the Greek Church--Destruction of forests--Spirit of Communism--Incendiary fires.

The mixture of races in Hungary is a puzzle to any outsider. There is the original substratum of Slavs, overlaid by Szeklers, Magyars, German immigrants, Wallacks, Rusniacks, Jews, and gipsies. An old German writer has quaintly described the characteristics of these various peoples in the following manner:--

"To the great national kitchen the Magyar contributes bread, meat, and wine; the Rusniack and Wallack, salt from the salt pits of Marmaros; the Slavonian, bacon, for Slavonia furnishes the greatest number of fattened pigs; the German gives potatoes and vegetables; the Italian, rice; the Slovack, milk, cheese, and b.u.t.ter, besides table-linen, kitchen utensils, and crockery ware; the Jew supplies the Hungarian with money; and the gipsy furnishes the entertainment with music."

Coming to hard facts, the latest statistics of M. Keleti give 15,417,327 as the total population of Hungary. Of these 2,470,000 are Wallacks, who since the nationality fever has set in desire to be called Roumains; and if you say Roman at once, they will be still better pleased. They were in old time the overflow of Wallachia, now forming part of the Roumanian Princ.i.p.ality. The first historical irruption of the Wallacks was about the end of the fourteenth century, when they became a terrible pest to the German settlers in Transylvania, dreaded by them as much as Turk or Tartar. They burned and pillaged the lands and villages of the peaceful dwellers in the Saxon settlement; but at length they had become so numerous that the law took cognisance of their existence and reduced them to a state of serfdom, from which they were not relieved till 1848.

A subject race has always its wrongs, and there is no doubt the haughty Magyar n.o.bles treated the Wallacks with great harshness and indignity.

It was the old story--good masters were kind to their serfs, but those less fortunate had a bad time of it, what with forced labour and other burdens. "A lord is a lord even in h.e.l.l" is the saying of the peasants.

Mr Paget[6] tells the story of an old countess he met in Transylvania, who used to lament that "times were sadly changed, peasants were no longer so respectful as they used to be; she could remember walking to church on the backs of the peasants, who knelt down in the mud to allow her to pa.s.s over them without soiling her shoes. She could also remember, though less partial to the recollection, a rising of the peasantry, when nothing but the kindness with which her mother had generally treated them saved her from the cruel death which many of her neighbours met with."

The rising here mentioned took place in 1784, when two Wallacks named Hora and Kloska were the leaders of a terrible onslaught upon the Magyar n.o.bles. The Vienna Government was accused on this occasion of being very tardy in sending troops to quell the insurrection. It was the time when the unpopular reforms of Joseph II. were so ill received by the Magyars, and no good feeling subsisted between Hungary and the Central Government.

But the most frightful outbreak of the Wallacks was, as we all know, within living memory. You can hear from the lips of witnesses descriptions of horrors committed not thirty years ago in Transylvania.

Entire villages were destroyed, whole families slaughtered, down to the new-born infant.

The arms of the Wallacks were supplied by Austria, for whom they were acting as a sort of militia at the time of Hungary's war of independence. The Vienna Government has been very fond of playing off the Wallacks and the Slavs against the Magyars: they have kept the pot always simmering; if some fine day it boils over, they will have the fat in the fire.

Of course in Southern Hungary one hears enough about the Panslavic movement, and Panslavic ideas. "The idea of Panslavism had a purely literary origin," observes Sir Gardiner Wilkinson in his book on Dalmatia. "It was started by Kolla, a Protestant clergyman of the Slavonic congregation at Pesth, who wished to establish a national literature by circulating all works written in the various Slavonic dialects.... The idea of an intellectual union of all these nations naturally led to that of a political one; and the Slavonians seeing that their numbers amounted to about one-third of the whole population of Europe, and occupied more than half its territory, began to be sensible that they might claim for themselves a position to which they had not hitherto aspired."

But the Wallacks, or, as we will now call them, Roumains, are not Slavs at all; they are utterly distinct in race, though they are co-religionists with the Southern Slavs. "The Roumanians," says Mr Freeman,[7] "speak neither Greek nor Turkish, neither Slave nor Skipetar, but a dialect of Latin, a tongue akin not to any of their neighbours, but to the tongues of Gaul, Italy, and Spain." He is inclined to think these so-called Dacians are the surviving representatives of the great Thracian race.

Who they were is, after all, not so important a question as what they are, these two millions and a half of Roumains in Hungary. To put the statistical figures in another way, Mr. b.o.n.e.r,[8] writing in 1865, calculates that the Roumains, naturalised in Southern Hungary, number 596 out of every 1000 souls in Transylvania. The fecundity of the race is remarkable, they threaten to overwhelm the Saxons, whose numbers, on the other hand, are seriously on the decrease. They are also supplanting the Magyars in _Southern_ Hungary.

I have myself seen villages which I was told had been exclusively Magyar, but which are now as exclusively Roumain. It is even possible to find churches where the service conducted in the Magyar tongue has ceased to be understood by the congregation.

To meet a Roumain possessed even of the first rudiments of education is an exception to the rule: even their priests are deplorably ignorant; but when we find them in receipt of such a miserable stipend as 100 florins, indeed in some cases 30 florins a-year, it speaks for itself that they belong to the poorest cla.s.s. The Wallacks lead their lives outside the pale of civilisation; they are without the wants and desires of a settled life. Very naturally the manumission of the serfs in 1848 found them utterly unprepared for their political freedom. Neither by nature or by tradition are they law-respecting; in fact, they are very much the reverse.

The Roumain is a Communist pure and simple; the uneducated among them know no other political creed. It is not that of the advanced school of Communism, which deals with social theories, but a simple consistent belief that, as they themselves express it, "what G.o.d makes grow belongs to one and all alike." In this spirit he helps himself to the fruit in his neighbour's garden when too lazy to cultivate the ground for himself.

This child of nature is by instinct a nomadic shepherd and herdsman; he hates forests, and will ruthlessly burn down the finest trees to make a clearing for sheep-pastures. It is impossible to travel twenty miles in the Southern Carpathians without encountering the terrible ravages committed by these people in the beautiful woods that adorn the sides of the mountains.

"The Wallacks find it too much trouble to fell the trees," says Mr b.o.n.e.r. "They destroy systematically: one year the bark is stripped off, the wood dries, and the year after it is fired.... In 1862, near Toplitza, 23,000 _joch_ of forest were burned by the peasantry."

Judging from what I saw during my travels in Hungary in 1875-76, I should say the evil described by Mr b.o.n.e.r ten years before has in no way abated. The Wallacks pursue their ruthless destruction of the forests, and the law seems powerless to arrest the mischief. At present there is wood and enough, but the time will come when the country at large must suffer from this reckless waste. There are about twenty-three million acres of forest in Hungary, including almost the only oak-woods left in Europe. The great proportion of the forest-land belongs to the State, hence the supervision is less keen, and the depredations more readily winked at. Riding one day with a Hungarian friend, I asked what would be the probable cost of a wooden house then building on the verge of the forest. My friend replied, laughing, "That depends on whether the builder stole the wood himself, or only bought it of some one else who had stolen it; he might possibly have purchased the wood from the real owner, but that is not very probable. So you see I really cannot tell you what the house will cost."

Incendiary fires are very common in Hungary. Here, again, the Wallacks do their share of mischief. If they have a grudge against an active magistrate or a thriving neighbour, his farmstead is set on fire, not once, but many times probably. Added to this, the Wallack takes an actual pleasure in wanton destruction. As an instance, an English company who are working coal mines in the neighbourhood of Orsova have been obliged within the last two years to relay their railway from the mines to the Danube no less than three times, in consequence of the Wallacks persistently destroying the permanent way and stealing the rails.

Notwithstanding all this the Wallacks are not without their good points.

They become capital workmen under certain circ.u.mstances, and they possess an amount of natural intelligence which promises better things as the result of education. "Barring his weakness for tobacco and spirits, the much-abused Wallack is a useful fellow to the sportsman and the traveller," said a sporting friend of mine who visits Transylvania nearly every autumn.

[Footnote 6: Hungary and Transylvania, 1839.]

[Footnote 7: 'Geographical Aspect of the Eastern Question,' Fortnightly Review, January 1877.]

[Footnote 8: Transylvania: its Products and People.]

CHAPTER V.