Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VII THE PETITE ENTENTE—THE SOUTHEKN DAM OF all the smaller European Powers none gained more in importance, in population of the same stock, and in territory than those Southern Slavs, the Serbs. None have more right to be proud of their dogged valour in war or of their heroic endurance of national misfortune, completely overrun as they were by the Germanic armies. If they proved boastful in the day of victory it would be only natural, but instead of that what does one see in the Prime Minister's office at Belgrade as the only other adornment of its walls beside the King's portrait? Some map showing the enlarged boundaries of the now great State? Some battle picture showing victory crowning the Serbian arms? Not at all, only an enlarged photograph of a scene marking the lowest ebb of Serbia's fortune, the saddest moment of her darkest day—the aged King Peter, after a gallantly- fought retreat across his own country, leading his Staff over the ancient Roman bridge connectingthe last remaining corner of German-infested Serbia with Albania to which he was driven in exile, a defeated leader of a beaten army, expelled from their homeland, perhaps never to return. I don't know when I have been so impressed as by the sight of that picture;—it meant so much of the right sort of national pride. Then too I was struck by the modesty and simplicity of the office, for it is much the smallest and most unpretentious of any in all Europe. Perhaps this is but natural, for Serbia is truly called a "peasant kingdom," a land in which there are few rich or very poor, where life, even in Belgrade, the capital, is of the simplest. It is said there are only four modern bathrooms in Belgrade, but that is perhaps more endurable than the unmodernity of the lumpy cobblestones that make loc...