— Written by Branko Veljković —
Petar Radulović from the village of Jabučje, Kolubara district, was a cavalry captain in the Serbian army. He was a good man, a good officer, but also, as our people would say, “a man cunning with his hands.” He knew how to drive, he could repair various machines, and he also understood automobile engines.
After weeks of heavy fighting with his unit, he retreated to Peć1. By direct order from the Chief of the General Staff of the Serbian army, he undertook the task of selecting, from the available vehicles of the king’s entourage, those that were in running condition “for further procedure.” This was the surplus part of the state vehicle pool and what was found there from the 31 vehicles the army had requisitioned before the 1912 war. The entire day, Petar and one of the adjutants adjusted and repaired the vehicles until they finally managed to make four of the available ones operational, technically ready for the journey ahead. Petar was skilled, and the adjutant was uncommonly hardworking and dedicated. Occasionally throughout the day, some high-ranking officer or someone from the Government would come to them and ask – “How’s it going, lads?”, “Will this be ready by tonight?”…
It seems someone “important” was in a great hurry. It must be that all the “important ones” were in a great hurry. Later, these two craftsmen would also understand why.
While they were repairing the vehicles, they watched as the column of the already dead moved from Peć towards the Albanian mountains.
The snow smelled of death, and Serbia smelled of betrayal.
They were disturbed by that silence in which an entire nation moved straight into the indescribable. Some murky people without faces or roots went around and whispered to the bewildered people that allied kitchens, hospitals, and ships awaited them on the other side. No one knew these whispering wretches. No one ever saw them again. They themselves never crossed Albania, they only persuaded others that they should.
Neither Petar nor the adjutant understood anything. Someone had ordered the cannons to be scrapped, but the limousines were being repaired!
“So why is all this people going over the Accursed Mountains2 when the route through Old Serbia3 is open?” – at one point, more to break the unbearable silence than to hear any kind of answer, the adjutant asked Petar,… Or he asked that to the king, or the generals, or the bishops, or those from the assembly and the Government,… The poor wretch asked all of them, but only Petar was beside him. And Petar was silent. And God was silent, although that day everyone looked up at the heaven so many times. They both knew that all that was happening to Serbia had nothing to do with God. Someone else had decided, through their own degenerate offspring, to send all those people to their death. The people to their death, and the degenerates to the limousines.
Then evening came. Columns long like the sentence of a righteous man dragged on further across the mountains, and those who had sentenced the people got into their freshly repaired limousines and, convinced they had hidden from the darkness with the cover of darkness, left in the direction of Skopje and further towards Greece. They packed into the vehicles quietly. That is the haunting silence that lives around real killers. When there is no soul, there is no smile either. Apart from God, the devil, Petar, and the adjutant, there was hardly anyone else there to witness who all got into those automobiles. There were no farewells, no saluting, no one wished anyone a safe journey. On behalf of all who got into those vehicles and the fatherland that was dying right before his eyes, Petar bowed his head. He was ashamed. The “illustrious” passengers did not bow their heads, they were not ashamed. Their “honour” was composed of muck, stone, and the blood of others, they just averted their gaze with practiced ease.
They turned on the vehicles’ headlights only when they were a good distance from Peć. The light bothered them, and they had spoken so much about how they would be the ones to bring light to the people.
With profound anguish and a heaviness in his stomach, Petar said to himself – “Well, where have you, peasant hardship, ever seen a politician escape on a cannon.” The adjutant, condemned to trample over death just like his comrade Petar, as if he had read his thoughts, just shrugged his shoulders and looked past Petar towards the mountains. As if he had a foreboding. Until recently, he had been a distinguished adjutant. Soon, he would become a walking sorrow. And he would never reach the salt water across the mountains. One morning, the hardship found him with his throat torn out and his neck half-severed. His fallen head remained frozen in some unnatural position. It seemed as though he hadn’t put up a fight at all. No one heard when the man with the knife crept up and when the icy blade slashed the adjutant’s artery.
How much must that butcher have hated that man to slaughter him when he was already frozen?
It must be that the one with the knife wasn’t a man at all, but some kind of beast.
Before the beasts with knives always came some beasts in limousines.
An entire army marched past that frozen body and 250,000 other slaughtered and dead. The living walked past the dead, the dead walked past the living.
A minister in the then Government, General Božidar Terzić4, wrote to the Prime Minister Nikola Pašić5, that bloodsucker from the privileged limousines, that in the Albanian tragedy, 243,877 people had been killed, died, or gone missing. Rada Pašić6, the pride of her worthy father Nikola, explained it laconically during a break between two drug sessions in Paris – “Empires are built stone by stone, brick by brick, corpse by corpse. The more corpses, the stronger the empire…”. He would often repeat this later…
And that, my brothers and sisters, amounts to one Serbian head for every meter of the road from Peć to the Albanian coast. That is what the politicians of that time sowed, and you, my brothers and sisters, think about it… What would these present ones sow? How many heads need to be buried for them to buy themselves a couple more new limousines or a few more minutes of our time on the national frequencies?
That is why Petar, the cavalry captain, and the adjutant spent the whole day repairing limousines. So that the politicians could escape. Because who needs a limousine when it was said that one must “cross Albania to that salty sea”. Once again, the rifle belonged to everyone, but the treacherous bullet came from Belgrade. One bullet for an entire nation.
When, alone and alive only in soul, he finally reached the Albanian shores, Petar understood everything. He watched the empty shores that were filling with corpses at a terrifying speed, and there were no promised ships.
He understood,…
Those in the limousines had not counted on anyone surviving. That is why on the other side of hell there were no hospitals, no food, no ships,… Simply, according to their plan, no one was supposed to survive. He and all the other surviving corpses were only meant to be counted as dead and become statistics for future international “settlements” and generals’ reports.
The king and the chosen ones got into the limousines and left towards Skopje and then further. The fatherland they sent to death. The king and the “elite” unexpectedly met the people again on the other side of hell. Until the great Peć “service” of limousines for the chosen ones, the good man Petar had believed in God, and in the king, and in the fatherland, and in the flag,… In the end, only God remained. The king and his lot chose the limousines and they drove the fatherland into the unspeakable.
A hundred years later, absolutely nothing has changed. Except the limousines. If by some chance the army were to start requisitioning again, there wouldn’t be enough parking for all the Belgrade armored cars, jeeps, and limousines. And from an armored car, my brothers, one never went into the trench. The trench was always only for peasants, workers, and the “common people”. So, those in armored cars are even afraid of their own people, let alone an enemy bullet, which is why they are in armored cars in the first place.
The good man Petar from Jabučje, Kolubara district, a cavalry captain of the Serbian army, understood.
Have we all understood?
Do not trust politicians !
- Peć – The administrative center of the Peć District, which was the administrative district of Serbia between 1992 and the end of the Kosovo War in 1999 (Source: Wikipedia) ↩︎
- Accursed Mountains – serbian “Prokletije”, the “Cursed Mountains”, also known as the Albanian Alps is a mountain range in coastal Southeast Europe adjacent to the Adriatic Sea. (Source: Wikipedia) ↩︎
- Old Serbia – The Serbian Empire was a medieval Serbian state that emerged from the Kingdom of Serbia. It was established in 1346 by Dušan the Mighty. ↩︎
- Božidar Terzić – Colonel/General, Minister of War (1915–1918) ↩︎
- Nikola Pašić – was a Serbian and Yugoslav politician and diplomat. During his political career, which spanned almost five decades, he served five times as prime minister of Serbia and three times as prime minister of Yugoslavia, leading 22 governments in total. (Source: Wikipedia) ↩︎
- Rada Pašić – the son of Nikola Pašić ↩︎