crack unit of the Armed Forces of the Independent State ofnCroatia. From time to time Signal, the Nazi version oiLife,nran stories on Germany’s loyal allies, the Croats. ThenIndependent State repaid its debt by exterminating thenBalkan Lumpengesindel and sending Ustashe to fight atnStalingrad.nMy father, gravely wounded, did not kill himself thatnnight. A woman soldier stayed his hand. Outlined againstnthe early dawn, the two Serbs limped away from thenbattlefield, as the Ustashe fired upon them, wagering bets.nFor Bosnia and Hercegovina, the turmoil did not start inn1941, nor even in 1914, when a young Bosnian Serb shotnArchduke Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, Triggered bynSerb nationalism, the Great War, which destroyed empires,ncreated new states, spawned Communism, and led to thenSecond Wodd War, brought nothing new to Bosnia.nAlready the site of a timeless war of the worlds, Bosnia knewnIllyrian, Celt, Roman, Teuton, Avar, Slav, Magyar, andnTurkish armies, long before the Germans, the Italians, thenPartisans, the Ustashe, and the Chetniks clashed in its darknforests.nFor all their vaunted differences, however, the present daynBosnians — the Serbs, the Croats, and the Moslems — are ansingle South Slav people. They speak the same language,nlook the same, often have the same family names. From thentimes of a White Serbia and a White Croatia on the Oder,nthe Croats and the Serbs lived side by side. Once the Eastnand the West, in the Balkans they became the South andnthe North as well.nSerbs were Christianized by Constantinople, Croats bynRome. Carved by peasant craftsmen, white limestonenchurches rose in Dalmatia. In Rascia, Serbs built rough,nByzantine crkve. Bearded nobles and barefoot ladies pushednaside mastiffs and peasants to enter. Saints were painted onnthe walls, until the Turks gouged their eyes out and coverednthem with lime.nSerbs remained free until the 15th century, long after thenGroats had become Hungarian subjects. Defeated by thenOttomans, they fled to Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia,nleaving only a part of their nation to be the Turkish rayah.nBut, as the Military Frontiersmen of the Austrian Empire,nboth the Serbs and the Croats fought the Bosnian Moslems,nthe most privileged military class of Ottoman Turkey.nRamparts of Christendom these yeomen Bosnian Croatsnand Serbs were called. Fiercely bewhiskered and scalplocked,nthey ravaged Europe for the Habsburgs, as eagerlynas their own borders.nIn 1848, the Austrians threw Serb and Groat armiesnagainst the Revolution in Hungary and Vienna. In Croatia,nwhich then included some Bosnian lands, immigrant Serbsnwere confirmed in their Grenzer status, while the Croatsnwere turned over to the Hungarians, in a bid to save thenAustro-Hungarian alliance. Geese, pigs, and brown-facednchildren ran happily through the streets of Serb militarynvillages. Croat peasants, dressed in brilliant white embroiderednwith scarlet, their red cloaks swirling around them,ndanced at feast days, and quietly toiled the rest of the year.n”To marry a Croat,” a Serb from Croatia said to me, “was asnunthinkable as marrying a cow.”nSouth of the Danube, among the rolling hills of Serbia,nfree Serbs dreamed of an everlasting Serbian Empire, whosenkings would never again leave them in the lurch. One-timenhaiduks, the Serbs were tired of being the Heavenly Host.nThey wanted to unite and live in peace with brothernBosnians, Montenegrins, and Macedonians.nIn answer to Hungarians who were trying to Magyarizenthem, Croatian intellectuals also began thinking of a Yugoslavia.nThey even adopted Hercegovinian Serbian as theirnliterary language, to facilitate the forthcoming union.nThen, in 1878, Austria-Hungary occupied Turkish Bosnianand Hercegovina. Bosnian Groats were suddenly liberated,nBosnian Moslems confirmed as agas and beys, whilenBosnian Serbs, apart from the Military Frontiersmen, remainednthe rayah.nFelled by a dumdum bullet in a battle that began longnbefore he was born, my father lay in front of Kupres,nwatching a burning mosque. Whether he was aware of it asna symbol, he never told me. But he did tell me of hisndespair, and terror in the night.nInside Kupres, Serb Military Frontiersmen of the ThirdnBosnian Partisan Military Frontier Corps barricaded themselvesnbehind captured Ustasha field pieces. A tall, darknMilitary Frontiersman said to the Montenegrins, “Frontiersmennnever fled before the Turks!”nAfter the Montenegrins retreated, the 13 Serbs werenassaulted with hand grenades and killed where they lay. ThenUstashe piled up their bodies, doused them with gasoline,nand burnt them to cinders.nJust over the mountain from Dubrovnik, Kupres, black,nburnt-out, choked with men and cattie, writhed silentnamong the wooded hills. Not far from it lay the immensenPerucica, the last European jungle.nLet the Cross and the Mace clash,nWhose head bursts, woe is him!nsang Petar Petrovic Njegos, Prince-Bishop of 19th-centurynMontenegro. Seven feet tall, this mortal enemy of Bosniannand Hercegovinian Moslems died at 38, a victim of bordernwars, beheadings, impalements, and an eclectic, Europeannknowledge. In Naples he ate oranges to cure his TB; to keepnhis aim true, he’d throw some of them high in the air andndrill them with his pistol.nToday, in Bosnia, Njegos is reproached for writing ofngenocide. His Mountain Garland, printed first in Vienna inn1847, sings of war between the Cross and the Crescent,nbetween Europe and Asia, light and darkness.n”Die, Serb,” Suleiman Sokolovic, a Hercegovinian, saidnto me in the Yugoslav People’s Army. His eyes were blue,nhis hair blond, his face and head long. Six feet four, he wasnthe machine gunner, while I, being an inch shorter, was hisnhelper.n”Suleiman,” I said, “in 1969 you’re still a Turk becausenyou want to be one. Your forefathers were Serbs before theynbetrayed themselves and their people, and became agas.”n”In the good old times, you would’ve been my serf,” saidnSuleiman.n”Maybe,” I said. “But maybe your head would’ve beennstuck upon a stake, in front of my house in Montenegro!”nHe grinned, a bleary, tired, not wholly unfriendly smile.nWe marched on, he lugging his M43,1 carrying my Mausernand his gear.nFor Bosnian peasants in 1941, everything was simple.nnnMAY 19881 31n