From a Junior and Senior High School Textbook for the Coraopolis School District I bought at a flea market in 1998 called THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACY: PATRIOTISM THROUGH LITERATURE by Lyman P. Powell, copyright 1918, Rand McNally & Company. The Frontispiece features a portrait of President Woodrow Willson, with other illustrations of Theodore Roosevelt, King Albert of Belgium, Samuel Gompers and Major St. Clair Stobart, all whose works are selected for their intellectual comprehensiveness, moral elevation, restrained feeling and rhythmic quality, as in Lincolns speeches. Other authors included in this school edition are Bret Harte and Katherine Lee Bates. There were FOUR selections about Serbia in this book. I will offer just two. This is TREASURED GOLD proof for our younger generations, as todays shameful revisionists of history would have our children believe that the Serbs (and not the Germans and Austrians) were the evil in WWI because of the death of Archduke Ferdinand. Not so, not so. SERBIAS SACRIFICE by Major St. Clair Stobart. (Spirit of Democracy, 1918.) (Read the NY Times archives to learn more about the FIRST Woman to command a flying field hospital! Aug. 25, 1917, p.5. Major St.Clair Stobart took part in the famous Albanian Golgatha retreat of the Serbian Army, with its epidemics of smallpox, typhus, diptheria, scarlet fever, marching on stony rugged cliffs and mountains over 8,000 ft. high!) *********************** As Serbian politicians looked from the heights of the Serbian mountains upon the glories of their fertile land, a land of corn and bread, a land of wine and vineyards, they must have heard the Tempters words, whispering as of old, All these things will I give you if----IF---you will fall down and worship militarism and the Central Powers. But with one voice the Serbian people answered, Get thee behind me, Satan. It is written in our hearts, Thou shalt worship Freedom: her only shalt thou serve. * Thus Serbia, the latest evoked of the European nations, perceived with an insight at which history will one day marvel, the inner, the true interpretation of the word nation. She perceived that the life force of a nation is a spiritual force, and is not dependent on material conditions for existence. Serbia had existed during five hundred years of material annihilation under Turkish rule. Through all that wilderness of time, the ideal of Freedom had been her pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, but a free and united spirit. That is the only definition which allows of the indefinite expansion which will some day include all human kind in one united nation. Serbia is full of faith and hope because she knows that she is not, and never will be, deprived of nationhood. pointing to the Promised Land. Serbia is again in the wilderness, and the same light guides her and cheers her. She is full of courageous faith, because she understands that a nation means, primarily, NOT physical country (mountains, rivers, valleys), NOT State, not Government, In some minor ways Serbia may, in her civilization, have been behind other nations in the west of Europe, but she was AHEAD of Western Europe in that one thing which is of REAL importance, that one thing which cannot be copied or learned from other nations, of which is therefore either innate or unachievable: Serbia is ahead of other nations in her power of sacrificing herself for nationhood. All nations are ready to sacrifice life for nationhood. Serbia made first this common sacrifice, but when that did not avail, she voluntarily, for the sake of an abstract and spiritual idea, made the supreme sacrifice, the sacrifice of country, the sacrifice for which other nations make the penultimate sacrifice of life. The Serbian people sacrificed their country rather than bow the knee to militarism and foreign tyranny; they sacrificed their country in Utopian quest for the right, both for themselves and for other Slav brethren, to work out their own salvation in spiritual freedom. A people with such ideas, and with such power of sacrifice, must be worthy of a great future. *From The Flaming Sword in Serbia and Elsewhere
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 22:41:23 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015