"
"One must also remember that a large percentage of them are younger
brothers; instead of going into bankruptcy, which is the usual tendency
of the younger brother nowadays, they gave their families a fair chance
of going into mourning. Every bullet finds a billet, according to a
rather optimistic proverb, and you must admit that nowadays it is
becoming increasingly difficult to find billets for a lot of young
gentlemen who would have adorned, and probably thoroughly enjoyed, one of
the old-time happy-go-lucky wars. But that is not exactly the burden of
my complaint. The Balkan lands are especially interesting to us in these
rapidly-moving days because they afford us the last remaining glimpse of
a vanishing period of European history. When I was a child one of the
earliest events of the outside world that forced itself coherently under
my notice was a war in the Balkans; I remember a sunburnt, soldierly man
putting little pin-flags in a war-map, red flags for the Turkish forces
and yellow flags for the Russians. It seemed a magical region, with its
mountain passes and frozen rivers and grim battlefields, its drifting
snows, and prowling wolves; there was a great stretch of water that bore
the sinister but engaging name of the Black Sea--nothing that I ever
learned before or after in a geography lesson made the same impression on
me as that strange-named inland sea, and I don't think its magic has ever
faded out of my imagination.
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