10 
LAND & WATER 
September 13, 1917 
to spare for lunch. There were many miles of slow creeping 
over freshly-crushed rock between there and the whited ruins 
of Liascovik, and several precarious crossings over temporary 
bridges in the bottoms of the deep valleys that gash the bare 
rocky ranges of this region ; but even so there was time for 
coffee and a glass of vermouth with the Italian commander 
at the latter point, and a glimpse of tlu- scars a vengeful 
Greek army had left upon the mosques and other Turkish 
buildiuKs when they entered the town in the last Balkan 
war. 
A long straight road with a surface like a billiard table in 
the valley of the Drinupoli, where the big I'Mat rolled olf miK- 
after mile at a rate close to seventv miles an hour, made up 
for the delay incidental to running' into the daily cloudburst 
in the lofty passes of the Aeropus range, and the perlect 
metalling and broad curves of the almost interminable zigzag 
of the still higher, coastal range, made it possible to make up 
fur the slow going through the mile-long caravans of foodstuffs- 
the Italians were rushing through to the starving population 
of lanina, which thev had just occupied. We caught our hist 
glimpse of the cobalt tloor of the Adriatic frfim the windy 
notch of a snowv pass at si.\ o'clock, and an hour later 
with time and to spare to wash off the accumulated dust of 
half the width of the Balkan Peninsula with a sea-bath before 
dinner, stepped out of our car on the sun-hot shingle of the 
beach of Santa Quaranta. 
Our record of" something like ten hours actual running 
time between l-lorina and Santa Quaranta. remarkable as it 
seemed at the moment, soon went into inglorious eclipse. 
An ofiicer in the Italian transport service— a man who had 
been a famous racing driver before the war — in haste to reach 
Italy from Salonika, drove from the latter city to Santa 
Quaranta — from the /Egean to the Adriatic— between day- 
iireak and dark of a long June day. He was sixteen hours on 
the road — all but three of which he was himself at the wheel 
— and in less than four hours of his arrival in Santa Quaranta. 
a swift destroyer had landed him at Brindisi, so that his 
time from Salonika to the shores of Italy was under twenty 
hours. I had received letters in Salonika which had taken 
live weeks to reach there from Rome. 
A New Mail Route 
The opening of the Santa Quaranta road to regular trafSc 
has given a safe and speedy route to Italy, France and Eng- 
land for urgent mail, and it is not improbable it may be 
utilised to advantage in conveying troops to and from the 
Balkan theatre. Its value for these purposes, as well as for 
any other transport, where great speed and practically coin- 
plete safety are desirable, will prove incalculable ; but the 
reports which have been circiilated that it would ultimately 
become the main line of communications for the forces holding 
the Macedonia line is absurd in the extreme. Not a half- 
dozen roads, built though they were with all the skill of the 
old Romans (and the Santa Quaranta road has small odds to 
ask on that score), over 250 to 350 miles of momitains, would 
suffice to carry all that such a force as the one now main- 
tained by the Allies in the Salonika area needs for its mainte- 
nance. So far as its main wants are concerned, the Salonika 
expedition is still on an " island " ; its principal communica- 
tions must be by sea until the end. 
Far from finding any obstacles put in the way of remaining 
for a while in Albania and seeing something of what was 
going on there, I found the Italian authorities ready and 
willing to grant me all facilities for going anywhere I pleased. 
" 1 have no objection whatever," said General Ferrero to me, 
" to your seeing what you please, and writing about anything 
you see. There is nothing here that we shall not be glad to 
iiave you see and write about. In fact, all I shall ask is that 
you will confine yourself to writing of things that you rfosee, 
and to refrain from writing of the things you do npl see ; that 
is, to form no judgments on secondhand or hearsay evidence." 
The General was as good as his word, and as a consequence 
there was hardly a mile of the newly-built roads of Southern 
Albania which I did not pass over by motor in the course 
of the mouth that followed, and not many of the main trails 
that I did not cover at least a portion of on foot or in the 
saddle. There was not a single city or large town which I did 
not visit, and scarcely an important village. All in all, I 
could not have asked for a better opportunity to carry out the 
parting injunction of my missionary friend in .Salonika to 
" try to see how the Italian is getting cm with the Albanian." 
There is perhaps no other episode in the sombre history of 
the present great world war so irradiated with romance as 
that of the coming of the Italiansto Albania Meridional. There 
is not a single stone-paved pass which to-day rings with the 
tread of the hob-nailed Bersaglien or Alpini which did not 
echo to the clanking armour of the Roman Legionaries of a 
score or more of centuries ago ; not a valley which did not 
yield of its fruitfulness to the Roman colonies just as freely 
as it does to-day to maintain the descendants of those who 
sent out th(jse colonies. For the Italian troops occupying 
this part of the Adriatic littoral have been able to draw much 
of their sustenance from tlie country, and thofee who have 
produced and sold them food and forage are largely descended 
from the colonists planted there by the first Roman Empire. 
These latter still call themselves Riimene ; they have stead- 
fastly refused to mix and intennarry with others of the Balkan 
peoples, and, through centuries of Moslem rule, they have 
kept to the basic forms of Christian worship. The women of 
these Romanic villages wear the cross tatooed on their fore- 
heads to this day. The language spoken by these people 
has so much in common with Latin that the least educated'of 
Italian soldiers — even the Piedinontese peasant, whose native 
speech is the least Latin of all Italians — has no difficulty in 
making himself understood in the most primitive villages. 
Latin Albanians 
If the Italian has something of the feeling of one coming 
again to his own in meeting the Rumene of Albania, imagine 
to what depths he is stirred when he finds that the easiest 
grades which the precise instruments of his engineers indicate 
should be followed in surmounting a lofty mountain range 
coincide tothe fraction of a degree with those run by the engi- 
neers of Augustus and Hadrian ; what must be his pride when 
he sees that the old Roman bridges — with the great stones of 
abutment and coping eroded smooth with the wind and rain 
of 2,000 years but otherwise intact — are deemed fit to bear the 
surging traffic of what must be one of the most sorely tried 
of all the great war roads ! how he is moved in spirit by all 
of this, how the soul of the ancient Roman awakes again in 
the modern one, maybe judged from the words of anoihcerof 
engineers to whom I had expressed my amazement and admira- 
tion at the tremendous amount of labour which' had been ex- 
pended on the embanking of a sharp bend where the Santa 
Quaranta road zigzagged up the steep range behind Delvino. 
' " The explanation is very simple," he said. "■ Those huge 
stones at the bottom of the embankment were probabl}' laid 
by the Phamecians (Phoenece is the old name of Delvino), 
while there is no doubt that the next ten feet of courses were 
laid by the Romans. Well; that being so it would indeed be 
a shameful thing on my part if I failed to make the super- 
structure worthy of the foundation." 
I have heard many French and British officers express 
their astonishment at what they termed the miracle of con- 
struction represented by the Santa Quaranta road. I think 
I have discovered the inspiration of that " mir<^clc." It 
is only the old Roman " showing the way." 
But it is not only the works of old Rome which stir a senti- 
mental interest in Southern Albania in the breast of the Italian, 
for it was in this region also that those sturdy navigators, the 
Venetians, pushed farther from the sea than anywhere else. 
The great castle at Agroycastro, from the ramparts of which 
(ieneral Ferrero read the proclamation of Albanian Inde- 
pendence, was built by the X'enetian, and so also were those 
at Teppelina, Santa Quaranta, \'allona, and many other points. 
But the Venetians left one legacy worth far more than crumb- 
ling ruins. Following an ancient custom of theirs every 
trans-Adriatic colonist was given a gold coin for ev-ery olive 
tree that he planted ; the consequence being that in the 
vicinity of Vallona alone the centuries-old veteran trees, that 
date from the Venetian occupation, in'ay be numbered by the 
hundreds of thousands. ' 
It is the sympathy engendered by the Italian's feeling that 
he is only coming to his own again in Southern Albania that 
has made his success in getting on with the nati\e peoples 
so remarkable. With the Rumene the bond of blood made his 
task an easy one ; with the Mohamedan Albanian uniform 
justice and generosity have been at the roots of his success. 
For the first time in his history the Albanian has learned what 
fair play is. and, sturdy fighter that he is, he is too good a 
sport not to appreciate it. The Turk had destn^yed the 
churches of the Christian Albanian, the Greek had destroyed 
the mosques of the Moslem ; the Italian, taking a page from 
the British colonial book, has pursued' a resolute course of 
non-interference with either. 
It is a remarkable anomaly that Southern Albania, in the 
midst of a military occupation and during the greatest of 
world wars, should be enjoying the coinpletest spell of peace and 
prosperity it has ever experienced. This is due to the fact 
that the protection afforded liiui by Italian occupation has 
given the Albanian the first real incentive to work he has ever 
known. With internecine wars keeping the men busy, and 
with the Turkish tax-gatherer and raids of unfriendly neigh- 
bours always threatening to take all the women cpuld raise in 
the fields, there was, naturally, nothing to encourage any more 
effort than was needed to raise enough to keep alive on. 
