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[A. Springhetti]

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BLACK HAND OVER EUROPE by Henri Pozzi 

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The Bulgarian Scene

The Valley of the Vardar 
Let us peep behind the barbed wires. What impresses
one immediately upon entering Macedonia is the immense
calm, and the absolute order which reigns there. 
In this Valley of the Vardar, under an implacable sun
which makes the red alluvial soil smoke, men and women
by thousands move about without a word, without a cry,
not even one of those songs which everywhere else
mounts into the sky. The countryside, as far as the
eye can reach, is without a human noise. The
atmosphere seems fixed in a peaceful seclusion.
Something indefinable, inexplicable, makes people and
things here unique on the earth. One has the sensation
of entering an unknown world. 
This sensation never leaves you, no matter where you
may go in the annexed provinces. 
Even the streets of the cities, where housewives press
before the butcher's shops, where bands of children
pass to and from school, remind one of nothing that
one has seen before in the Balkans. Even the noise, if
I may so express it, is silent. 
The crowds going for a walk in the evening hours speak
in monotones, as if murmuring, and the footsteps
suggest the sober movement of a procession. They walk
under the eye of the gendarmes who, rifle in sling and
revolver at the belt, pace up and down the pavement.
The people seem to have retired into themselves. To
whatever class they may belong, all the Macedonians
whom you will encounter in Macedonia, from Ochrida to
Bitolj, from Veles to Guevgueli, in the cities and in
the country, are the same. 

"They are like poor people who are on a visit to rich
relations," said a young doctor to me at Skoplje. The
attitude of this people, whom he had imagined to be
exuberant, amazed him. 
Macedonia, which was for so long a field of agitation
and violence, to-day reposes in the Pax Serbiana. 
At Nisch the coaches of the international train, which
had already been inspected before leaving Belgrade,
were searched again from top to bottom. Passports were
checked again with an exasperating minuteness. As for
the baggage, an hour after our departure from Nisch
the occupants of the compartment next to mine, Jews
from Salonika, still wept with rage before the
disaster which had overtaken their travelling bags. 
And Nisch was nothing compared with what awaited us at
Leskovatz(Leskovac) ! The women in the third class
coaches were half undressed. The men had to take off
their shoes. 
The railways are guarded by soldiers as in Croatia;
but infinitely more severely. There are sentries
everywhere visible, and others who are not visible
because they hide behind bushes at the approach of the
trains: At every step on the narrow roads which cut
the bright verdure of the plains, horsemen appear,
advancing two by two like war-time patrols.
>From Leskovatz to Skoplje, from Veles to Bitolj or
Chtip or Ochrida, I must have seen a hundred massive
gendarmes, riding frisky little horses with their
carbines placed before them on the saddle. 
Children and old men bow low as they pass. Only old
women sometimes turn their heads. Near Priboz(Priboj),
two young lads fled into a cornfield upon seeing the
khaki uniforms. They were chased by the horsemen and
harshly beaten in the face with riding whips because
of their suspicious conduct. 
"Anything we can do to facilitate your investigations
in South Serbia, we will do ! " Dr. Radovanovitch had
said to me. 
He kept his word. 
My coming was announced everywhere. In all the
stations after Nisch special commissioners were the
very incarnation of politeness when examining my
passport. My valises were not searched, and, as a
result, travelling companions, whose vest- pockets
even were turned inside out, conceived an immense
respect for my person. 
At Skoplje, Mr. Jovanovitch, the representative of the
Press-Bureau, took possession of me. He had been
telephoned the night before by Radovanovitch. He and
his friends did not leave me for a minute. I was
presented to a crowd of amiable people, civil and
military, and I had the pleasure of encountering them
at each step afterwards. They followed me to the
mosque where I thought I was alone ; to the old
Macedonian quarters where their occupation hardly
appeared to call them ; even to the French military
cemetery, three miles from the city, where, without
me, surely they would never have gone. 
I did not, however, remain long under this
supervision. On the evening of the fourteenth of July
a terrible storm kept me very late at the Cercle
Francais on Peter the First Street. When it rained the
hardest I insisted on leaving. There was no reason to
hesitate any longer. My cover was complete, for the
electric current had been cut off far fear of
accidents, and my all-too-faithful escorts had sought
shelter. 
My guide, I will not give his name, took me to a house
where I found a mother nursing a little girl of ten or
twelve years of age. I learned that this child, having
been surprised talking Bulgarian with one of her
little friends, had been bound to a bench before the
class, and whipped until the blood came. Her back, her
hips, and her thighs were covered by great sores. She
could hardly walk, and she cried with pain when she
sat down. They had warned her, however, that if she
missed school or arrived late the punishment would be
renewed.
"Do you employ corporal punishment in your schools?" I
asked Jovanovitch that same evening at the Grand Cafe.
"Never!" he replied. "Do you take us for Germans ? " 
" Sir," the father of the wounded child had said to me
when I was getting ready to leave, "you see how they
treat our children ! What they do to our children they
do to us all. A Macedonian woman who enters a police
station or a gendarmerie is received as a prostitute ;
a Macedonian merchant who gives credit to a Serb
official will never be paid, and if he demands payment
he is asking for ruin ; our peasants succumb under the
burden of taxes and if they are one day late in paying
them, they are seized and thrown out of their homes.
The shepherds who go to the mountains are allowed to
take only one day's provision with them ; and one of
them must come for provisions each morning and give an
account to the police of what he has seen, what he has
heard, and what he and his companions are going to do
during the day. Our letters are opened, our children
questioned at school on what takes place in their
homes ; we cannot even have the right to go from one
village to another without permission. But never have
our people been more faithful to Macedonia! When she
finally falls on the Serbs our vengeance will be as
pitiless as the justice of God." 
"What that man told you," said a Frenchman to me (one
whom a long stay in Macedonia had familiarised with
things), "is, unfortunately, the truth. There is not a
word you can strike out. Nothing can give you an idea
of the atrocious regime inflicted by the Serb
administration on the Macedonian populations. I knew
the bashi-bazouks. They were lambs compared with the
Serbs ! " 
The father of the little girl took me through the
storm to the end of the Turkish city on the other side
of the Vardar. He took me to the home of some people
whose address had been given me at the French
consulate by one of the guests staying there. 
"My God, sir," said a woman to me as we went in, "we
are lost if anyone has seen you enter." 
Her husband and she looked at me curiously in the
light of a flickering lamp on the corner of the table.
They were puzzled by this "Franski" who did not fear
the police. They plied me with questions. "Are you
going to Veles? To Chtip? To Negotin? To Bitolj? You
will be well received because the Serbs fear the
French, but you will see nothing." 
The man hobbled about painfully, and his fifty years
appeared seventy. His legs had been broken with the
butt-end of a musket in the prison where he had been
put for two years simply because his brother had fled
from Macedonia. In this prison he had to polish
pencils and metal penholders. He had to polish a
thousand each day, and was not allowed to sleep until
he had made the count. Twice a week, in the dead of
night, the gendarmes would lead him to the torture
chamber where each prisoner was given twenty-five
cudgel blows on the balls of the feet and on the
hands, which had been previously soaked for half
an-hour in warm water. Food consisted of two pounds of
black bread each day, and two glasses of water at
noon. The chains on his ankles weighed forty pounds.
His deformed feet and hands bore frightful scars. The
broken bones had knitted together above the knee
without having been set in place, and they protruded
through the skin. 
The man who gave me the address of these poor people
asked me next day what I thought about it all. "If it
were not so dangerous for them I would have given you
ten or twenty other addresses," he said. "All those
who leave prison are in the same state, and half of
them, at least, leave it only to be cast into a common
grave. What takes place in these ‘houses of death,’ as
the Macedonians call them, is unimaginable. But you
can make a pretty good guess if you have ever seen an
accused man return from a questioning by the police
magistrate. I saw an accused at Ochrida who had had
his natural issues ‘ buckled’ both before and behind ,
and was then forced to eat and drink copiously for
three days. He howled with pain, but he confessed
nothing-which is of little importance, since,
probably, he had nothing to confess. Then they beat
him unconscious in such a manner that not a tooth
remained in the front of his mouth." 
Dr. Trumbitch, former minister of Foreign Affairs of
Serbia, Stefanitch and Meslitch, at Belgrade, and a
high Serb personality of the opposition with whom I
dined at the home of a common friend at Zemoun, had
furnished me such details of the penitentiary regime
that I was ready to listen to anything. 
"If it were known," they had said to me, "what takes
place in our prisons, a cry of horror would resound
all over Europe. The offices of police magistrates are
torture chambers. The prisons are hells of suffering
and ignominy. Thousands of human beings, men and
women, even children, are tormented there and suffer
without hope. Political prisoners are packed into
cells too small to permit of any movement, and there
they are left for weeks in an unbreathable atmosphere
with their own mess rising up to their ankles. They
take them out only to beat them to death or to subject
them to ignominious outrages. The Valaque abomination,
for which the Turks have been so much reproached, is a
favourite resort when all else has failed to make the
suspects confess. Even old men and women are subjected
to it."
The Serbian language is enforced in the schools, yet
at home the children speak to their parents in
Bulgarian, for their parents know no other. Yet which
language moulds their souls, and their secret
personality? Which of the two languages do they employ
when they reflect, when they speak to themselves? That
of the mothers, or that of the schoolmasters? 
All the Macedonians have had to Serbianise their names
by ending them with "itch" instead of "off." From one
end of the country to the other all traces of
"Macedonianism" have disappeared; store-signs, menus,
inscriptions on tombs, all are in Serbian. You will
not find a paper, a magazine, a book, a pamphlet, or a
single inscription in the Bulgarian language
throughout all Macedonia. And yet fifteen years ago it
was the only language spoken there. The swiftness of
this change may be due to enthusiasm for Serbia, but
it may not be entirely uninfluenced by the fact that
the smallest letter in Bulgarian may cost its writer
anything from six months to five years in prison, and
a dose of cudgel blows before, during, and after.
The "loyalty" of Macedonians in impeccable. Their
deference towards all who have the slightest authority
is touching. They express their joy in a loud voice at
having "become Serbs again." 
But this loyalty, this deference, this joy, becomes a
little ironic when one discovers what it hides. 
"No one needs to preach hatred of the Serbs to our
compatriots," Macedonian refugees in Bulgaria said to
me. "They have only to open their eyes to become
filled with it." 
It is true.
I have returned from Macedonia stupefied, revolted,
disgusted, by what I saw there; by what I heard and
learned there, thanks to the special means of
information of which I was able to avail myself, in
spite of the immense effort on the part of Serbian
agents to prevent my discovering the truth. 
I am a Frenchman who profoundly loves Serbia, and has
sufficiently proved it for twenty years, yet I declare
unhesitatingly that the officials, judges, priests and
police who represent Yugoslavia in Macedonia are a
dishonour to their nation. 
Before going actually to the spot and seeing things
with my own eyes, I refused to admit the reality of
the accusations made by the Macedonian organisations
of Bulgaria against the Serbian administration in
Macedonia. 
But now I know that they do not contain a word that is
not true. All the cases of atrocity, violence,
despotism and immorality that I have been able to
check have, without a single exception, been true.
Materially and morally, the annexed peoples are
crushed, plundered and martyrised beyond all belief.
And there is no chance of their getting justice, aid,
or protection. 
In Macedonia the Serbs confiscate, imprison, torture,
violate and assassinate, continually, tranquilly and
abominably. 
Last August, at Topsider, a French official, whose
name I cannot, to my great regret, publish, said to me
: "They send down there the scum of the Yugoslav
administration, all those whom it has been impossible
to break or maintain elsewhere. They are a rabble of
thieves, of sadists and extortioners. Their ignorance,
their vanity, and their immorality is unimaginable." 
Here are a few more of the things I saw in Macedonia.
In one of the busy streets of Bitolj I heard frightful
cries coming from the open window of a primary school.
Two masters were beating half a-dozen young boys, who
were tied to their benches " Dirty Bulgars ! " yelled
the masters. " Sons of Macedonian sows ! I'll teach
you Serb, I will ! " 
A Croat lieutenant from Zagreb was with me at the
time. " What these chaps are doing here, they would
like to do with us at home," he said. "Devils, they
are, not men ! "
Near the village of Orasac, between Kumanovo and
Novoselo, I saw a peasant attached to a tree with his
trousers down. His face, his back, and his belly were
covered with blood. Three gendarmes and a
non-commissioned officer stood round him. A fourth
gendarme came out of a house. He was carrying a cat in
a sack. They tied the cat above the peasant's knees,
and then pulled his trousers up over the furious cat.
All the village, men, women and children, looked on in
silence. The man, his flesh torn by the enraged beast,
screamed in agony. "
Let's get out of here ! " said the Frenchman who had
driven me there in his car. " If we intervene they
will let him go, but they'll only blow his brains out
as soon as we have turned our backs." 
In 1915 when the armies of Belgrade retreated beaten
towards Albania, after having occupied Macedonia for
two years, the Macedonians fell upon the wounded and
stragglers. There were atrocious reprisals. I was one
of those who denounced them to the world. To-day,
knowing what I know, seeing what I have seen, I should
no longer have the force to condemn them. 
In 1918, when she became a Serbian province, Macedonia
had more than 700 churches; she also possessed 86
colleges or secondary schools, with 2,800 students and
460 professors ; 556 primary schools with 33,000
scholars and 850 teachers. The convents and churches
contained inestimable treasures--the fruits of a
thousand years of Mace- donian culture and thought.
The churches, monasteries and schools have been
confiscated, all the priests, all the teachers have
been expelled, imprisoned, or deported into Old
Serbia. The churches and monasteries, which even the
Turks themselves had respected, have been pillaged
from top to bottom. 
At Skoplje, at Chtip, at Veles, in twenty villages
around these cities, in the region of Ochrida and of
Guevgueli, I found Serb masters in the schools and
Serb priests in the churches. When I asked the latter
what had become of such and such a precious ikon,
statue or wainscoting, the existence of which had been
known to me in advance, they replied with-out
exception, "They have sent them to Belgrade." 
In all the cemeteries and churches of annexed
Macedonia, Belgrade has removed all the Bulgarian
inscriptions from the altars, from the walls and from
the tombs. In many cases they have emptied the tombs
and the crypts of their contents. 
At Skoplje, for example, more than forty corpses were
torn from the Church of Saint- Dimitri.
" What have they done with them? " I asked Mr.
Jovanovitch's assistant who was showing me the church.

"They heaved them into the Vardar," he replied. 
At Veles, the Bulgarian officers who fell in the
course of the last battles of the Franco- Serb
offensive of September, 1918, had been interred in the
old Church of Saint- Pantaleimon. Their remains were
exhumed by the Serbs and cast on to the rubbish heap. 
I saw cemeteries at Chtip, at Krivolak, at Veles, at
Kratovo and at Ochrida in which all the Macedonian
funeral monuments had been pillaged, the names and the
inscriptions in the Bulgarian language effaced, and
all the tombstones torn out and shattered. These
places of rest now resemble demolition works. 
One of the most insistent claims made by the
propaganda of the Pan-Serbs is the work of sanitation
and hygiene. 
"In Macedonia, where malaria, typhoid and the worst
venereal maladies raged, where the whole population
stagnated in ignorance and filth," Dr. Radovanovitch
had said to me, "we have created one of the healthiest
and most prosperous regions of Europe, thanks to the
millions that France has had the generosity to advance
us." 
What I saw was rather different. 
At Skoplje, for example, hundreds of millions of
dinars have gone in the construction of a colossal
Military Casino, greater than the Cercle des Armees de
Terre et de Mer in Paris. A gigantic branch bank of
the National Bank of Belgrade has been built, and
luxurious villas have been erected for officials and
officers. Yet clouds of mosquitoes still breed out of
the slime of the Vardar; from the sewer-mouths, and
from all the stagnant pools scattered about the old
city and its suburbs. The centre of Skoplje is
relatively clean ; but the old quarters, where more
than fifty thousand people are piled upon one another,
are never sprinkled, never swept, and remain covered
with decomposing refuse. A fine "Institute of Research
and Prophylaxy" is situated behind the railway
station. I saw herds of syphilitics, malarials,
consumptives, and women and children in the last
degree of exhaustion and anaemia, file through its
door. The staff were devoted, the buildings spacious,
but the equipment was lamentably inefficient and
filthy. I saw bed-sheets there which had not been
changed for fifteen days. Even quinine and
disinfectants were missing.
"There is no money ! " the director said to me. At
Veles, at Chtip, at Novoselo, at Kradsko(Gradsko), at
Krevolok, and all along the valleys of the Vardar, the
general mortality by malaria and tuberculosis and the
number of syphilitics is shocking. The misery of the
peasants, of the workers, and even of the merchants,
defeats the imagination. Everywhere the water which
the population consumes is contaminated by the worst
infiltrations.
I had left Skoplje, declaring to Jovanovitch that I
was going to Bitolj, from where I would go by car to
Ochrida. I hoped in this manner to free myself from
official supervision. 
However, this was expecting too much. I had not been
in my hotel at Veles five minutes before the Inspector
of Police, Djaganetitch, saluted me on the doorstep.
The Intelligence Service functions very well in
Macedonia ! He was a charming man, this Inspector
Djaganetitch. He took me to his office later on and
told me of his campaigns against the comitadjis of the
ORIM. 
"Do they still come as far as Veles?" 
"We took the last nearly three years ago, near the
village of Katzibego(Kacibeg)," he replied. "Fourteen
men and two women. Fine slips of girls they were too.
They kept us company all night ! " 
" That must have amused you ! " I said tactfully, but
ironically. 
"Oh yes! In the morning when we had to get en route
they couldn't stand up. But we knew the remedy for
that ! A few cracks of a horsewhip on the seat, and
they ran like she-goats ! 
"The main thing, however, was to make the dirty curs
talk. You can bet they hadn't come all the way from
Bulgaria without being hidden and aided along the
route. We wanted the names and addresses of their
friends. 
" Well, believe me, sir, we tried everything ; iron
wire twisted round the head or the knees with a stick,
big toes crushed with a hammer. It's a rar 
e thing if a chap doesn't confess before the second
foot. It's even better than the one with the teeth!
You know the one, I reckon. It's this way! You put the
man in a chair with his head bound to the back of it.
You pry open his mouth and drill one, two, three
teeth. I've seen huskies collapse at the second tooth
! At the third they tell you all you want to know.
It's worth more than fifty cudgel blows. 
"But this last gang we caught simply wouldn't talk.
No, sir. They made a sign to stop, and then when we
stopped they said nothing. The women were the worst !
We drilled four teeth, two in front and two big ones.
They went a bit white, but that's all. One of them
spat in my face ! I could have killed her ! I wanted
to set them on burning coals, as M. Lazitch had us do
near Kratovo. 
" Well, all of a sudden, I found this."
He plunged his hand into a drawer and held out to me
an old rusty razor.
" With that in two hours I made the dirty curs
denounce more than twenty traitors ; peasants,
shepherds, women, even kids ! I didn't have the time
to write it all down. You tell M. Chiappe (French
Prefect of Police in Paris) this method when you get
back to France, it'll be useful to him."
Hastily, all that had been said to me at Zagreb, at
Sofia, at Belgrade, about the procedure of
interrogation in the Serb prisons came back to me. I
remembered the stories I had heard of noses and ears
slashed, palms of the hands and balls of the feet
beaten, points of the breast ripped out with pincers,
the genital parts twisted, red-hot irons applied to
the loins and under the feet. 
I cited these to the Inspector.
He laughed. "Good Lord, no, sir. We had to do worse
than that. Do you think that a chap whose big toes
have been flattened, and who suffers the thunder of
God with his teeth gives a damn about that sort of
thing. 
" I had them all piled there in the corner, stark
naked, and one of them I had held before me, his legs
spread out, a weight of twenty kilos on each foot. . .
. I was sitting there where you are. 
"'` You don't want to say anything? "' I said. 
"Each time that he said `No' with his head, the
sergeant gave him a rap on the nose or the eyes with
his fist, whilst I advanced my chair a notch. The
third notch, and I was near enough to touch him.
" ` Well, you see this razor? If you refuse to reply,
I am going to use it on you. After that the rope ! But
if you tell us which way you came in, who took you in
and informed you on the road, we will take care of you
and set you free. Understand?' 
"First, I made two slashes on his loins. He talked
when I took up my razor again-two pages of it." 
"And you gave them their liberty?"
I heard myself saying the words as a man in a ghastly
nightmare.
The fiend before me laughed. "Gave them their liberty?
Why, what are you thinking of! It was that, sir, that
made them talk! When the first one had said all he had
to say, they took him downstairs ‘to see the doctor’.
At the door they put a rope around his neck and strung
him up the tree in front of the little coffee-house,
on the square there. The whole fourteen went like
that.
"That affects you, eh? I can see that you don't know
these curs !They had killed a dozen of our men, and at
Kratovo and at Krupiste they had burned the homes of
Serb colonists with the people inside. The comitadjis
of the ORIM! It’s wasting rope to hang them !A bullet
in the belly, two or three strokes of the butt-end of
a musket on the head, that's all they're worth ! They
are brutes, good for nothing." 
"And the two women," I asked. “They died without
having confessed?" 
"Without having confessed? Ah! I guarantee you that it
didn't take long to settle them. We gave them the
candle."
And so this also was true !This ghastly atrocity which
Dr. Trumbitch told me about at Zagreb, and Professor
P___at Belgrade. 
"Why, yes, the candle!" went on Djaganetitch.
"Naturally, the woman is warned. If she persists, they
stand her up, light a candle or a good pocket-
lighter, and raise the flame little by little until it
is thrust into her genitals."
"And then?" 
"And then they were strung up with the rest of them.
But we have never seen another comitadji in this
region since, not one. They know what's waiting for
them. The sub- prefect could go alone as far as
Karaslar, by deserted roads, as safely as if he were
on the terrace of Kalemeigdan."
I had a talk with this sub-prefect, M. Nikolitch. He
also was full of " information. " 
"Do you intend to visit Kratovo?" he asked. "When you
get there go and see Lieutenant Mina. He's a veteran
of the armies of King Peter who dared go all alone to
a region infested with revolutionaries and traitors. A
real Serb ! He had a score of his old comrades at
Kratovo. He installed them on the abandoned lands and
in the houses. M. Jovanovitch didn't tell you the
story of the marriages, did he? Ah! you must hear it.
It's one of the things for which His Majesty
complimented Mina.
"Mina and his bachelor comrades at Kratovo could find
no one to marry, because the women would not have a
Serb. But that wasn't for long! One Sunday, Mina
assembled the village and told his comrades to choose
a girl each. They took eleven women whose husbands had
fled to Bulgaria, and who cried that they were already
married. 
" ‘ I annul your marriage !’ said Mina. They refused.
So Mina had them tied to benches. They were whipped by
their future husbands until they could cry no longer.
Then Mina warned them that they would do it again the
following Sunday, and each Sunday after, until they
gave in. 
" For three Sundays Mina thrashed them thus, and then
they said ‘Yes.’ Mina had a minister come from Serbia,
and they were married." 
I met one of the "re-married" women. She was playing
on the doorstep with the son of her Serb husband, a
fine lad of three or four years of age. She showed
such a tenderness for him that I, knowing the story
from my guide, was stupefied. 
In answer to my question she replied : "I want my son
to love me so much that it will be I, living or dead,
who aims his rifle on the day of our liberation." 

"Whatever you see you must plainly tell," Dr.
Radovanovitch had said to me at Belgrade. "We do not
fear the truth ! " 
I have accepted his challenge as the challenge of the
Pan-Serbs. I have been, I have seen, I have heard. 
... And now I am telling the world ...



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Books about Macedonia/ "War is coming again" by Henri
Pozzi/ The valley of the Vardar 

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