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The Previous Albania By NIGEL HESELTINE NATIONALISTS, since Wolf Tone visited the new French Republic, have often regarded new states as models for, and proofs of, the possibility of their ideals. And since the reality of a small state is often far different from the projects that went before it, believers in a Welsh Republic, Dominion, or other arrangement, do well when they get behind the exhilarating independence of a new state, and the facile newspaper accounts of it, and see how the lives of the inhabitants there shape themselves. When I visited Albania in 1937 it was still customary for Welsh nationalists to visit Ireland, see Dail Eireann, separate coinage, telefon in Irish, pillar-boxes painted green, and see one side of the national picture. Ireland has been fortunate in her fertility which makes her, in spite of economic wars, an integral part of the economy of Western Europe, so that her standard of living has actually risen since 1922. In Albania it was not so. The new state grew out of the Balkan Wars of 1912-14, which wiped Turkey out of Europe, and the European War, in which Austria-Hungary disappeared. Like Ireland she had a devastating civil war in the early '20's, which however, left no bridges to rebuild, no public buildings to re-roof, since the Turks had never built any. It was on the ruins of part of the Turkish Empire that Albania was founded, and those ruins consisted largely of derelict mosques. Often, as I stood on the ridges of the immense mountains that cross the country in all directions, and looked out on the sea of peaks and deep valleys, ranging like waves of stone into Macedonia, I tried to reconcile my own delight in the vast wildness of this terrain where I was free to walk in the hot sun with my pack, lie out on starry nights and sleep, bathe in freezing mountain torrents, pick gentians, watch wild tortoises with the apathy of the malaria-ridden peasants of the south, squatting listlessly in front of their doorways, with the claustrophobia of young men in towns like Premeti and Korca who pined for Paris or Brooklyn, with the cynicism of the Mati tribesmen of the central province who drew pensions from fellow-tribesman Zog, and left their fields sprouting bents and weeds. In Premeti a young man from the French lycee of Korca suddenly asked me, Do you believe in God ? I was taken aback, and con-