Belgrade, in early April

I wandered up the hillside through the ruins of the White City with whose broad avenues and byways I had been familiar not so long ago. All man’s work has been destroyed by man’s diabolical inventions. Only the Danube and the Save majestically flow on to their union under the old Turkish citadel, and so I know I am in Belgrade, or what is left of it.

At times there was such an uproar I thought that once again the capital of the Serbs was under fire, but that was not the case. Gangs of soldiers and civilians, urged on by the loud cries of officers and foremen, were clearing away the ruins that tell the sad story of the Austrian bombardment with which the holocaust of disaster began. Rapid-fire explosions rent the air, and now and again the wreckers brought to view the body of a man or a woman who had not lived to see this day of liberation. Generally the corpses were exceedingly lifelike and some had homely utensils in their hands, showing that they were going about their daily round of duties when death came down out of the clouds, or from the ironclad monitors on the river. Entombed as they have been for four years in piles of brick and timber, these first victims of the war have been protected from the scavengers of the air who now, however, circle menacingly over the scene of desolation. As I climbed in and out of the ruins I heard scraps of every language known to man, and many of the speakers have come from faraway lands and over distant seas. I spotted two Filipinos and tackled them in scraps of Tagalog, but they shook their heads.

“Me Visayan,” said one, and then they explained in scrappy Spanish that early in the war they had enlisted on an English ship as stewards and now were serving with the Danube patrol. At last I escaped the labyrinth of wreckage and before me waved invitingly the Stars and Stripes over a building still intact that was once the Turkish Legation. I hastened on to greet one of our most competent representatives, H. Percival Dodge, a career man upon whom I had dropped in at many faraway posts, in China, in Morocco, in Panama, and in Paris.

On the steps of the Legation I was delayed by an arresting figure, and soon I was in conversation with perhaps the only happy and contented man I have come up with in all the acrimonious days which have followed upon the Armistice. He was talking with the Frenchspeaking butler, and not making much headway, but at sight of my uniform he turned to me with evident relief.

“I am Mikel Tusla,” he said, “an American citizen,” and he glowed with pride. His nakedness was covered with a scanty assortment of rags. He wore a fur cap from which the fur was gone and only the skin remained. His face was grimy and his feet were wrapped in rags. As we talked, a gentle rain began to fall and washed little canyons down his mud-caked face.

“I’m Mikel Tusla, an American citizen,” he repeated, “but when I heard Mother Serbia was invaded, I came back home; and could I do otherwise? My brother had been killed and the little house on the hillside where I was bom had gone up in flames! God! even in the days of the Turks our home had been spared. For four years I have fought with the Smedalia brigade and now that we have victory and peace, I want to go back to my Iowa farm—but there is difficulty.”

I sat down on the doorstep and talked for some minutes with this happy man, without a shirt and without shoes, but who had an expression of contentment in his eyes to which I had long been a stranger. Then the Minister¹ appeared and proudly I introduced our fellow citizen.

“You should—and you shall—have a decoration,” said the Minister. “Only last week the Prince Regent told me that all the boys who came back across the sea to fight for the homeland would be remembered.”

This talk about a decoration failed to interest Mikel.

“I only want a little writing on my passport, to say it is good; you see, it was only good for two years, but it was not my fault that it took us four years to lick the ‘Swabs.’ Now that all is well in Serbia, I want to go home to my farm in Iowa and to my American children.”

The Minister, after examining his army papers, wrote on that passport a citation that would make the heart of any soldier swell with pride.

Then Mikel turned to me.

“Would you mind if I touched your uniform? Someday my son will wear it.”

“I shall be proud,” I answered. And he laid his grimy hand on my insignia with something that was very like a caress.

“You must come to see me tomorrow, or any day, any hour, if there is any further difficulty,” said the Minister.

“With that writing on my pass, there will be no difficulty,” said Mikel Tusla. And he turned and went down the hill through the smoking ruins, the only happy, contented man I had met in months, and he was without a shirt or shoes.

“The melting pot,” said the Minister, “and glory be to it.”

* * *

I confess the atmosphere of the at once honeymoon chariot and funeral car on which I came to the smoking ruins of the Serbian capital had depressed me, and I planned to make the return journey by ordinary conveyance, but when after two days in the mourning city Logan agreed to hold his car for me at least twelve hours I succumbed to the comforts, the creature comforts, which it afforded. If there are ghosts in this world they certainly must have infested that tragic Pullman. But of course there are none, simply devils and demons of flesh and blood, extremely like ourselves. We made a quick journey back to what had been the Kaiserstadt without any noteworthy experience except one just as we were running into the station. Hearing Logan and myself discussing once again the ill-fated couple, the porter said: “I want to show you something.” We followed him, and in my sleeping compartment he pointed out, scratched on one of the panels, “Sophie and Franzl,” but he was not a sensationalist. He admitted that he did not know whether the names dated from the honeymoon journey, when the honeymooners might have written them, as so many democratic trippers do on similar occasions, or whether it had been scratched there by some railway servant with a romantic leaning toward the vanished regime.