It was wonderfully exact in the spirit; same roar of
guns, same protestations of superiority, same words in the air; race,
liberation, justice--and the same mood of trivial demonstrations. One
could not take to-day a ticket for Petersburg. "You mean Petrograd,"
would say the booking clerk. Shortly after the fall of Adrianople a
friend of mine passing through Sophia asked for some _cafe turc_ at the
end of his lunch.
"Monsieur veut dire Cafe balkanique," the patriotic waiter corrected him
austerely.
I will not say that I had not observed something of that instructive
aspect of the war of the Balkans both in its first and in its second
phase. But those with whom I touched upon that vision were pleased to
see in it the evidence of my alarmist cynicism. As to alarm, I pointed
out that fear is natural to man, and even salutary. It has done as much
as courage for the preservation of races and institutions. But from a
charge of cynicism I have always shrunk instinctively. It is like a
charge of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of
disgraceful calamity that must he carried off with a jaunty bearing--a
sort of thing I am not capable of.
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