301 CHRONICLESnA DIRGE FOR BOSNIAn”Whom I served—by him I was buried!”n— 14th-Century Bosnian Inscriptionn^ ^ XT’ or now I began to get the news from Croatia,” wrotenv. Mrs. Ruth Mitchell, an American in Dubrovnik, innMay of 1941. “I could not believe a quarter of them.nUnfortunately, I was soon to know that they were a weaknunderstatement of the truth. Men were soon to arrive innDubrovnik itself, hung with strings of Serbian tongues andnwith bowls of Serbian eyes for sale.”nFrom the ridge of the Dinaric Alps, Dubrovnik looksngolden against a deep-blue sea. Olive groves and vineyardsnsurround it, and the air smells of pomegranates and orangesnand exotic, Mediterranean flowers. When they first reachednit in the seventh century, the wandering Slavs must havenregarded Ragusa as a paradise.nBosnians, Bogomils who converted into Islam in the 15thncentury, were the men Ruth Mitchell saw in wartimenDubrovnik. Former Turkish Military Frontiersmen, they,nragged and dark, strolled through white, polished, sundrenchednDubrovnik. Filigreed hanjars glistened in theirnsashes.nUntil 1878, these Islamized Serbs or Croats manned anline that once divided the Eastern and the Western RomannEmpire. Starting with the 15th century, the former adminis­nby Momcilo Selicnnntrative limes became the Military Frontier which sunderednAustria from Turkey, East from West, Islam from Christianity,nNorth from South. Marauding bands, growing overnightninto hosts, ran back and forth across it, singing epicnsongs of treason and courage.n”Jovan, we’ll cut your heart out!” my father heard thenBosnian Ustashe cry, in 1942.nThe gunfire had subsided, and the Fourth Battalion ofnTito’s Fourth Montenegrin Proletarian Brigade lay facendown in the rye. Most of the fighters were dead, cut downnless than 150 feet before the small town of Kupres, innBosnia.nSlowly, my father took out his pistol and put it against hisnhead. His name was not Jovan, but he was a Serb.nThe day before the storming of Kupres, on August 10,n1942, he and his soldiers had come upon the Bosnian Serbnvillage of Gornji Malovan and found a house full ofnheadless corpses. The old men, women, and children hadnbeen butchered above a hole cut in the wooden floor, andntheir blood collected in a barrel, in the cellar directly under.nThe men who massacred them were the Bosnian Croatsnand the Bosnian Moslems of the Ustasha Black Legion, an