Transcriber’s Note

There is no page 244 in the book, as mentioned on the ‘Colonel Militch
on Diana’ illustration on Page 220.

The words Topolchar and Topolchor have been left as spelt.

The words wagons and waggons have been left as spelt.


[Illustration: COLONEL MILITCH, COMMANDANT OF THE SECOND REGIMENT (ON
THE LEFT) AND HIS CHIEF OF STAFF; WITH THE REGIMENTAL FLAG

_Frontispiece_]




    An English
    Woman-Sergeant
    in the
    Serbian Army

    BY
    FLORA SANDES

    With an Introduction by
    SLAVKO Y. GROUITCH
    _Secrétaire-Général of the Serbian Ministry of
    Foreign Affairs_


    HODDER AND STOUGHTON
    LONDON, NEW YORK, TORONTO




INTRODUCTION


Innumerable have been the manifestations of sympathy, generosity, and
of the sincere desire to help Serbia given by the British people to
their little Ally since the very beginning of the War. No words could
ever express the deep gratitude of the Serbian Nation for the splendid
services rendered by the many British Medical Missions, whose staffs,
men and women, have nursed the sick and wounded without a thought for
the hardships and dangers to which they have been personally exposed,
and which, especially during the typhus epidemic and, later on, during
the Great Retreat, were very serious indeed. British women, have played
a most prominent part in this humanitarian work of charity and mercy,
and some of them have even given their lives for the Cause.

When the history of their splendid achievements is written--as I hope
will be done some day--the name of Miss Flora Sandes will certainly
figure in it with a special acknowledgment. In the interesting
pages which follow she will herself give a vivid description of her
experiences during the Retreat in the ranks of the Serbian Army, in
which, I believe, she was the only foreign woman allowed to serve in
a fighting capacity. That in itself speaks very highly of the esteem
and confidence in which she is held in Serbia. But she only took to
a rifle when there was no more nursing to be done, as, owing to the
Army retreating, the wounded could not be picked up and had to be
left behind. Before that she had worked in Serbia for eighteen months
as a voluntary nurse, practically without interruption, having left
the country but twice, and that on a short visit to London to collect
funds and bring back with her dressings and other hospital supplies
which were badly wanted. During the typhus epidemic she volunteered
to go to Valjevo, which was the centre of the disease and where eight
Serbian doctors and many nurses had already succumbed. The same fate
very nearly overtook her, but fortunately she recovered and resumed
immediately her self-imposed duty.

Such examples of self-sacrifice, added to so many others given by
British men and women in Serbia, have implanted in the hearts of the
Serbians a deep love and admiration for Great Britain, who may well be
proud of such sons and daughters.

  SLAVKO Y. GROUITCH,

  _Secrétaire-Général of the_
  _Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs_.




CONTENTS


    CHAPTER I

                                                       PAGE

    REJOINING THE SERBIANS, NOVEMBER, 1915--THE
    SECOND REGIMENTAL AMBULANCE                          1

    CHAPTER II

    A SERBIAN AMBULANCE AT WORK--WE START
    TO RETREAT                                          22

    CHAPTER III

    A RIDE TO KALABAC AND A BATTLE IN THE
    SNOW                                                46

    CHAPTER IV

    I MEET THE FOURTH COMPANY--A COLD
    NIGHT RIDE                                          77

    CHAPTER V

    WE SAY GOOD-BYE TO SERBIA AND TAKE TO
    THE ALBANIAN MOUNTAINS                             104


    CHAPTER VI

    FIGHTING ON MOUNT CHUKUS                           126

    CHAPTER VII

    ELBASAN--WE PUSH ON TOWARDS THE
    COAST                                              148

    CHAPTER VIII

    SERBIAN CHRISTMAS DAY AT DURAZZO--AEROPLANE
    RAIDS                                              170

    CHAPTER IX

    WE GO TO CORFU                                     192

    CHAPTER X

    THE “SLAVA DAY” OF THE SECOND REGIMENT             230




CHAPTER I

REJOINING THE SERBIANS, NOVEMBER, 1915--THE SECOND REGIMENTAL AMBULANCE


Events moved so rapidly in Serbia after the Bulgarians declared war
that when I reached Salonica last winter I found it full of nurses and
doctors who had been home on leave and who had gone out there to rejoin
their various British hospital units, only to find themselves unable to
get up into the country.

I had been home for a holiday after working in Serbian hospitals since
the very beginning of the war, but when things began to look so serious
again I hurried back to Serbia. We had rather an eventful voyage, as
the French boat I was on was carrying ammunition as well as passengers,
and the submarines seemed to make a dead set at us. At Malta we were
held up for three days, waiting for the coast to clear. The third
night I had been dining ashore, and on getting back to the boat, about
eleven, found the military police in charge, and the ship and all the
passengers being searched for a spy and some missing documents. We were
not allowed to go down to our cabins until they had been thoroughly
ransacked, but as nothing incriminating was found we eventually
proceeded on our way, with a torpedo-destroyer on either side of us as
an escort. The boats were always slung out in readiness, and we were
cautioned never to lose sight of our life-belts. We had to put in again
at Piræus, and again at Lemnos for a few days, so that it was November
3rd before we finally reached Salonica--having taken fourteen days from
Marseilles--only to find that the railway line had been cut, and there
was no possible way of getting up into Serbia.

My intention had been to go back into my old Serbian hospital at
Valjevo to work under the Serbian Red Cross as I did before; that was
out of the question now, of course, as Valjevo was already in the hands
of the Austrians, but I thought I might get up to Nish and get my
orders from the President of the Serbian Red Cross there. I inquired
from a Serbian officer staying at the hotel, who had just ridden down
from Prisren, if it would be possible to ride up into Serbia, but he
most strongly discouraged all idea of riding, saying that with every
facility at his disposal, and relays of fresh horses all along the
route, it had taken him ten days to ride from Prisren to Salonica,
and that during that time he had frequently been unable to obtain
food either for himself or his horses; that, furthermore, it was very
dangerous even with an escort, as part of the way was through hostile
Albania, and that all the horses were needed for the Army. I gave up
that idea, therefore, and set to work to find out where I could come
into touch with the Serbians, and finally found I could go to Monastir,
or, to call it by its Serbian name, Bitol. Accordingly, I, with four
other nurses and a doctor whose acquaintance I had made on the boat,
who also found themselves unable to reach their original destinations,
left for Bitol the next day.

Arrived at Bitol, I at once made inquiries about the next step farther,
and found that Prilip, about twenty-five miles farther on, was still
in the hands of the Serbians, though its evacuation was expected any
minute, and even now the road from Bitol to Prilip was not considered
safe on account of marauding Bulgarian comitadjes, or irregulars.
However, the English Consul had to go out there, and he said he would
take us with him to see how the land lay, and whether we were needed in
the hospital there.

I spent the afternoon prowling round Bitol, mostly in the Turkish
quarter.

The next day we went with the Consul to Prilip--though up to the last
moment I was afraid we should not go, as there was so much talk about
the road not being safe--some of us in the touring car and the rest in
a motor-lorry, with an escort of Serbian soldiers, all armed to the
teeth. I took my camp bed and blankets with me, on the off chance of
being able to stay at Prilip, as I was gradually edging my way up to
the Front, leaving the rest of my baggage in Bitol to be sent after me.
We got there without any mishap, keeping a sharp look-out for Bulgarian
patrols. We found a Serbian military hospital at Prilip, and I asked
the Upravnik or Director if I might stay and work there, to which he
consented, but added that he was afraid that it would not be for long,
as they were expecting to have to fly before the Bulgarians any day. I
accordingly got a room at the hotel, and the Consul left me an orderly
to look after me, named Joe, who could speak a little English. I was
very pleased at getting into a Serbian hospital again in spite of all
difficulties, as the opinion in Salonica seemed to be that it was
impossible; but I must say I felt rather lost when the cars went back
that evening and I was left alone, the only Englishwoman in Prilip.

The first thing I did was to turn all the furniture, including the bed,
out of the room in the tenth-rate pub., which was the best hotel that
Prilip boasted, and made Joe scrub the floor and put in my own camp bed.

I take the following extract out of my diary, written on my first
night in Prilip:

“Monday, 8th, 8.30 p.m.--I am sitting up in bed in my sleeping sack,
writing this in a very small room in S---- Hotel, Prilip. The room
contains (besides my camp bed) a rickety chair, and a small table with
my little rubber basin, a cracked mirror and my faithful tea-basket.
From the café below comes a deafening chorus of Serbian soldiers. I am
glad there is a good lock on the door, as someone is making a violent
effort to come in, and from the fierce altercation going on between
him and the boy-chambermaid, scraps of which I can understand, he is
apparently under the impression that I have taken his room--I may have
for all I know, but anyhow the proprietor gave it to me.

“The view from my window is not calculated to inspire confidence
either. It looks on to a stableyard full of pigs, donkeys and the most
villainous-looking Turks squatting about at their supper. These, I tell
myself, are the ones who will come in and cut my throat if Prilip is
taken to-night, as I don’t think any responsible person in the town
knows I am here. However, if I live through the night things will
probably look more cheery in the morning.”

In the middle of the night I was awakened by another fearful racket in
the passage. “That’s done it,” I thought, sitting up in bed with my
electric torch in one hand and my service revolver in the other, “it’s
like my rotten luck that the Bulgars should pitch on to-night to come
in and sack the town.” However, a very few minutes convinced me that
it was only two drunks coming up to bed, and, telling myself not to be
more of a fool than nature intended, I turned over and went to sleep
again.

I think my morbid reflections must have been brought on by the supper I
had had. Joe, my orderly, had, for reasons best known to himself, taken
me to a different restaurant to the one where we had been to lunch with
the Consul, assuring me that it was much better; it was not, very much
worse, in fact, though I should not have thought such a thing could be
possible. It was full of soldiers and comitadjes drinking. At first
I could get no food at all, and when it did come it was uneatable. I
had supper with an American doctor I met in the town next night, and
he informed me that food was so scarce and dear in Prilip that to get
anything of a meal you had to have your meat in one restaurant, your
potatoes in another, and your coffee in a third!

Next morning I went round to the hospital, and in the afternoon one of
the doctors took me round and introduced me to the Serbian Chief of
Police, who was most friendly and polite, got me a nice little room
close to the hospital, and apologised for not being able to ask me to
come to his house as his guest as his wife was ill. This is the sort
of courtesy that has always been extended to me in Serbia; they think
the best of everything they can offer is not too good for the stranger
within their gates, and I began to feel much cheered up.

There were not very many wounded in the hospital, but a great many
sick, and dysentery cases beginning to come in rapidly. I was soon
quite at home there, being used to the ways of Serbian hospitals. The
Director was going to Bitol for a few days, and I asked him to ask
the head of the Sanitary Department there, Dr. Nikotitch, if I might
join a regimental ambulance as nurse, as I heard that the ambulance of
the Second Regiment was some miles farther up the road, just behind
the Front. The Second and Fourteenth Regiments were then holding the
Baboona Pass, a very strongly fortified position in the mountains,
against the Bulgarians.

I stayed about a week in the hospital; there was plenty of work to
do--in fact, to have done it properly there would have been enough for
a dozen nurses, as dysentery was rapidly becoming an epidemic, and the
hospital was soon full up; we could take in no more. We were fearfully
short of everything, beds, bedding, drugs, and we simply had to do the
best we could with practically no kind of hospital appliances. Any kind
of proper nursing was impossible, most of the patients lying on the
floor in their muddy, trench-stained uniforms.

One afternoon two of the doctors motored out to the ambulance of
the Second Regiment and took me with them. We stopped first at the
ambulance of the Fourteenth, where we found twenty unfortunate
dysentery cases lying on the bare ground in two ragged tents groaning.
We had a long chat with the doctor of the Second Regimental ambulance,
and had coffee and cigarettes in his room--a loft over the stable.
That is to say, I did not do much of the talking as he was a Greek,
and besides his own language only talked Turkish and not very fluent
Serbian, although later on, strange to say, when I joined the same
ambulance, we used to carry on long conversations together in a kind of
mongrel lingo very largely helped out by signs.

[Illustration: FRENCH STEAMER WITH BOATS SLUNG OUT READY AND ESCORT

Page 2]

[Illustration: AMBULANCE OF SECOND REGIMENT. OX WAGGONS WHICH HAVE JUST
BROUGHT IN WOUNDED

Page 15]

We visited a large empty barracks on our way back, and made
arrangements for it to be turned into a dysentery hospital, as this
disease was beginning to assume serious proportions, and our
hospital was full up. This was never carried out, however, owing to
the Bulgarians’ rapid advance a few days later.

The next day the Director came back, and brought with him papers
whereby I was officially attached to the ambulance of the Second
Regiment; and it was part of my extraordinary luck to have just hit on
this particular regiment, which is acknowledged to be the finest in the
Serbian Army. Everybody was extremely kind to me in the hospital, and
all the doctors asked me to stay there and work, saying I could have no
idea of the hardships of ambulance life; but as I knew that it would
not be many days before we all had to clear out of Prilip before the
advancing Bulgarians, and that would mean my going back to Salonica,
and losing all chance of staying with the Serbians (whom I had grown
thoroughly attached to in my work among them for the last year and a
half), I adhered to my resolution to throw in my lot with the Army.

I always had my meals at the hospital now, and we had quite a merry
supper that night, and they all drank my health, declaring they would
see me back in three days, when I had been frozen out of my small tent
on the hills, where it was already bitterly cold. The next afternoon
I went all round the hospital and said good-bye to everyone; I was
very sorry to leave my patients, they are so affectionate, and always
so grateful for anything one does for them. One young soldier was my
special pet; he had been driven mad from the shock of a shell bursting
close to him, though he was not wounded. He was such a nice gentle
lad, and I used to spend a good bit of time with him, coaxing him to
swallow spoonfuls of milk, as he would not take anything from anyone
else, though the Bolnichars--hospital orderlies--were very kind to him.
I heard afterwards that he lived till the hospital was evacuated, but
died at Bitol. A good many of the men were from the Second Regiment,
and when they heard I was going to their ambulance we only said _au
revoir_. They assured me we should meet again when they were sent back
to their regiment, as they would come and see me directly they had the
smallest pain.

It was rather late in the day when Joe and I finally set out in a very
rickety carriage commandeered by martial law, with a very unwilling
driver, and a horse that could hardly crawl. The harness, which was
tied up with bits of string, kept coming to pieces, and the driver kept
stopping to repair it. Joe began to look very uneasy, and kept peering
round in the gathering dusk for any signs of wandering Bulgarian
patrols, or comitadjes, as it was a very lonely road. At last, after
what seemed an interminable time, we arrived at the ambulance, which
was on the grass by the side of the road. They were not expecting me
then as it was late, and the Serbians turn in soon after sunset. There
was apparently nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat. One of them took us
round to the doctor’s quarters, the same loft I had visited a few days
before, not far from the ambulance. He turned out full of apologies,
and said that he had had notice that I was coming that day, but that as
it was so late he had given me up.

It seemed a bit of a problem where I was to sleep, but eventually some
of the soldiers turned out of one of their small bivouac tents. These
tents are only a sort of little lean-to’s, which you crawl into, just
the height of a rifle, two of which can be used instead of poles. You
seem a bit cramped at first, but after I had lived in one for a couple
of months I did not notice it. All the tents were bunched up together,
touching each other, with four soldiers, or hospital orderlies, in
each. I insisted, to their great surprise, in having mine moved to a
clean spot about fifteen yards away from the others, and some more or
less clean hay put in to lie upon. There was a good deal of excitement
and confusion, the whole camp turning out and assisting. They could
not imagine why I wanted it moved, and declared that the Bulgarian
comitadjes would come down in the night and cut my throat before the
sentry knew they were there. Afterwards, when I was more used to war,
and accustomed to sleeping in the middle of a regiment, and to sleeping
when and where one could, in any amount of noise, I used to laugh at
my scruples then, and only wondered they were all as good-tempered
and patient as they were with what must have seemed to them my
extraordinary English ideas. The doctor sent me down some supper of
bread and cheese and eggs, and presently came down himself and sat on
the grass beside me as I ate it, and altogether they all did their
best to make me comfy, and were as amiable as only Serbians can be
when you rouse them out in the middle of the night and turn everything
upside down. It reminded me somewhat of my arrival in Valjevo, at the
beginning of the typhus epidemic, when owing to the vagaries of the
Serbian trains I was landed at the hospital at 3 a.m., after everyone
had given me up. After I had finished my supper I crawled into my tent,
tightly rolled myself up into the blankets as it was a very cold night,
and slept like a top on my bed of hay.




CHAPTER II

A SERBIAN AMBULANCE AT WORK--WE START TO RETREAT


Next morning we all turned out at daybreak, and I got a better view of
my surroundings. The ambulance itself consisted of one largish tent,
where the patients lie on their clothes on very muddy straw, until they
can be removed to the base hospital by bullock-wagon. This is done as
often as transport permits. There were a few cases of dressings, drugs,
etc., in the tent, and a small table for writing at. There were about
twenty patients in at one time, some of them sick and some wounded.
About a dozen little tents, similar to mine, for the soldiers and
ambulance men, and two or three wagons completed the outfit.

There was a Serbian girl, about seventeen, helping; she was very unlike
any other Serbian woman I had ever met, lived and dressed just like
the soldiers, and was very good to the sick men. She spoke German very
well, so that we understood each other and became very good friends;
she gave me lots of tips, and though I had been under the impression
that I knew something about camping out and roughing it, having done so
already in various parts of the world, she could walk rings round me in
that respect. The first thing the men did after I had had some tea with
them by the camp fire was to set to work to convince me of the error
of my ways, and to move my little tent back to its old spot before any
harm could happen to me. We don’t have breakfast in Serbia, but have an
early glass of tea, very hot and sweet, without milk.

The doctor came down shortly afterwards to prescribe for the men who
were sick, and then a couple of orderlies and myself dressed the
wounded ones, those who were able to walk coming out of the tent and
squatting down on the grass outside, where there was more room, and
light enough to see what you were doing. They kept straggling in all
day from Baboona, where there was a battle going on; it was not far
away, and the guns sounded very plain. There were not very many
seriously wounded, but I am afraid that was because the path down the
mountains is so steep that it is almost impossible to get a badly
wounded man down on a stretcher. Any who are able to walk down do so,
and they were glad to get their wounds dressed and be able to lie down.
At lunch-time we knocked off for a couple of hours, and I went back
with the doctor to his loft. We had lunch in great style, sitting on
his bed, there being no chairs, and with a blue pocket-handkerchief
spread out between us for a table-cloth. He said they were expecting to
have a retreat at any moment, and that we must always be in readiness
for it as soon as the order arrived. All the patients we had were to
go off that afternoon if the bullock-wagons arrived. This question of
transport is always a terrible problem; in many cases bullock-wagons
are the only things that will stand the rough tracks, although here
there was a good road all the way to Bitol, and had we had a service
of motor-cars we could have saved the poor fellows an immense amount
of suffering. Imagine yourself with a shattered leg lying in company
with three or four others on the floor of a springless bullock-wagon,
jolting like that over the rough roads for twenty or thirty miles. When
I was in Kragujewatz we used to get in big batches of wounded who had
travelled like that for three or four days straight from the Front,
with only the first rough dressing which each man carries in his pocket.

The wagons came that afternoon, but only two or three for the lying
down patients; several poor chaps who were so sick they could hardly
crawl had to turn out and start on a weary walk of a good many miles
to the nearest hospital at Prilip. One man protested that he would
never do it, and I really didn’t think he could, and said so; however,
the ambulance men, who were well up to their work, explained that it
was absolutely imperative that all should get off into safety day
by day, otherwise when the order came suddenly to retreat we might
find ourselves landed with an overflowing tentful of sick and wounded
men, and no transport available on the spot. “Go, brother,” they said
kindly, “Idi polako, polako” (“Go slowly, slowly”), and fortified
with a drink of cognac from the ambulance stores, and a handful of
cigarettes from me, he and the others like him set off.

We all turned in prepared that evening, and I was cautioned to take not
even my boots off. Later on, sleeping in one’s clothes didn’t strike me
as anything unusual; in fact, two months later, when we had finished
marching and arrived at Durazzo, it was some time before I remembered
that it was usual to undress when you went to bed, and that once upon a
time, long, long ago, I used to do the same.

In the middle of the night a special messenger arrived with a carriage
from the English Consul at Bitol, advising me to come back at once, and
that a motor-car would meet me in Prilip, and take me back to Bitol. I
knew perfectly well that I should not be able to find the motor-car in
the middle of the night in Prilip, which is as dark as the nethermost
regions, there not being a lamp in the town, and that it would probably
mean sitting up in the carriage in one of those dirty little streets
all night; so I said all right, I would see about it in the morning,
and went to bed again. In the morning I had another look at the
telegram, and as it was not an _order_ to go back, but only advising me
strongly to do so, I said I meant to stop. They all seemed very pleased
because I said I wanted to stick with the Serbians, and, as we all sat
round the camp fire in the bitter cold of a November sunrise, we drank
the healths of England and Serbia together in tin mugs full of strong,
hot tea.

Later on during the day came another telegram, and I must say that the
English Consul at Bitol was a perfect trump in the way he did his duty
by stray English subjects and looked after their safety, before he
finally had himself to leave for Salonica. A Serbian officer was sent
out from somewhere, and he said that if I liked to throw in my lot with
them and stop he would send out a wagon and horses, in which I could
live and sleep, and in which I could carry my luggage. I hadn’t very
much of the latter, and what I had I was perfectly willing to abandon
if it was any bother, but he wouldn’t hear of that; and in due course
the wagon arrived, and proved, when a little hay had been put on the
floor to sleep on, a most snug abode.

The next day the wounded kept straggling in all day, faster than we
could evacuate them, and when the order came at ten o’clock that
night that the regiment was forced to retreat from Baboona, and that
the ambulance was to start at once, we had sixteen wounded in the
tent, twelve of them unable to walk. The Serbian ambulances travel
very light, and half an hour after receiving our orders we were on
the move, the men being adepts at packing up tents and starting at a
moment’s notice. At the last moment, while the big ambulance tent was
being taken down, a man with a very bad shrapnel wound in the ankle
was carried in, and as it was blowing a gale, and we couldn’t keep a
lamp alight, I dressed it by the light of a pocket electric torch,
which I fortunately had with me. They said at first that he would have
to go on as he was, but as I knew very well that it might be three
or four days before he would get another dressing I insisted on them
getting out some iodine, gauze, etc., and kneeling in the mud, and
with some difficulty under the circumstances as the tent was being
taken down over my head, I cut off his boot and bloody bandages (he
had been wounded in the morning) and cleaned and dressed the wound.
He was awfully good, poor fellow, though it hurt him horribly, and he
hardly made a murmur. Then two ambulance men carried him out to the
ox-wagon, three of which had appeared from somewhere, I don’t know
where. I found the Kid, as I called her, had been working like a
Trojan in the pitch dark and pelting rain helping the men through the
thick slippery mud down the bank to the road, and had settled four men,
lying down, in each wagon, that being all they could hold, and had also
decided the knotty point which should be the four unlucky ones who had
to walk--these four being, I may say, quite well enough to walk, but
naturally not being anxious to do so. When they were all started off,
she and I clambered into our wagon, and the whole cavalcade set off in
the pitch dark, not having the faintest idea (at least, we had not, I
don’t know if anybody else had) where we were going to travel to or
how long for. We were a long cavalcade with all the ambulance staff,
the Komorra or transport, and a good many soldiers all armed, and a
most unpleasant night we had rumbling along in the dark, halting every
few miles, not knowing whether the Bulgars had got there first and cut
the road in front of us, or what was happening. It was bitterly cold
besides, and as the Kid and I were black and blue from jolting about
on the floor of our wagon I began to wonder how the poor wounded ever
survived it at all.

A little way on we picked up a young recruit who said he was wounded
and couldn’t walk; our driver demurred, saying that he had had orders
that no one else was to use our wagon, but we said, of course, the poor
boy was to come in if he was wounded. He lay on my feet all night,
which didn’t add to my comfort, though it kept them warm. He was
evidently starving, so we gave him half a loaf of bread that we had
with us, and some brandy out of my water-bottle, and he went to sleep.

Putting brandy in my water-bottle had been suggested to me by a tale
a young Austrian officer, a prisoner, who was one of my patients in
Kragujewatz hospital, told me. Poor boy, he had been badly wounded in
the leg, and was telling me some of his experiences during the war
and about the terrible journey after he was wounded, travelling in a
bullock cart. He said he had a flask full of brandy, and that was a
help while it lasted. When that was all gone he filled up the flask
with tea, which was pretty good, too, as it had a stray flavour of
brandy still, and then when he had drunk all that he put water in, and
that had the flavour of tea!

The next morning our “wounded hero” hopped off quite unhurt, and we
couldn’t help laughing at the way we had been done. It was a bitterly
cold dawn, and we found to our sorrow that the recruit had not put the
cork back in my water-bottle, and the rest of the brandy had upset,
as had also a bottle of raspberry syrup which the Kid set great store
by. I once upset a pot of gooseberry jam in a small motor-car, and it
permeated everything until I had to take the car to a garage to be
washed, and go and take a bath myself before I could get rid of it; but
it was not a patch in the way of stickiness to a pot of raspberry syrup
let loose in a jolting wagon, and we were very glad to get out at
daybreak, after eight hours’ travelling, to walk a bit to stretch our
legs, and also to wipe off some of the stickiness with some grass.

We came through Prilip that night, and were rather doubtful how we
should get through, but though the people standing about glowered at
us, and we heard a few shots in the distance, nothing much happened,
and only one man got slightly hurt.

We arrived somewhere between Prilip and Bitol at sunrise, and made
a big fire and waited for further orders when the Colonel of the
regiment should arrive. Presently he rode up with his staff, and I was
introduced to Colonel Militch, the Commandant of the Second Regiment.
My first impression of him was that he was a real sport, and later
on, when I got to know him very well and had the privilege of being a
soldier in his regiment, I found out that not only was he a sport, but
one of the bravest soldiers and most chivalrous gentlemen anyone ever
served under. We stood round the fire for some time and had a great
powwow; my Serbian was still in an embryo stage, but the Colonel spoke
German.

We were all very cold and hungry, but one of the officers of the staff,
who was a person of resource, made some rather queerish coffee in a
big tin mug on the fire, and we all had some, and it tasted jolly good
and hot, and then the Colonel produced a bottle of liqueur from a
little handbag, and we drank each other’s healths. I got to know that
little handbag well later--it used always to miraculously appear when
everybody was cold, tired and dying for a drink.

After a couple of hours the ambulance went on about a mile and pitched
camp, and I went with them. The Kid went to sleep in the wagon and
I did the same outside on the grass. The doctor sent me a piece of
bread and cheese, which I casually ate on the spot, not liking to
wake the Kid up, but afterwards I was filled with remorse for my
thoughtlessness, when I was convicted by her later on for not being
a good comrade at all, as it appeared it was the only eatable thing
in camp; but, as I was new and green at “retreating,” at that time it
never dawned on me: I learnt better ways later on. I made her some tea
with my tea-basket, but it was not very satisfying.

Later on in the day the Commandant of the Bitol Division, Colonel
Wasitch, and an English officer came up in a car. I was introduced to
them, and went with them in the car somewhere up the road to visit a
camp. The Commandant of the division went off to attend to business,
leaving the English officer and myself to amuse ourselves as we liked.

Here we were witnesses of a case of corporal punishment. I relate it
because some people think this is quite a common occurrence; it is not,
cruelty is absolutely foreign to their natures. Some people once talked
of setting up a branch of the “Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” in
Serbia, and were asked in astonishment what work they supposed they
would find to do; who ever heard of a Serbian being cruel to child
or animal? Corporal punishment, that is to say, a certain number of
strokes with a stick (maximum 25--schoolboys will know on what part),
is the legitimate and recognised way of punishing in the Serbian Army,
and the sentence is carried out by a non-commissioned officer. As an
officer once explained to me, some punishment you must have in the
interests of discipline, and what else _can_ you do in wartime, when
you are on the move every day? Particularly was it so at this most
critical juncture, when it would have been fatal for the whole Army had
the men been allowed to get out of hand.

This question of corporal punishment in the Serbian Army has so
frequently been brought up to me by English and French officers that
I purposely mention it, as I have always tried to thoroughly disabuse
their minds of any idea that the men were indiscriminately knocked
about. I may add that it is not so very many years since flogging was
abolished in our own Navy, and no doubt in course of time the Serbian
Army will follow suit. The most popular officer I knew, who was
absolutely adored by his own men, was extremely ready to award corporal
punishment. “My soldiers have got to be _soldiers_,” he replied curtly
to me once, and his men certainly were. These things always depend
largely on the particular officer, of course. I think the Serbian
soldier, more than anyone else I have ever come across, can excel as
a “passive resister” when he is under an unpopular officer; while all
the time keeping himself just within the bounds of discipline, he will
contrive to avoid doing anything he does not wish to do, while he is
extraordinarily “clannish” and loyal to one whom he likes. In the
critical moments in a battle it is not the question whether an officer
is “active” or “reserve” that counts, or whether he has passed through
his military academy or risen from the ranks, but whether the men will
follow him or not.

Captain ---- and I walked back to the ambulance together and found that
some of the orderlies had got a pig from somewhere and were roasting it
with a long pole through it over the camp fire: it smelt jolly good,
and as we were very hungry, having had nothing to eat but a piece of
bread and cheese, we accepted their invitation to have supper with them
with alacrity. As soon as it was cooked we all sat round the big fire
in a semicircle, and ate roast pig with our fingers, there being no
plates or cutlery available, and Captain ---- said he had never tasted
anything so good in his life, and wished he could come and join our
ambulance altogether.

At some of the other fires dotted about they were roasting some unwary
geese which had been foolish enough to stray round our camp. As the
inhabitants of the houses had fled leaving them behind we certainly
could not call it looting. Looting was very firmly checked; the
Serbian is far from being the undisciplined soldier in that respect
that some people suppose.




CHAPTER III

A RIDE TO KALABAC AND A BATTLE IN THE SNOW


It snowed hard in the night and most of the next day and was bitterly
cold, blowing a gale, but my wagon was a good bit snugger than the
tent. The Colonel and his staff had quarters in a loft over a little
café just along the road, and after lunch the Commander of the
division, who came with two English officers, took the Kid and me with
them in their cars some miles back along the road towards Prilip,
where we all walked about and inspected the new positions part of the
regiment was to take up. The Kid went back to Bitol in the car with
them that evening to fetch some clothes, and I never saw her again,
though I believe she did want to come back to us later on.

I used to sit over the camp fires in the evenings with the soldiers,
and we used to exchange cigarettes and discuss the war by the hour. I
was picking up a few more words of Serbian every day, and they used to
take endless trouble to make me understand, though our conversations
were very largely made up of signs, but I understood what they meant if
I couldn’t always understand what they said. It was heartbreaking the
way they used to ask me every evening, “Did I think the English were
coming to help them?” and “Would they send cannon?” The Bulgarians had
big guns, and we had nothing but some little old cannon about ten years
old, which were really only what the comitadjes used to use. If we had
had a few big guns we could have held the Baboona Pass practically for
any length of time, for it was an almost impregnable position. I used
to cheer them up as best I could, and said I was sure that some guns
would come, and that even if they did not they must not think that the
English had deserted them, as I supposed they had big plans in their
head that we knew nothing about, and that though we might have to
retreat now everything would come right in the end. It was touching the
faith they had in the English, whom they all described as going “slowly
but surely.” They were very much excited when they saw the two English
officers, as they were sure they had come to say some English troops
were coming.

One day, however, one thousand new English rifles did come, and there
was great rejoicing thereat.

With the courtesy which always distinguishes the Serbian peasant, they
used always to stand up and make room for me, and bring a box for me to
sit on in the most comfortable place by the fire, out of the smoke, and
I used to spend hours like this with them. Under happier circumstances
they would all have been singing their national songs and dancing, but,
though there were many fine singers among them, nothing would induce
them to sing: they were too broken-hearted at being driven back. One
man did start a song one night to please me, but he broke down in the
middle and said he knew I would understand why he could not sing.

There was deep snow on the ground, and it was bitterly cold, and the
men used to anxiously ask me if I managed to keep warm at night, as
they huddled up together, four in one tiny tent, for warmth, and seemed
to rather fear that they might find me frozen to death some morning in
my wagon, but I was really quite warm enough.

[Illustration: AN AMBULANCE FIELD KITCHEN

Page 26]

[Illustration: ROASTING THE PIG

Page 50]

The next day, while we were doing the dressings, a man came in who had
walked from Nish, twenty-two days’ tramp. He was a cheery soul, and
said he felt very fit, but he looked as thin as a rake. We all crowded
round him to hear the news. He said that the town of Nish was
evacuated and everyone gone to Krushavatz.

Commandant Militch told me he was sending for his second horse, so that
I could ride her. When she arrived she proved to be a very fine white
half-Arab, who could gallop like the wind, and I grew very fond of her.
She had a passion for sugar, and always expected a bit when she saw
me. The Commandant had moved his quarters a few miles farther up the
road towards Prilip to a small deserted hahn, or inn, consisting of two
small rooms by the roadside. It was close to the village of Topolchar.
I had been cautioned not to stray away from the camp by myself, as
it was very unsafe; only a few days before Bulgarian comitadjes had
swooped down and taken prisoner a Serbian soldier who had gone to
fetch some water not a quarter of a mile from his own camp. One bright
sunny morning, however, the hills looked so tempting that I went for
a stroll and wandered on farther than I intended. I was out of sight
of the camp, when suddenly I heard voices behind some trees, though I
could not see anybody, and I knew that none of our men were camping
near. Discretion conquering curiosity, I beat a dignified retreat at a
brisk walk, as I was quite unarmed at the time, and they told me when I
got back it was a good thing I did. I took no more constitutionals over
the hills while in that neighbourhood, anyhow, for I had no wish to cut
off my career with the Army by suddenly disappearing, as no one would
know what had become of me.

One day I rode over on Diana, my white mare, to see the Commandant
and his staff at the hahn. They all welcomed me most warmly, inviting
me to stop to supper, sleep there, and ride out next day with them
to the mountain of Kalabac, to visit the positions there. I accepted
joyfully. They said I could either sleep there near the stove or have
my wagon brought up, if I was not afraid of being too cold. I decided
in favour of the wagon, as the hahn was already pretty crowded; so they
telephoned for it, and in due course it arrived with my orderly. It was
a grey-covered wagon, and I had christened it “My little grey home in
the west.” A house on wheels is an ideal arrangement, as if you take
it into your head to sleep anywhere else you go off and your house
simply follows you. It was planted exactly opposite the door, with a
sentry to guard me.

The Commandant, in spite of all his troubles, was full of fun, and even
in the darkest and most anxious hours in the tragic weeks that followed
kept up everyone’s spirits and thought of everyone’s comfort before his
own. After a most hilarious supper I turned in, as we were to make an
early start next morning.

Next day the Commandant, his Adjutant and I, with four armed gendarmes,
rode off to Kalabac. It was a lovely day, and we had about two hours’
ride across country to the first line of trenches. The Commandant and I
used to have a race whenever we got to a good bit of ground. He was a
fine rider, and, as the horses were pretty well matched, we used to get
up a break-neck speed sometimes, and had some splendid gallops. About
a year before in Kragujewatz I was riding with a Serbian soldier who
had been sent with a horse for me, and he said: “What did I want to be
a nurse for?” and tried to persuade me not to go back to the hospital,
but to join the Army then and there, regardless of my poor patients
expecting me back.

The first line of trenches that we came to were little shallow trenches
dotted about on the hillside, with about a dozen men in each. We sat in
one of them and drank coffee, and I thought then that I should be able
to tell them at home that I had been in a real Serbian trench, little
thinking at the time that I was going to do it in good earnest later on
under different circumstances.

After that we went on up to another position right at the top of
Kalabac. It was a tremendous ride, and I could never have believed that
horses could have climbed such steep places, or have kept their feet on
some of the obstacles we went over, but these horses were trained to
it, and could get through or over anything. Just the last bit of the
way we all had to dismount, and, leaving the horses with the gendarmes,
did the rest on foot. There was no need for trenches there, as it was
very rocky, and there was plenty of natural cover. Major B---- and
another officer met us near the top, and he and the Commandant went
off to discuss things. It happened to be Captain Pesio’s “Slava” day.
This “Slava” day is an institution peculiar only to the Serbians, and
which they always keep most faithfully. Every family and every regiment
has one. It is the day of their particular patron saint, and is handed
down from father to son. It is kept up for three days with as much
jollification as circumstances permit, even in wartime. I have been
the guest at plenty of other Slava days in Serbia, but I never enjoyed
anything so much as I did that one. We sat round the fire on boxes or
logs of wood under the shelter of a big overhanging rock, with a most
gorgeous panorama of the country stretching for miles round, and had
a very festive lunch, and all drank Captain Pesio’s health. In the
middle of lunch I had my first sight of the enemy, a Bulgarian patrol
in the distance, and orders were promptly given to some of our men to
go down and head them off. The men all seemed to be in high spirits
up there, in spite of the cold, and some of them were roasting a pig,
although I suppose that was a “Slava” luxury for them, not to be had
every day.

It was evening by the time we left, and we slipped and slid down the
mountain again by moonlight. When we got back to the first trenches
which we had visited we made a short halt, and sat in an officer’s
little tent and drank tea. He had certainly not been at war for four
years without learning how to make himself comfortable under adverse
circumstances, and had brought it down to a fine art. He had a tiny
little tent, one side of which was pitched against a bank, and in the
bank there was a hole, with a large fire in it, and a sort of tunnel
leading up to the outer air for a chimney. His blanket was spread on
some boughs woven together for a bed, and he was as snug and warm
as a toast when he did get a chance to sleep in his tent, which was
apparently not very often. He was very popular with everyone, and the
Commandant spoke particularly of his bravery. We were quite sorry to
leave and turn out into the cold night air.

We had a long ride home, ending up with a hard gallop along the last
bit of road, and it was late when we got back to the hahn. There
was a big fire going in the iron stove, and we soon thawed out. The
Commandant sat down at his table and dictated endless despatches to
his Adjutant, while I dosed on his camp bed till about ten, when he
finished his work for the time being and we had supper. Every now and
then there would be a rap at the door, and an exhausted, half-frozen
rider would come in bearing a despatch from one of the outlying
positions on the hills.

I was very sorry afterwards that I had not taken my camera with me up
to the positions, but I was not sure at the time if they would like me
to, though afterwards they told me I might take it anywhere I liked.

There was another small ambulance here in charge of the proper
regimental doctor, and in the afternoon everyone was ordered to move
up into the village, Topolchor, and find rooms there. The soldiers were
all delighted at the prospect of getting under a roof of any kind,
though I felt quite sorry at leaving my Little Grey Home. The doctor
got me a nice big empty room in what was formerly the school. There
was a pile of desks and tables filling up one side of it, and a stove,
but otherwise no furniture. After my orderly had unpacked my camp bed
and lit the stove I had some visitors: three or four old native women,
who came up and inspected me and all my belongings closely, and seemed
deeply impressed with the extraordinary luxury in which an Englishwoman
lived, with a room to herself, a bed _and_ a rubber bath! I had been
making futile efforts, by the way, for the last few days to make use
of this same bath, in spite of my orderly’s repeated assurances that
you could _not_ have a bath in wartime, which I found afterwards to be
strictly true. I did not succeed even here, owing to the lack of water
and anything to carry it in.

The villagers themselves, those who had not already fled in terror,
seemed to live in the most abject poverty, huddled together in houses
no better than pigsties. The place was infested by enormous mongrel
dogs, which used to pursue me in gangs, barking and growling, but they
had a wholesome respect for a stone, and never came to close quarters.

Next morning I went for a long ride with the Commandant to inspect
some more of the positions. He had to hold an enormous front with only
two regiments, and, as we were outnumbered by the Bulgarians by more
than four to one, when the latter could not break through our lines
they simply made an encircling movement and walked round them, and, as
there were absolutely no reserves, every available man being already in
the fighting line, troops had to abandon some other position in order
to cut across and bar their route. Thus we were constantly being edged
back, and were very many times in great danger of being surrounded.
We were fighting a rear-guard action practically all the time for
the next six weeks--a mere handful of troops, worn out by weeks of
incessant fighting, hungry, sick, and with no big guns to back them
up, retreating slowly and in good order before overwhelming forces of
an enemy who was fresh, well equipped and with heavy artillery. It was
no use throwing men’s lives away by holding on to positions when no
purpose could be gained by it, though the Colonel felt it keenly that
the finest regiment in the Army should have to abandon position after
position, although contesting every inch, without having a chance of
going on the offensive. It was heartbreaking work for all concerned,
and the way they accomplished it is an everlasting credit to officers
and men alike.

My orderly told me he had heard we were going that evening, so he
packed up everything, camp bed included, and put it in my wagon. We
hung about all the evening expecting to get the order to go at any
moment, as the horses were always kept ready saddled in the stable, and
you simply had to “stand by” and wait until you were told to go, and
then be ready to get straight off. Eventually, however, the Commandant
came back and said we were not going that night, and we had a quiet
supper about ten o’clock and turned in, with a warning to be up early
in the morning. As my bed was packed up I rolled myself up in a blanket
on the floor, and my orderly did likewise at the other side of the
stove and kept the fire up. It was snowing hard and frightfully cold.
At daybreak we did move, but not very far, only to the little hahn
by the roadside; and there we stood about in the snow and listened
to a battle which was apparently going on quite close; although we
strained our eyes we could see nothing--there was such a frightful
blizzard. A company of reinforcements passed us and floundered off
through the deep snow drifts across the fields in the direction of the
firing. There was no artillery fire (I suppose they could not haul
the guns through the snow), but the crackle of the rifles got nearer
and nearer, and at last about midday they were so close that we could
hear the wild “Hourrah, Hourrahs” of the Bulgarians as they took our
trenches, and as the blizzard had stopped for a bit we could see them
coming streaking across the snow towards us, our little handful of men
retreating and reforming as they went. The Bulgarians always give the
most blood-curdling yells when they charge. The ambulance was already
gone, and there were only the Colonel and his staff, myself and the
doctor left. The horses were brought out, and the order came to go, but
only about three miles to where the big ambulance was camped with whom
I had been at first.

There was a river between the hahn and this ambulance, and the road
went over a bridge. This bridge was heavily mined and was to be
blown up as soon as our men were over, thus cutting off, or anyhow
considerably delaying, the Bulgarians, as the river was now a swollen
icy torrent. We sat round the fire of the ambulance and dried our feet.
Some of the men were soaking to the knees, having no boots, but only
opankis, leather sandals fastened on with a strap which winds round
the leg up to the knee. Later on some wounded were brought in, given a
very hurried dressing, and despatched at once to the base hospital. The
majority of them seemed to be hit in the right arm or wrist, but I am
afraid perhaps the worst wounded never reached us. One poor fellow who
was hit in the abdomen was, I am afraid, done for; he would hardly live
till he got to the hospital.

We heard no more firing till late in the afternoon, when all at once
it broke out again quite close, and with big guns as well this time.
We wondered how on earth they had been able to get them across the
river, but the explanation was forthcoming when we heard that the
bridge, although it had ten mines in it, had failed to blow up--the
mines would not explode; no one knew why. I floundered through the
snow up a little hill with some of the others to see if we could see
anything, but we could not see much through the winter twilight except
the flashes from the guns momentarily lighting up the snow banks, and
hear the noise of the shells as they whistled overhead.

This had been going on for a couple of hours now, and the Greek doctor
was getting into a regular funk because they had had no orders to move,
though it was all right as we had no wounded in the tent to be carried
away, and no one else was worrying about it; but he finally sent a
messenger up to the Commandant, as he seemed to think the ambulance
had been forgotten. A couple of days afterwards the men told me with
much scorn that that afternoon had been too much for him, and that he
did a retreat on his own and never came back to the ambulance again. I
was just thinking of looking round for something to eat, as I had had
neither breakfast nor lunch, and had been much too busy to think about
it, when the order arrived for the ambulance to pack up and move, and
the tents came down like lightning. The soldiers were all retreating
across the snow, and I never saw such a depressing sight. The grey
November twilight, the endless white expanse of snow, lit up every
moment by the flashes of the guns, and the long column of men trailing
away into the dusk wailing a sort of dismal dirge--I don’t know what it
was they were singing--something between a song and a sob, it sounded
like the cry of a Banshee. I have never heard it before or since, but
it was a most heartbreaking sound.

My saïs (groom) brought Diana round to me. I asked him if he had been
told to do so, and he said “No,” but that I “had better go now.” He
shook his head dubiously, murmuring, “Safer to go now,” when I told him
I was coming later on with the Commandant and his staff.

War always seems to turn out exactly the opposite to what you imagine
is going to happen. Such a great proportion of it consists of “an
everlastin’ waiting on an everlastin’ road,” as someone has already
written. Bairnsfather hits it off exactly in his picture of the young
officer with his new sword: how he pictures himself using it, charging
at the head of his company, and how he really does use it, toasting
bread over the camp fire! I had some wild visions in my head--as I knew
the Commandant would wait until the last moment--of a tremendous gallop
over the snow, hotly pursued by Bulgarian cavalry. I imagine I must
once have seen something like it on a cinematograph. What, however,
really did happen was that, having received permission to stop, I
sat for four hours in company with seven or eight officers who were
waiting for orders, on a hard bench in a freezing cold shed, which in
its palmier days might have been a cowhouse. I was ravenously hungry,
and sucked a few Horlick’s milk tablets I found in my pocket, but they
did not seem so satisfying as the advertisements would lead one to
suppose. However, presently the jolly little captain, whose tent I
described on Kalabac, came in, followed by his soldier servant bearing
a hot roast chicken wrapped up in a piece of paper! Where in the world
he got it I can’t think. We had no knives or forks, but we sat side
by side, and each took hold of a leg and pulled till something gave.
It tasted delicious! He shared it round with everybody, and I don’t
think had much left for himself. Although he came straight from the
trenches, where he had been fighting incessantly and had not slept for
three nights himself, he was full of spirits and livened us all up, and
we little thought that it was the last time we were to see him. I was
terribly sorry to hear a few days later of the tragic death of my gay
little friend.

The firing had ceased, as it usually does at night, and at last, about
nine o’clock, the Commandant appeared and the horses were brought out,
and instead of the wild cinema gallop I had pictured we had one of the
slowest, coldest rides you can imagine. There was a piercing blizzard
blowing across the snowy waste, blinding our eyes and filling our ears
with snow; our hands were numbed, and our feet so cold and wet we
could hardly feel the stirrups. We proceeded in dead silence, no one
feeling disposed to talk, and slowly threaded our way through crowds
of soldiers tramping along, with bent heads, as silently as phantoms,
the sound of their feet muffled by the snow. I pitied the poor fellows
from the bottom of my heart--they were so much colder and wearier even
than I was myself, and I wondered where the “glory” of war came in.
It was exactly like a nightmare, from which one might presently wake
up. My dreams of home fires and hot muffins were brought to an abrupt
termination by the Commandant suddenly breaking into a trot, when I
found my knees were “set fast” with the cold, and I had a very painful
five minutes till they loosened up.

After a long time we turned off the road across some snowy fields.
I followed close behind the Commandant, who always made a bee line
straight ahead through everything; and after our horses had slipped
and scrambled through a hedge, a couple of deep ditches and a stream
we eventually got to the village of Mogilee, I think it was called.
The soldiers bivouacked in some farm out-houses, and we were received
by some officers in a big loft. They had a huge stove going and supper
ready for us. We finished up the long day quite cheerily, even having
a bottle of champagne that a comitadje brought as a present to the
Commandant. We all slept that night in the loft on the floor, I being
given the place of honour on a wide bench near the stove, while the
other six or seven selected whichever particular board on the floor
took their fancy most, and spread their blankets on it. Turning in was
a simple matter, as you only have to take off your boots; and, though
the atmosphere got a bit thick, we all slept like tops.

[Illustration: THE TENT I SLEPT IN FOR TWO MONTHS

Page 24]

[Illustration: SERBIAN ARMY TRUDGING ALONG

Page 77]




CHAPTER IV

I MEET THE FOURTH COMPANY--A COLD NIGHT RIDE


We were all up at daybreak next morning as usual; no good Serbian
sleeps after the first streak of light. It was still snowing fearfully
hard, making it impossible to go out, though the Commandant and his
Staff Captain rode out somewhere all the morning. We had sundry cups
of tea and coffee during the morning and a pretty substantial snack
of bread and eggs and cold pig about ten. I protested that I was not
hungry, and that we should have lunch when the Commandant came in, but
they reminded me of what had happened to me yesterday in the matter of
meals, and might possibly happen again to-morrow, and advised me to eat
and sleep whenever I got a chance. They were old soldiers and spoke
from experience, and I subsequently found it to be very good advice.

It was a long day, as we had nothing to do. In the afternoon the doctor
started to teach me some Serbian verbs, and afterwards we all played
“Fox and Goose,” and I initiated them into the mysteries of “drawing a
pig with your eyes shut,” and any other games we could think of with
pencil and paper to while away the time.

About dusk we set forth again to a small village, Orizir, close to
Bitol. It was pitch dark as we splashed across a field and a couple of
streams to another little house which we occupied. It consisted of two
tiny rooms, up a sort of ladder, with a fair-sized balcony in front.
The balcony was quite sheltered with a big pile of straw at one end,
and I elected to sleep there, though they were fearfully worried about
it, and declared I should die of cold, in spite of my protestations
that English people always sleep much better in the open air than in a
hot room with all the windows shut. Foreigners always look upon English
people as more than half mad on the subject of fresh air, especially
at night. The next day my orderly, who was in a great state of mind,
and seemed to think that I would lose caste with his fellow orderlies
if I persisted in sleeping on the balcony, told me that he had found
another room for me in a hahn by the roadside, where I accordingly
slept the next night, and subsequently we all moved down there. I
actually got my long-sought-for bath that day, my resourceful man
borrowing a sort of stable for me for an hour and fixing it up for me.
As all old campaigners know, a certain kind of live stock, and plenty
of them, is the inevitable accompaniment to this sort of life, and is
one of its greatest trials, though you do get more or less used even
to that. I burnt a hole in my vest cremating some of them, but judging
by the look of my bathroom, where the soldiers had been sleeping, I
am not at all sure that I did not carry more away with me than I got
rid of. While I was engaged in this interesting occupation my orderly
called out that the English Consul was there and wished to see me, so
I hastily dressed and went out to interview him. He had come in a car
to take me back to Salonica with him if I wanted to go, which of course
I did not; so he just drove me into town to pick up a large case of
cigarettes which I had previously ordered from Salonica for myself and
the soldiers and anyone else who ran short of them, and he also gave me
a case of tins of jam and one of warm woollen helmets, which were very
much appreciated by the men. He said he thought I was quite right to
stop, and we parted warm friends.

When I got back I found the Staff Captain, who was the Commandant’s
right hand, just going out for another cold ride. He had had fever for
the last two or three days, and looked so fearfully ill that I begged
him not to go, as, however much he might, and did, boss everybody
when he was well, he might let himself be looked after a little bit
when he was ill. Rather to my surprise he submitted quite meekly, and
let me dose him with quinine, and tuck him up in his blankets by the
stove, and as he was shivering violently I told his orderly to make
him some hot tea and stand outside the door to see that no one came in
to disturb him. As the tea did not seem to be forthcoming, I went out
presently to see what was up, and found him with several of his fellow
orderlies sitting in the snow round the camp fire having a meal of some
kind. He said he had made the tea, but had not any sugar; so I asked
some of the others.

“Now, don’t you say ‘Néma’ to me,” I said, before he had time to speak,
“but go and find some, because I know perfectly well you have got it.”
It is a Serbian peculiarity, which I had found out long ago, that
whenever you first ask for a thing they invariably say “Néma” (“There
isn’t any”). I have frequently been told that in a shop with the thing
lying there under my eyes, because the man was too lazy to get up and
get it. They thought it a great joke, and of course produced it, and
“Don’t say ‘Néma’ to me” became a sort of laughing byword amongst some
of the men afterwards whenever I asked for anything. They have a keen
sense of humour, and are always ready for a laugh and a joke, and
their gaiety and high spirits bubble up even under the most adverse
circumstances.

The rest of the Staff and I then made a fire in the other little room,
and sat there and played chess and auction bridge, and were making a
terrific noise over the latter, when the Commandant came back. If you
really want an amusing occupation, likely to give rise to any amount
of discussion and argument, try teaching auction bridge to three men
who have never seen it played before, in a language your knowledge of
which is so slight that you can only ask for the simplest things in
the fewest possible words. You’ll find the result is a very queer and
original game.

[Illustration: REINFORCEMENTS IN THE SNOW

Page 72]

[Illustration: AN EARLY START. PACKING UP

Page 84]

The next afternoon, it having at last stopped snowing, I walked over to
visit my old friends in the ambulance a couple of miles up the road,
and we sat by the camp fire and pored over the map of Albania, whither
we should soon be going, and discussed the war as usual. When I got
back about sunset I found the Commandant had gone to visit a company
who were camped about a mile and a half up the road, and his Adjutant
was waiting for me, as we thought it would be a good opportunity to
give away some of the warm woollen helmets while it was so cold.
Accordingly, followed by a couple of men carrying the wool helmets,
some cigarettes and a few pots of jam, we started for the camp. It
turned out to be the Fourth Company of the First Battalion, strange to
say, the very company that I afterwards joined, though I didn’t guess
that at the time. It was a most picturesque scene with the little
tents all crowded together, and dozens of big camp fires blazing in the
snow with soldiers sitting round them; they all seemed very cheery in
spite of the bitter cold. We had a great reception, the whole company
was lined up, and under the direction of their Company Commander I
gave every seventh man a white woollen helmet--unfortunately there
were not enough for each man to have one--and every man a couple of
cigarettes, and my orderly followed with half a dozen large pots of jam
and a spoon, the men opening their mouths like young starlings waiting
to be fed. This is a national custom in Serbia; directly you visit a
house your hostess brings in a tray with a pot of jam, glasses of
water and a dish with spoons on it. You eat a spoonful of jam, take a
drink of water, and put your spoon down on another dish provided for
that purpose. It is very amusing to see a stranger the first time this
is presented to him; he generally does not know what he is supposed to
do, or whether he is to dip the jam into the water, or _vice versa_,
and how many spoonfuls it would be polite to eat, Serbian jam being
extraordinarily good. One Englishman I knew wanted to go on eating
several spoonfuls, and I had gently but firmly to check him.

I was introduced to all the officers, and a great many of the men who
were pointed out to me as having done something very special. One of
the men was wearing an English medal for “distinguished conduct in
the field.” The men seemed awfully pleased with their little presents;
they never have anything in the way of luxury--no jam, sweets or
tobacco served out to them with their rations, no parcels or letters
from home (at this time), no concerts or amusements got up for their
benefit, none of the things that our Tommies hardly regard in the light
of luxuries, but necessities. No one who has not lived with them can
imagine how simply they live, how much they think of a very little, and
what a small thing it takes to please them. After that little ceremony
was over we sat round the officers’ camp fire and a young sergeant--a
student artist--played the flute very well indeed, and they sang some
of their national songs. It was all so friendly and fascinating that
we were very loath indeed to tear ourselves away, and I promised to
come back next day and take their photographs, but next day they were
not there, having been ordered off at dawn to hold some positions up on
the hills.

Among other sundry oddments in my luggage I had a box of chessmen and
a board, and as several of them could play we whiled away many weary
hours when we had nothing else to do playing chess. The Commandant
and I were very evenly matched, and we used to have some tremendous
battles, sometimes long after everyone else was asleep, and always kept
a careful record of who won. Some of the others were very keen on it
too, and those who were not playing would stand round and offer advice.
I used sometimes to think, as I listened to the sounds of hurried
packing up going on all round while we sat calmly playing chess, that
the Bulgars would walk in one day and capture the lot of us, chessboard
and all.

About 9 p.m. next night the Commandant gave the order to start, and we
walked the first mile, the horses being led behind, I suppose to get
used to the roads, which were one slippery sheet of ice. When we got
to Bitol, which was quite close, we went to the headquarters of the
Commandant of the division, and sat there till about midnight, while
he and our Commandant discussed matters. We met Dr. Nikotitch there
again, and he and Commandant Wasitch asked me if I really had made
up my mind to go on. They said the journey through Albania would be
very terrible, that nothing we had gone through so far was anything
approaching it, and that they would send me down to Salonica if I
liked. I was not quite sure whether having a woman with them might not
be more of an anxiety and nuisance to them than anything else, though
they knew I did not mind roughing it; and I asked them, if so, to tell
me quite frankly, and I would go down to Salonica that night. They were
awfully nice, though, and said that “for them it would be better if I
stopped, because it would encourage the soldiers, who already all knew
me, and to whose simple minds I represented, so to speak, the whole
of England.” The only thought that buoyed them up at that time, and
still does, was that England would never forsake them. So that settled
the matter, as I should have been awfully sorry if I had had to go
back, and I believe the fact that I went through with them did perhaps
sometimes help to encourage the soldiers.

We left there soon after midnight, and rode all night and most of the
next day. The Commandant and his Staff Captain drove in a wagon, the
same one that the Kid and I had driven in on the first night of the
retreat. They asked me whether I would rather come in the wagon with
them or ride, as the roads were simply terrible, but I elected to ride
and chance Diana going on her head, which she did not do, however, as
the Commandant, with his usual thoughtfulness, had had her roughed for
me a few days before. We rode very, very slowly, always through crowds
of soldiers, pack-horses and donkeys, halting about every hour at
little camp fires along the roadside made by our front guard, where we
sat and warmed our feet for about a quarter of an hour till the tired
soldiers could catch us up, there being frequent halts for them to rest
for a few minutes. I rode alongside the Adjutant and another officer,
and was very glad that my orderly had filled my thermos flask with hot
tea, with a good dash of cognac in it, which the three of us consumed
while riding along. The roads were really fearful, one solid sheet of
ice, and the Adjutant’s horse came down so often that eventually he had
to walk and lead it. Occasionally we all used to get down and walk for
a bit to warm our feet, which became like blocks of ice, but the going
was so hard that we were glad to mount again. I say “mount,” but in
reality, what between wearing a heavy fur coat and getting colder and
stiffer and wearier, it was more a sort of crawl up Diana’s side that
I did; fortunately she was a patient animal, and used to stand still.
It soothed my feelings to see that I was not the only one, several of
the others having nearly as much difficulty in mounting. They were all
so friendly, and I had more than one “Good luck to you” shouted after
me. It was not really such a hard ride as we had expected, though, as
stopping at the little camp fires and chatting with the men round them
made a nice break.

About daybreak we arrived at a hahn, where we found the ambulance
again, and the Commandant and the Captain got their horses there,
and we all walked, and later on rode, up and up a winding road, up a
mountain. It was bitterly cold, and every few yards we passed horrible
looking corpses of bullocks, donkeys and ponies, with the hides and
some of the flesh stripped from them; sometimes there were packs,
ammunition and rifles thrown away by the roadside, but very, very few
of the latter; a soldier is very far gone indeed before he will part
with that. Of course everywhere swarmed with spies, and we stopped a
man and a boy in civilian clothes carrying baskets; they protested that
they were going down to do some marketing or something of that sort,
but whatever it was they wanted to do they were told they could not do
it, and gently but firmly turned back.

At the very top we stopped at the ruins of a filthy little hut, where
a halt was called and the field telephone rigged up. We built a fire
outside--it was too dirty to go inside--under the wall, and had some
coffee, and tried, very unsuccessfully, to get out of the howling,
bitter wind. The soldiers sat about and rested, and we stayed there
until late in the afternoon. We were to spend the night at Resan, some
way down the other side, and about 3 o’clock the doctor said he was
going down there, and I might as well come down with him and look for
a room. Wily young man, he was petrified with cold himself and didn’t
like to say so, so had previously told the Staff Captain that _I_ was
cold and wanted to go into the town, and that, as I could not go by
myself, hadn’t he better escort me? He let this out afterwards, and
I was very indignant with him, but he was quite unabashed. He used to
love teasing me, calling me “Napoleon” because I rode a white horse,
and we were constantly sparring. My orderly, after a long search,
found me quite a decent little room in a house close to the Caserne,
where the staff were to be quartered. The family consisted of two old
ladies and a girl, who all fell on my neck and hugged me, rather to
my embarrassment. One of the old ladies explained volubly that she
had once had something--I never could quite make out whether it was a
husband or a cat--and had lost it, and I was now to take its place in
the family circle.

We all sat round the stove in my little room, which seemed quite a
luxurious palace to me now, and I made them real English tea with my
little tea-basket, and the poor old things seemed quite enchanted, as
they had neither tea nor sugar in the house, and they fussed over me,
and could not do enough for me.

The next morning I stayed in bed till nearly eight, and, after dressing
leisurely, went up to see the Commandant and staff, who said they had
begun to think they had lost me. About five o’clock my orderly came
in in a great state of excitement and wrath, declaring that he did
not know what to do with my things as the wagon had been taken for
something else, and that the Commandant and staff were all gone. He was
an excitable person, and used to get these panics occasionally, and,
as I knew perfectly well that whatever happened they would not leave me
behind, I told him not to be such an ass, but to go and get my horse
and I would go and find out for myself, as I could not get any sense
out of him. I happened to meet the Commandant in the street, and, as
I fully expected, we had supper quietly, and did not stir till 9 p.m.
We nearly always did ride at night. We left very quietly, and walked
the first bit of the way through the mud, and then rode up a beautiful
serpentine road, which had originally been made by the Turks, through
what looked as if it might be beautiful country if you could only see
it. All the way along there were soldiers and camp fires, which looked
so pretty twinkling all over the hills through the fir trees, and we
made frequent halts while the Commandant gave his orders.

I thought we were going to ride all night, and it was a pleasant
surprise when we turned off the road, and put our horses at a steep
muddy bit of mound at the top of which was an old block-house, one
of the many built by the Turks and dotted all over that part of the
country. The telephone was rigged up there, and it was full of officers
and soldiers; the ground all round was a perfect sea of mud, and there
were soldiers everywhere. I had not the faintest idea whether we were
going to stop there half an hour or for the rest of the night, and I
don’t suppose anybody else had either, except, perhaps, the Commandant.
I sat by the stove for some time, and finally lay down on the floor
on some straw that looked not quite so dirty as the rest, though that
is not saying much, but when I woke up some hours later I got the
impression that I had strayed into a new version of the Black Hole
of Calcutta. The whole floor was absolutely covered so thickly with
sleeping men that you could not put your feet down without treading on
them. I counted up to twenty-nine and then gave it up because I saw
several more come in afterwards, though where they managed to wedge
themselves in I do not know. The Commandant had left the telephone and
was sleeping peacefully among the others; the only person awake was a
very big, good-looking gendarme, who was keeping the stove stoked up,
although it was already suffocatingly hot. The Serbians laugh at me
because I declare that they always pick their gendarmes for their good
looks; they are certainly a magnificent set of men. This one inquired
if I wanted anything, as soon as he saw that I was awake, and I asked
him if he would fetch me my thermos flask full of tea, which he would
find in Diana’s saddle-bag. He had never seen a thermos flask before,
and when he brought it back and I shared the tea with him he was
perfectly thunderstruck to find it still hot. He couldn’t make it out
at all, and seemed to think that in some extraordinary way Diana must
have had something to do with it, and I shouldn’t be surprised if next
day he put a bottle of tea in his own saddle-bag to see if his horse
would be equally clever.

About 5 a.m., while it was still dark, I woke up again so boiling hot
that I could not stand it any longer, and crawled out cautiously over
the sleeping men, treading on a good many, I am afraid, though they did
not seem to object, and took a walk round; but, as it was raining and
the mud appalling, I did not stay outside long. There was one camp fire
still going, and what I took to be a large bundle covered over with
a sack beside it. Here’s luck, I thought, something to sit on beside
the fire, and down I plumped, but got up again quickly when it gave
a protesting grunt and a heave, and I found I had sat down on a man.
After that I sat on a tin can in the cold passage for some time and
waited for daybreak.




CHAPTER V

WE SAY GOOD-BYE TO SERBIA AND TAKE TO THE ALBANIAN MOUNTAINS


The next morning we rode on and camped at another block-house. The
field telephone was going all the time here, and evidently the news
was anything but satisfactory. I did so heartily wish that I knew more
Serbian and could understand more of what was going on. I was so keenly
interested in what was happening and where the various companies were
and how they were getting on, and it was maddening when breathless
despatch riders used to come in from the trenches, and I could only
gather a little bit of what they were saying, and generally miss the
vital point. The Commandant and his Staff Captain used to pore over
maps at the table, and, although they would not have minded my knowing
anything, of course I could not bother them with questions. Sometimes
if Commandant Militch was not busy he used to show me the various
positions on the map, and tell me where he was moving the men to. It
was such a frightfully anxious time for him, he had to hold the threads
of everything in his hands; everything depended on him, the lives and
safety of all the men, and despatch riders and telephone calls gave him
very little rest.

On this particular occasion we made an unusually sudden start, and
he explained to me afterwards, as we were riding along, that the
Bulgarians had made another of their encircling movements, and got
round our position, and very nearly cut the road in front of us, and
there was considerable probability at one moment that we might have
to take to the mountains on foot, to escape being taken prisoners.
However, he was able to send some troops round, and they succeeded in
getting down in time to cut them off. Being taken prisoner by the wild
Bulgarians would have been no joke.

We halted in the afternoon in a field where a company was resting, some
of the Third Call. There are three calls, First, Second and Third--the
young men, middle-aged and the old fellows, who as a general rule are
only used for light work, guarding bridges, railways, etc., but now
had to march and do the same as the young men, and it came very hard on
them.

The Serbians live hard and seem to age much quicker than our men do, as
they call a man of forty or forty-five an old man, and they look it,
too. The peasants usually marry very young, about twenty; and as we sat
and chatted round the fires several of this Third Call told me their
ages and how many sons they had serving in the Army. We camped that
night in a house in the village, the usual room up a flight of wooden
steps. These houses never seem to have any ground floor. I suppose in
these disturbed parts the inhabitants find it safer to live at the top
of a ladder.

The next day the snow had all cleared away, and, strange to say, it
was like a lovely spring morning. While I was drinking a cup of coffee
out on the verandah a young soldier came up and wanted to see the
Commandant. He looked fearfully thin and ill, and told me that he and
ten others had had nothing to eat for eleven days. I was horror-struck,
and asked the Staff Captain if such a thing could be possible, but what
he literally meant was that they had been stationed somewhere where
they had received no regular rations, and had had to live by their wits
or on what the people in the village would give them. Be that as it
may, there was no mistaking the fact that he looked very hungry, and I
gave him a large piece of bread and cheese which I had in reserve and
some cigarettes. He put the piece of bread and cheese in his pocket,
and when I asked him why he did not eat it then and there said he
was going to take it back and share it with the others! To see real
unselfishness one must live through bad times like these with men, when
everyone shares whatever he has.

We rode on into a filthy, muddy little village, where we spent the
afternoon. I went for a walk up the hill, through a company of soldiers
who were resting on the grass, belonging to some other regiment whom I
did not know, and coming back I was stopped and closely questioned by
an officer. He did not know who I was, and was evidently considerably
puzzled. He wanted to know where I had been and why, and seemed to
think that I might have been paying a visit to the Bulgarians, who
were close on our heels as usual. He looked rather incredulous when I
said that I had only been for a walk, and I thought he was going to
arrest me on the spot pending further investigations, until I pointed
to the brass letter “2” on my shoulders, and said I was with the Second
Regiment, and that the Commandant was down in the village. Then he let
me pass. The Commandant had taken the regimental numbers off his own
epaulettes when I first joined and fastened them on the shoulders of
his new recruit, and I was very proud of them. The Commandant was very
much amused when I told him about it, and told me not to go and get
shot in mistake for a spy.

[Illustration: A COLD HALTING PLACE

Page 103]

[Illustration: THE BLOCK-HOUSE WHERE WE ALL SLEPT

Page 110]

In the evening we rode on by Ockrida Lake, on and on along the most
awful roads, with mud up to our horses’ knees, till we finally came to
a building and camped in the loft.

Next morning I rode out with the Commandant to inspect the positions.
There was a battle going on a little way away in the hills, and we
could hear the guns plainly and see the shrapnel bursting. There was a
lovely view of the lake, and on the other side you looked away towards
the black Albanian hills, and we thought as we looked towards them
that this was the very last scrap of Serbia, and that we should soon
be driven out of it. Coming back we passed a company by the roadside,
and the Commandant stopped and talked to them, and anyone could see how
popular he was, and how pleased they always were to see him. He made
them a long speech, cheering them up and telling them to stand fast
now and not despair, as some day we would all march back into Serbia
together.

We rode to Struga, on the Ockrida Lake, that night, and went up to the
headquarters of the Commandant of the division, where we found him and
his whole staff in bed. The room seemed absolutely full up with camp
beds and sleeping men, but they got up with great cheerfulness, put on
their boots and brushed their moustaches and entertained us with tea
and coffee till about 1 a.m., when we repaired to an empty hotel, where
there was plenty of room for all, for a few hours’ sleep.

We were routed out long before dawn, and after a cup of Turkish coffee
in the kitchen all turned out into the main street of the village
of Struga. In the bitterly cold grey dawn we stood around in black,
churned-up mud, shivering, hungry, and miserable. The discouraged
soldiers trailed along the road, in the half-light of a winter morning,
and altogether we looked the most hopelessly forlorn Army imaginable,
setting our faces towards the dark, hard-looking range of snow-capped
mountains which separate their beloved Serbia from Albania. It was the
last town in Serbia, and we were being driven out of it into exile. It
made me feel sad enough, and what must it have been to them, for they
are so passionately attached to their own country that they never want
to leave it, and the Serbian peasant feels lost and homesick ten miles
from his own native village.

A great deal has been written about the physical sufferings of the
soldiers at this time; hunger and pain they can stand, but this home
sickness and despair, the feeling that they were friendless, an Army in
exile, not knowing what had become of all their loved ones in Serbia,
this was what really broke their hearts and took the spirit out of them
far more than their other sufferings. They looked upon me almost as one
of themselves, and officers and men alike used to tell me about their
homes until I felt almost as if it was my own country that had been
invaded, and that we were being driven out of. “I am leaving my youth
behind me in Albania,” said one young officer to me as we sat looking
away into the stormy Albanian sunset one evening. How many of us before
we won through to the coast were to leave not only our youth but our
health and some of us our lives on those Albanian mountains!

Very glad I was that morning to see the sun rise and things brighten
and warm up a little. We rode to a Turkish village up on a hill
overlooking Struga and the lake, and from there we watched the bridge
burn which connected the Turkish quarter of the town with the part
held by our soldiers, thus delaying the Bulgarian pursuit, but not for
long. We stayed there two or three days with fighting going on all
around. The Bulgarians kept up a heavy bombardment with their big guns
over the Struga road, responded to by our little antiquated cannon. We
looked right down on it, and watched the shrapnel bursting all day and
the enemy gradually coming closer. Some of our artillery was concealed
in a little wood just below the village, and presently the enemy got
the range of this beautifully, and the shells were falling fast among
the trees. The doctor had been down there, and he brought me back a
piece of shell which had fallen right into the middle of the men’s
kitchen and upset all their soup, scattering them in all directions,
but, wonderful to say, not hurting anybody, and he had promised to take
me with him next time. I was sitting on the wall with the Staff Captain
watching it and wanted very much to go down, but he said I had better
not. “Do you mean only I ‘had better not,’ or that I ‘am not to’?” I
enquired meekly, having a wholesome respect for military discipline by
now. “No,” he said positively, “I mean you are not to.” So there was
nothing more to do but to salute and say “Rasumem” (“I understand”),
the Serbian reply to an order. I thought it rather hard, however, to be
chipped afterwards by the officer in command down there for not coming
down to help them and I could not persuade him that I had done my best.

The Turkish inhabitants of the village were very friendly, and the old
man who owned our house used to bring us large presents of walnuts.
They did not seem to like the Bulgarians at all, and explained to us by
signs that the Bulgarians were bad people and very cruel and would cut
their throats if they came into the village. The villagers used to sit
about all day watching the shrapnel. They seemed very pleased to see
us, and several of the children used to bring me presents of nuts and
flowers. They used to look at me with great curiosity, and could not
quite make out who or what I was. I found a couple of miserable looking
Austrian prisoners who were wandering round the village, who were too
ill to go away with the others and had been left behind.

We left there a few days afterwards at three o’clock in the morning
and rode down to a valley where the Fourteenth Regiment were camped,
and spent the rest of the night sitting round their camp fire. We
looked so funny in the early morning light all squatting round the
fire, the Commandant included, toasting bits of cheese on the ends of
pointed sticks; it tasted extremely good washed down by some of the
Commandant’s “Widow’s Cruse” of liqueur. I wanted to take a photograph
of us, but the light wasn’t good enough. Afterwards I curled up by
the fire with the soldiers and went to sleep, and the sun was shining
brightly when I woke to find the whole regiment sitting up with their
shirts off busily hunting the “first hundred thousand,” and I wished
I could do the same myself. “Shirts off” always seemed by unanimous
consent to be the order of the day directly there was a halt for any
length of time, and I should think there must have been very large
“catches” sometimes.

We crossed the frontier through Albania that afternoon, and went along
a winding road up a hill till right at the top you looked down on
beautiful Lake Ockrida and Serbia on one hand and on the other barren
Albania. Here we halted for a few minutes, and sort of said good-bye to
Serbia, and then rode on in silence into the Albanian valley, where we
camped at a sentry’s little hut on a hillock.

The next day the Commandant took me with him for his usual ride up into
the positions. The hills were very rough and steep, but our plucky
horses managed it all right. We stopped at one Albanian village on the
way which was invested by some of our troops. These Albanian villages
were a perfect picture of squalor and filth. I don’t know what the
people subsist on, but they seem to live like animals. I had always
pictured the Albanian peasants as a very fine picturesque race of men
wearing spotless native costume, and slung about with fascinating
looking daggers and curious weapons of all kinds, but the great
majority of those I saw, more especially in the small towns, were a
very degenerate looking race indeed.

We had intended going up to some positions which the Fourteenth
Regiment were holding, and where a battle was then in progress, but
before we got up there we got word that they had had to retreat, and
saw them coming back down the mountain side; so we had to stop where
the field telephone was rigged up, and the Commandant was very busy for
a long time giving orders, etc. He was away for some time, and I lay
down and went to sleep on the grass. With their usual charming manners
a couple of soldiers came up, telling me they had a fire over there,
and one of them fetched his blanket and spread it by the fire for me to
lie on, while the other one rolled up his overcoat for a pillow. The
Serbian peasant’s manners are not an acquired thing, depending upon
whether they have been well or badly brought up, but seem to be natural
and part of themselves, and as such are always to be depended upon.
People who do not know anything about them have sometimes asked me if I
was not afraid to go about among what they imagine to be a race of wild
savages, but quite the opposite is the case. I cannot imagine anything
more unlikely than to be insulted by a Serbian soldier. I should feel
safer walking through any town or village in Serbia at any hour of the
night than I should in most English or Continental towns.

Coming back in the dark, Diana fell on to her head in a ditch, and I
rolled off out of the way, as I did not want her to lie down on top of
me, but I got unmercifully chipped for “falling off.” I was tired, and
had besides a splitting headache; so I went and lay down in my tent
when we got in. My orderly came and tucked me up, made me some tea,
and told the men near not to make a noise, and altogether made up for
any shortcomings he might have by being exceedingly sympathetic. I
had not intended going in to supper, but he was so persuasive about
it, telling me there was, as he expressed it, such a “fine supper,”
and was so anxious for me to have some, that I finally went in. About
9.30 p.m. we packed up again and rode for a couple of hours to another
little house, where we found some officers, who turned out of their
beds--which they invited us to sit on while they entertained us with
tea--after which the Commandant, Captain, Adjutant and myself turned in
thankfully, not for very long, as we had to start at 3 a.m. the next
morning.

We rode till daylight, and then camped on a hill near the ambulance.
There was no house here, so the staff borrowed one of the ambulance
tents, and I pitched my little one alongside of it. The Second Regiment
were camped on the same hillside, and the next morning the Commander
of the First Battalion, Captain Stoyadinovitch, came in to see the
Colonel before going with his battalion to take up the positions. I
asked if I might go with him, and he said I might; so I rode off with
him at the head of the battalion, little thinking how long it would
be before I saw the Commandant and his staff again, and that was how
I came afterwards to be attached properly to a company, and became an
ordinary soldier.




CHAPTER VI

FIGHTING ON MOUNT CHUKUS


We rode all that morning, and as the Commander of the battalion,
Captain Stoyadinovitch, did not speak anything but Serbian, nor did
any other of the officers or men, it looked as if I should soon pick
it up. The staff had also shifted their quarters at the same time, and
while we were riding up a very steep hill where Captain S---- had to go
for orders Diana’s saddle slipped round, and by the time some of the
soldiers had fixed it again for me I found he had got his orders and
disappeared. I asked some of the soldiers which way he had gone, and
they pointed across some fields; so I went after him as fast as Diana
could gallop. I met three officers that I knew, also running in the
same direction, and all the men seemed to be going the same way too.
The officers hesitated about letting me come, and said, “Certainly not
on Diana,” who was white and would make an easy mark for the enemy; so
I jumped off and threw my reins to a soldier.

“Well, can you run fast?” they said.

“What, away from the Bulgars!” I exclaimed in surprise.

“No, towards them.”

“Yes, of course I can.”

“Well, come on then,” and off we went for a regular steeplechase,
down one side of a steep hill, splashing and scrambling through a
torrent at the bottom of it and up another one equally steep, a sturdy
lieutenant leading us over all obstacles, at a pace which left even
all of them gasping, and I was thankful that I was wearing riding
breeches and not skirts, which would have certainly been a handicap
through the bushes. I wondered how fast we could go if occasion should
arise that we ever had to run away _from_ the Bulgarians, if we went
at that pace _towards_ them. Though no one had breath to tell me where
we were going, it was plain enough, as we could hear the firing more
clearly every moment. We finally came to anchor in a ruined Albanian
hut in the middle of a bare plateau on the top of a hill, where we
found the Commander of the battalion there before us, he having ridden
another way. The Fourth Company, whom we had already met once that
morning, were holding some natural trenches a short way farther on,
and we were not allowed to go any farther. The Bulgarians seemed to
have got their artillery fairly close, and the shrapnel was bursting
pretty thickly all round. We sat under the shelter of the wall and
watched it, though, as it was the only building standing up all by
itself, it seemed to make a pretty good mark, supposing they discovered
we were there, which they did very shortly. An ancient old crone, an
Albanian woman, barefooted and in rags, was wandering about among the
ruins, and she looked such a poor old thing that I gave her a few
coppers. She called down what I took at the time to be blessings on my
head, but which afterwards I had reason to suppose were curses. The
shells were beginning to fall pretty thickly in our neighbourhood,
and our Battalion Commander finally said it was time to move on. He
proved to be right, as three minutes after we left it the wall under
which we were sitting was blown to atoms by a shell. My old crone had
disappeared in the meantime to a couple of wooden houses on the edge
of the wood. We had to cross a piece of open ground, which we did in
single file, to reach this wood, and before we got to it we got a
whole fusillade of bullets whistling round our ears from the friends
and relations of the old lady upon whom I had expended my misplaced
sympathy and coppers. These were the sort of tricks the Albanians were
constantly playing on us from the windows of houses, whenever they got
a chance.

We got down through the wood to where we left our horses, waited for
the Fourth Company to join us, which they presently did, and then rode
on, halting for a time, not far from where some of our artillery were
shelling the enemy down below in the valley. The officer in charge
showed me how to fire off one of the guns when he gave the word, and
let me take the place of the man who had been doing it as long as we
stayed there.

It was dark when we got to our camping ground that night, close to
where the Colonel and his staff were settled, so I sent for my
blankets and tent, which I had left with them, and camped with the
battalion. After a light supper of bowls of soup we sat in a circle
round the camp fire till late, smoking and chatting. The whole
battalion was camped there, including the Fourth Company, with whom
I had previously spent an evening at their camp in the snow, and I
thought it very jolly being with them again. It did not seem quite so
jolly, however, the next morning, when we were aroused at 3 a.m. in
pitch dark and pouring rain, everything extremely cold and horribly
wet, to climb into soaking saddles, without any breakfast, and ride off
goodness knows where to take up some new position.

It was so thick that we could literally not see our horses’ ears; I
kept as close as I could behind Captain S----, and he called out
every now and again to know if I was still there. We jostled our way
through crowds of soldiers, all going in the same direction up a steep
path turned into a mountain torrent from the rain, with a precipitous
rock on the near side, which I was told to keep close to, as there was
a precipice on the other. A figure wrapped up in a waterproof cloak
loomed up beside me in the darkness and proved to be the Commander
of the Fourth Company. He presented me with firstly a pull from his
flask of cognac, which was very grateful and comforting, and secondly
a pair of warm woollen gloves, which he had in reserve, as my hands
were wet and frozen. This young man had a most useful faculty of having
a “reserve” of everything one could possibly want, which he always
produced just at the right moment, when one did want it. He had not
done four years’ incessant campaigning without learning everything
there was to know about it, and prided himself upon always having a
“reserve,” from a tin of sardines or a piece of chocolate when you were
hungry and had nothing to eat, to a spare bridle when someone’s broke,
as mine did one day, although he seemed to carry no more luggage than
anyone else.

We rode like this till after daylight, and then sat on the wet grass
under some trees and had a plate of beans; they tasted very good then,
but I’ve eaten them so often since that now I simply can’t look a bean
in the face. They asked me if I was going to tackle the mountain on
foot with them, or if I would rather stay there with the transport. I
went with them, of course. Mount Chukus is 1,790 metres high from where
we were then, and it certainly was a stiff climb. We left our horses
there--I had been riding a rough mountain pony of Captain S----’s--and
the whole battalion started up on foot. There was no path most of the
way, and in places it was so steep that we had to scramble along and
pull ourselves up by the bushes, over the rocks and boulders, and in
spite of the cold and wet we were all dripping with perspiration. We
of necessity went very slowly, making frequent halts to recover our
breath and let the end men catch up, as we did not want to lose any
stragglers. It must be remembered that not one of these men but had at
least one old wound received either in this or some previous war, and
a great number had five or six, and this climb was calculated to catch
anybody in their weak spot.

We arrived at the top about 4 p.m., steady travelling since 3 a.m. that
morning, most of which had been uphill and hard-going. One officer with
an old wound through his chest, and another bullet still in his side,
just dropped on his face when we got to the top, though he had not
uttered a word of complaint before.

At the very tip-top we camped amongst some pine trees and put up our
tents; it was still raining hard and continued to do so all that
night, and everything was soaking--there didn’t seem to be a dry spot
anywhere. The little bivouac tents are made in four pieces, and each
man carries one piece, which he wraps round him like a waterproof when
he has to march in the rain; and, if it is not convenient to put up
tents, rolls himself up in it at night. We made fires, though we were
nearly blinded by the smoke from the wet wood; someone produced some
bread and cheese and shared it round, and then we all turned in. It was
so cold and wet that I crawled out again about 2 a.m., and finished
the night by the fire, as did three or four more uneasy souls who were
too cold to sleep. My feet were soaking, so I stuck them near the fire
and then went to sleep, pulling my coat over my head to keep off the
rain, and it was not until some time afterwards that I discovered that
I had burnt the soles nearly off my boots. I felt hearty sympathy for
a soldier I heard one day in Durazzo being reprimanded by an officer
for having half his overcoat burnt away--“Do you think you were the
only one who was cold? Why didn’t _that_ man and _that_ man burn their
clothes? they were just as cold,” and I thought guiltily of my own
burnt boots.

Later on the next day the sun put in an appearance, as did also the
Bulgarians. The other side of the mountain was very steep, and our
position dominated a flat wooded sort of plateau below, where the enemy
were. One of our sentries, who was posted behind a rock, reported
the first sight of them, and I went up to see where they were, with
two of the officers. I could not see them plainly at first, but they
could evidently see our three heads very plainly. The companies were
quickly posted in their various positions, and I made my way over to
the Fourth, which was in the first line; we did not need any trenches,
as there were heaps of rocks for cover, and we laid behind them firing
by volley. I had only a revolver and no rifle of my own at that time,
but one of my comrades was quite satisfied to lend me his and curl
himself up and smoke. We all talked in whispers, as if we were stalking
rabbits, though I could not see that it mattered much if the Bulgarians
did hear us, as they knew exactly where we were, as the bullets that
came singing round one’s head directly one stood up proved, but they
did not seem awfully good shots. It is a funny thing about rifle fire,
that a person’s instinct always seems to be to hunch up his shoulders
or turn up his coat collar when he is walking about, as if it were
rain, though the bullet you hear whistle past your ears is not the one
that is going to hit you. I have seen heaps of men do this who have
been through dozens of battles and are not afraid of any mortal thing.

We lay there and fired at them all that day, and I took a lot of
photographs which I wanted very much to turn out well; but, alas!
during the journey through Albania the films, together with nearly
all the others that I took, got wet and spoilt. The firing died down
at dark, and we left the firing line and made innumerable camp fires
and sat round them. Lieut. Jovitch, the Commander, took me into his
company, and I was enrolled on its books, and he seemed to think I
might be made a corporal pretty soon if I behaved myself. We were 221
in the Fourth, and were the largest, and, we flattered ourselves, the
smartest, company of the smartest regiment, the first to be ready in
marching order in the mornings, and the quickest to have our tents
properly pitched and our camp fires going at night. Our Company
Commander was a hustler, very proud of his men, and they were devoted
to him and would do anything for him, and well they might. He was a
martinet for discipline, but the comfort of his men was always his
first consideration; they came to him for everything, and he would
have given anyone the coat off his back if they had wanted it. A good
commander makes a good company, and he could make a dead man get up
and follow him.

That evening was very different to the previous one. Lieut. Jovitch
had a roaring fire of pine logs built in a little hollow, just below
what had been our firing line, and he and I and the other two officers
of the company sat round it and had our supper of bread and beans, and
after that we spread our blankets on spruce boughs round the fire and
rolled up in them. It was a most glorious moonlight night, with the
ground covered with white hoar frost, and it looked perfectly lovely
with all the camp fires twinkling every few yards over the hillside
among the pine trees. I lay on my back looking up at the stars, and,
when one of them asked me what I was thinking about, I told him that
when I was old and decrepit and done for, and had to stay in a house
and not go about any more, I should remember my first night with the
Fourth Company on the top of Mount Chukus.

The next morning our blankets were all covered with frost and the air
was nippy, but got warmer as the sun got up, and one soon gets used to
the cold when one is always out of doors.

We took up our positions again behind the same line of rocks soon after
sunrise. In the afternoon the firing got very hot, and the Bulgars got
a sort of cross fire on, so that the bullets were also spitting across
the plateau where we had our fire last night, and they seemed to be
getting up nearer round another ridge. Our cannon were posted somewhere
below on our left commanding the road, and we could watch how things
were going on between them and the Bulgarian artillery by the puffs of
white smoke. We had a few casualties, but not so very many.

We stayed there all day till dark, and it got very cold towards sunset,
kneeling or lying on our tummies; sometimes we just sniped as we liked,
and sometimes fired by volley as the platoon sergeant gave the order,
“Né shanni palli” (“Take aim, fire”). I had luckily always been used to
a rifle, so could do it with the others all right.

One drawback to Chukus was that there was very little to eat and no
water, or at least hardly any, it having to be fetched in water-bottles
from a long distance, or melted down from the snow which still hung
about there in deep drifts. We used to fill billy-cans with snow and
melt it over the fire. The men had long ago finished their ration of
bread which they carried in their knapsacks and only had corn cobs,
which they roasted over the camp fires; we had also almost run out of
cigarettes and tobacco.

About 9 p.m. the order came to retire; coming up the mountain was bad
enough, but going down was worse. It was lucky there was a moon. We
went down a different side along a path covered with thick slippery
mud and very steep, and, as I had no nails in my boots and not much
soles, I found it hard to keep my feet. Half-way down we met another
battalion, and I was delighted to meet my old friend whose “Slava day”
we had celebrated on the top of Mount Kalabac, and who wanted to know
what in the world I was doing here. We found the horses at the bottom,
and then the men marched, and I and those of the officers who had
horses rode all night through a long defile in the mountains. It was a
very narrow track, with a mountain up one side and a precipice on the
other which effectually prevented one from giving way to the temptation
to go to sleep while riding.

We picked up the rest of the regiment soon after daybreak and halted
there. I already knew nearly all the officers, and they all wanted
to know what I thought of Chukus. We sat round the fires for some
time laughing and joking and then all went on to within a few miles
of Elbasan. I thought we were going to camp there, but we still had
another five or six miles’ march to the outskirts of Elbasan. Since I
had joined this company we had had a day’s fighting, then a twelve-hour
march, starting at 3 a.m. with a climb to the top of Chukus thrown in,
36 hours’ pelting rain, two days’ continuous fighting, nothing but a
few cobs to eat, and now had been marching since 9 o’clock the night
before, yet as we turned at 5 o’clock in the afternoon into the swampy
field where we were to camp they had enough spirit left to respond to
their company Commander’s appeal, “Now then, men, left, right, left,
right; pull yourselves together and remember you are soldiers,” and
this was only a sample of what they had been doing for weeks past.




CHAPTER VII

ELBASAN--WE PUSH ON TOWARDS THE COAST


[Illustration: AN ENGLISH WOMAN-SERGEANT IN SERBIA

THE AUTHOR IN KHAKI

Page 148]

Next day we had a whole blessed day’s rest, and the men lay about
and rested, and everybody washed their shirts and generally polished
themselves up to the best of their ability. Our camp was in a bare and
very muddy field about two miles outside Elbasan. In the afternoon
Lieut. Jovitch got leave and took me with him to Elbasan to see the
sights and show me what an Albanian town is like. It was a filthy
little town; the streets paved with big cobble stones and running
rivers of mud. The inhabitants were as hostile as they dared to be,
and used to refuse to sell us anything. They put the price of bread up
to Frs. 16 a loaf, and everything else in proportion, and would not
sell us any hay for our horses, although they had plenty. Although
the men were not allowed into the town then for fear of trouble, they
would never forget it, and promised themselves to get some of their own
back whenever they came back that way again. Many of the inhabitants
were wearing Austrian overcoats which they had got in exchange for a
small piece of bread from the starving Austrian prisoners who passed
through there. Some of our men had been given new boots, and, while
refusing to sell us anything, the Albanians would try to tempt them by
offering a small loaf in exchange for them, and naturally, under the
circumstances, they sometimes succeeded.

There was absolutely nothing to see in the town, so we sat for a time
in the only Kafana, or hotel, in the place--a dark, dirty little den,
with some of the officers whom we met, and drank coffee, and later in
the afternoon galloped back as hard as we could to camp through the
drenching rain. We found our low-lying field afloat, and the soldiers
had moved to a bit of slightly rising ground where it was not quite
so bad. It was raining so hard and everything was so wet that on
discovering a sort of loft or small room up a ladder fourteen officers
and myself piled in there. Here three of us who had camp beds put them
up, and the rest slept on the floor. Of course, as a rule camp beds
were no use to us, as you cannot get a camp bed into a bivouac tent. We
thought we were going to stay there all night, and would have plenty
of time to sleep, and sat about and talked, and some of them played
cards all night; so we got a nasty jar when at daylight the order came
that we were all to move to another camp. We didn’t want any trouble
with the natives, but the officers had the men well in hand, and they
marched steadily through the town. I rode at the head of our company,
while the company Commander dropped back alongside and kept his eye
on the men; and we all went through without trouble, marching well.
We camped in an olive grove beside the river, and most of us went to
sleep. It still poured all that day and all night and all the next
night and all the next day.

I rode into Elbasan again, and paid a visit to Commandant Militch and
his staff, who had taken up quarters in the town. They had arrived that
morning, and the rains had been so heavy since we passed that the river
had risen and they had had to ford it up to their waists.

We turned out before dawn next morning, and it was horribly cold and
damp; we had been sleeping on the wet ground, there being no hay for
the horses to eat, and much less for us to sleep on. We had to cross a
beautiful old bridge over the wide Schkumba River, and there was a good
deal of delay and waiting about. The river had risen, and the bridge
did not reach quite far enough, so the men had to cross a plank at the
other end, and it took ages for the whole regiment to get across. Those
who were on horseback forded the river, which was not very deep, though
very wide, with a very rapid current. The fields at the other side were
a swamp, and the men were up to their knees in mud and water.

My company was told off to take up a position by itself on a range
of hills, and we went up there in the afternoon by a very bad steep
track, through bushes with very big prickly thorns. The hills were
covered with bracken, which we cut down to make beds of, and pitched
our tents in a little hollow. We were all by ourselves up there, and
had a very quiet four days, as we seemed at last to have shaken off
the pursuing Bulgarians, and it seemed sometimes as if everyone had
forgotten all about us. We were the only company up there, and were
a very funny-looking camp, with the men sitting about resting and
repairing their clothes, and washing hanging out on all the bushes; in
fact, we said ourselves that we looked more like a travelling gipsies’
encampment than the smartest company in the regiment.

[Illustration: SERBIAN SOLDIERS. A COLD CAMP

Page 114]

[Illustration: ROUND THE CAMP FIRE

Page 154]

Christmas Eve was bright and sunny, and in the afternoon we visited
an Albanian village. I was an object of great curiosity to the
inhabitants, especially the women, and they always asked Lieut. Jovitch
whether I was a woman or a soldier, and seemed very much puzzled when
he said I was an Englishwoman but a Serbian soldier. We were sitting
outside one cottage talking to a very old man and his wife. Poor old
thing, she patted me all over, examining everything I had on with the
deepest interest, and finally disappeared into the cottage and came out
again with a bowl of sour milk and some awful-looking bread, of which
I ate as much as I could, not to hurt her feelings. We had given the
old man some money, and I searched my pockets to see if I could find
anything the old woman would like, and finally, feeling rather like
“Alice in Wonderland” when she “begged the acceptance of this elegant
thimble,” I presented her with a small pocket mirror. I do not think
she had ever seen such a thing before, and gazed into it with the
greatest delight though she looked about a hundred and was ugly enough
to frighten the devil.

The Serbian Christmas is not till thirteen days later than ours, but
we celebrated my English Christmas Eve over the camp fire that night.
A plate of beans and dry bread had to take the place of roast beef
and plum pudding, but we drank Christmas healths in a small flask of
cognac, after which I played “God Save the King” on the violin, and we
all stood up and sang it. This violin went into my long, narrow kit
bag, which was carried on a pack-horse and had managed to survive its
travels, though the damp had not improved its tone. In the middle of
this performance a soldier walked up from the town with the news that
the Allies were advancing and that Scoplyé had been retaken by the
French, and we were all fearfully bucked. The men came crowding up
to hear the news, and immediately began making great plans of turning
round and marching straight back into Serbia the way we had come, and
we sat round the fire until late, playing and singing to celebrate
the victory. This news afterwards proved to be incorrect, but we
quite believed it at the time. We hardly ever did get any news of the
outside world and the doings of one’s own particular regiment, and more
especially the varying fortunes of one’s own particular company, seemed
to be the most important things in the whole war to us, and what may
have been passing during that time on other and more important fronts
I did not hear from any reliable source until we got to Durazzo, and
not very much then. The greater part of the Serbian Army who went by
the northern route through Montenegro to Scutari I heard afterwards had
an infinitely worse time than we did, but we did not hear the tale of
their sufferings until later, and much has already been written about
them.

The next day was Christmas Day, and a Serbian journalist who had spent
a great many years in America walked some miles over from his own
company to wish me a “Merry Christmas,” so that I should hear the old
greeting from someone in English.

We had quite settled down to our gipsy life, but the food question had
become a serious problem by now; bread was at famine prices, the men
had finished all their corn cobs and had had practically nothing to eat
for two days. I asked the company Commander if it would be possible
to buy anything for them, and we sent down into the town and bought a
sort of corn meal for Frs. 200, and had it baked into flat loaves there
in the town, and next day when we turned out for a fresh start we gave
each man in the company half of one of my corn meal loaves and a couple
of cigarettes, telling them it was England’s Christmas box to them,
which they ate as they went along, otherwise they would have had to
march all that day on nothing. As the other companies who had not been
so fortunate saw our men go past munching the last of their corn meal
bread they called, “Well done, Fourth Company!” after us, and wanted to
join us.

For the first time since we had left Baboona we had shaken off the
Bulgarians and were no longer within sound of the guns, but we had to
press on or the men would starve.

We had lost hundreds of horses from exhaustion and starvation--once
they fell they were too weak to rise again--and their corpses lined
the road, or rather track. Sick or well, the men had to keep on. No
one could be carried, and you had got to keep on going or die by the
roadside.

The next four or five days we continued steadily on our way towards
Durazzo, starting about 4 a.m. and generally turning into camp between
6 and 7, long after the short winter afternoons had closed in, so that
we had to find our way round our new camping ground in the dark. The
weather had got considerably warmer, although the nights were still
bitterly cold, and quite a scorching sun used to come out for a few
hours in the middle of the day, and this took it out of the tired men a
good deal. Before, when I had been working in the hospitals, and I used
to ask the men where it hurt them, I had often been rather puzzled at
the general reply of the new arrivals, “Sve me boli” (“Everything hurts
me”), it seemed such a vague description and such a curious malady; but
in these days I learnt to understand perfectly what they meant by it,
when you seem to be nothing but one pain from the crown of your aching
head to the soles of your blistered feet, and I thought it was a very
good thing that the next time I was working in a military hospital I
should be able to enter into my patient’s feelings, and realise that
all he felt he wanted was to be let alone to sleep for about a week and
only rouse up for his meals.

We went slowly and halted every few hours, sometimes just for a quarter
of an hour, sometimes for a good deal longer, and the moment the halt
was called everyone used to just drop down on the ground and fall
asleep till our company Commander would call, “Now then, men, get up,”
and we would all pull ourselves together, everyone rising immediately
without the slightest delay. In the long midday halt we used to join
up with the others, and the whole regiment would rest together, and
exchange any scraps of news going. In the evenings the men used to sit
round the fires and gossip, and everything that everybody did or said
was discussed all through the regiment. News always travels like this
among Serbians, and I have often been astonished after I had been away
from camp to be told the following day exactly where I had been, whom I
had been with, and what I had done. I remember once in Kragujewatz when
there were some English officers up in Belgrade who fondly imagined
that both their presence and their doings there were a dead secret, in
the same curious way we, in the centre of Serbia, knew all about them.

Our riding horses were some of them so starved and exhausted that
we could hardly keep the poor brutes on their feet, and I used to
sometimes walk to give mine a rest; but at the same time I should have
felt more sympathy with it if it had not had a most irritating habit
of refusing to stand still for a moment, but kept wheeling round and
round in circles. It was a rough mountain pony belonging to my company
Commander, who, when I joined his company, of course, produced a
“reserve” pony for me. The poor little brute died two days after we got
to Durazzo.

One night we halted on rather funny camping ground, on the side of a
hill covered with holly bushes, and had to find our way through them
in the dark. We slept round the fires, as there was not room to put
up tents among the prickly bushes. Our company Commander, telling his
ordonnance that they were all too slow for a funeral, lit our fire
himself in two minutes under the shelter of a huge holly bush, and we
were half-way through supper, very comfortably sitting round a roaring
blaze, while other people were still looking for a good spot for their
fire, and were asleep at opposite sides of ours before half the others
were well alight.

At last we were nearing our journey’s end; it was the last day’s
march, and an unusually long one, too. We passed a company of Italian
soldiers, and some of the officers came up early in the morning and
visited our camp. Durazzo was being bombarded from the sea, and we
could hear the boom of the big naval guns in the distance, but it was
all over before we arrived. We marched that day from 5 a.m., which
meant, of course, being up at least an hour before, to 8 p.m., with
only very short and infrequent halts.

About dusk we reached Kavaia, and all the inhabitants turned out and
lined the streets to watch us go past. There, again, they put up
everything to famine prices, a tiny flask of cognac which we bought
costing Frs. 6, in addition to which they would only give us three
Italian francs for our Serbian 10-franc note.

I never saw anything like the mud in Kavaia; in the town it was a
liquid black mass, through which men waded far above their knees, and
on the long road between Kavaia and our camping ground it was like
treacle. It came right above the tops of my top boots, and one could
hardly drag one’s feet out of it. The road was full of rocks and pits,
and every two or three yards there were dead and dying horses which had
floundered down to rise no more; and it was pitch dark and very cold.

Though not very many miles, it took us nearly three hours to do this
bit from Kavaia to our camp, there being a block on the road in front
of us, and we were absolutely exhausted, when at last we saw the camp
fires of the First Company twinkling on the hillside. We kept pushing
on and on, and seemed to be never getting any nearer to them; owing to
the darkness and the constant blocks caused by the narrow approach to
our camp, the road got frightfully congested. I did the latter part of
the way on foot, too, and began to wonder if those really were camp
fires ahead of us or sort of will-o’-the-wisps getting farther away.
At last we turned on to the hillside by the sea, which was to be our
resting-place for the next month. I was lying on the grass talking to
a soldier, while my orderly put up my tent. He said he was very tired,
and I said we all were, but would soon be able to turn in. “Yes,” he
said thoughtfully, not complaining at all, but merely stating a fact,
“but you have ridden most of the way and I have walked, and presently
you will have _something_ to eat, and I shan’t.” There was no supper
waiting for the tired man. In the Austrian Army I hear the officers
live in luxury while their men starve, but that could most certainly
not be said of our officers--beans and bread, and not too much of
either, and we had bought the bread ourselves. He was stoking up the
fire a little later on, and I called him over and gave him my piece of
bread. He shook his head and refused to take it at first, saying, “No,
you’ll need that yourself,” and not till I had quite convinced him that
I had enough without it would he take it. We all turned in dead to the
world that night, but very glad to have at last reached the coast, and
I completely forgot that it was New Year’s Eve, though certainly even
had I remembered I should not have sat up to see the New Year in.




CHAPTER VIII

SERBIAN CHRISTMAS DAY AT DURAZZO--AEROPLANE RAIDS


Next day was New Year’s Day, and everyone came up and wished me a Happy
New Year, our English New Year, that is, as theirs, of course, did not
come till thirteen days later, and we all hoped that the New Year might
prove happier than the old one had been.

The whole regiment moved their tents up on to the hill and got
ship-shape, which, of course, we had not attempted to do in the dark
last night. All the men hurried up to the top of the hill to have
their first look at the sea, most of them never having seen it before,
and they seemed never tired of lying gazing at it. The sea looked quite
close, but in reality there was a river and a wide swamp between us
and it, as I found to my cost one day when I tried to go down there to
bathe. It was lovely weather, and that afternoon the band played for
the first time, and we all sat about, or paid visits to each other’s
tents, and congratulated ourselves that we seemed to be nearing the
end of our troubles, though as a matter of fact many poor fellows who
had struggled on bravely through Albania succumbed in Durazzo, and
thousands more later on in Corfu from the effects of starvation and
exposure.

We were about 10 miles from the town of Durazzo, though it did not
look anything like so far, and we could see it plainly at the end of
the long line of yellow sands jutting out into the sea. There were
several wrecks round there, one of them a Greek steamer, which had hit
a floating mine. There were a great many of these floating mines about,
and the Austrian submarines were also very active, adding immensely
to the difficulty of getting food and supplies, which all had to be
brought by sea to the troops.

A couple of days after I rode into Durazzo with three of the officers
to see the sights of the town. The first sight I did see was a real
live English sergeant-major walking down the street. I could hardly
believe my eyes, it seemed so long since I had seen an Englishman, and
I did not know there were any there. I almost fell on his neck in
my excitement, and he seemed equally astonished and pleased to see a
fellow countrywoman. He took me up at once to the headquarters of the
British Adriatic Mission, and fed me on tea and cakes, while we were
waiting for Colonel ---- to come in. The same man was also afterwards,
strange to say, the first man I met in Salonica, as he was acting as
Captain of the tug which came to take us off the French steamer on
which we had come from Corfu. Afterwards I had lunch with Colonel ----
and his staff. It was the first time for so long that I had sat on a
chair and eaten my meals off a table with a table-cloth that I had
almost forgotten how to do it. I went back late in the afternoon laden
with sundry luxuries they had given me in the way of butter, jam, and
a tinned plum pudding, and also two loaves of bread which I had bought
in the town, as in those days when we got near a shop we always bought
a loaf of bread, in the same way that people at home would buy cake.

I rode back with an artillery officer, who invited me to lunch next
day, the other side of Kavaia, and I promised I would come if I could
borrow a better horse than the one I was then riding. The road from
our camp to Durazzo was in a shocking condition, and it was very hard
to ride along it after dark; there were so many dead horses strewn all
along it that it was a wonder they did not breed a pestilence.

On my way to my luncheon party next day I met my old friend whose
“Slava day” we had celebrated on the top of Mount Kalabac, and stopped
there for supper coming back. We had supper by the camp fire with an
orchestra of two Tziganes, who sang and played the Serbian airs on
their violins. These Tziganes are all very musical and would sooner
part with anything than their violin. Some of them play very well, and
they can do a very difficult thing--sing a song and play their own
accompaniment with chords on the violin at the same time.

The next day, the men having by now had a little time to get rested,
there was a big parade and inspection, though we were a somewhat
ragged-looking regiment for a full-dress parade.

On the Serbian Christmas Eve there was a great ceremony, which is
always kept up. Of course, we only kept it on a small scale, but I
was told that in Belgrade in peace time it was a very splendid affair
indeed. This was cutting the Christmas oak. All the officers rode out
to a wood, where the band played, and there was a sort of service
conducted by the priest, and then we came back carrying a small oak
tree, and there were refreshments and much drinking of healths.

We kept up Christmas festivities for three days, and the men had extra
rations, and all had roast pig, which even the very poorest family
in Serbia always has on Christmas Day. In the evening I was invited
to dinner with the Colonel of the regiment and his staff; we drank
the healths of England and Serbia together, and kept it up till very
late. They put a gold coin in their pudding like we put things in
our English plum puddings, and I got the slice containing it. They
told me it was very lucky, and I always wear it now. On Christmas
Eve they roast nuts like we do on Twelfth Night. It is the same date
as our Twelfth Night, and I was surprised to find that they had many
of these old customs which are now found more in Ireland than in
England. Although they did their best to make a bluff at having a happy
Christmas it was a very sad and homesick one for them really, not
knowing in the least where their families were spending theirs, or if
they would ever meet again.

We had fixed ourselves up pretty comfortably by now. By digging out
a place about 2 ft. deep, building up the earth into a wall all
round and pitching the tent on to the top of that you can turn a
small bivouac tent into quite a large and commodious abode, which
will contain a camp bed if you have one and a fireplace with an earth
chimney for the smoke, and when you have a fire going and four or five
of you are sitting in there no one need complain of the cold, even on
the coldest evening; and the evenings were still very cold indeed,
although the days were hot.

I used to ride into Durazzo fairly often to see my English friends
there, who were more than kind and hospitable to me, and used to give
me many little luxuries to take back with which to eke out our slender
rations, as, no longer having the hard exercise every day to put an
edge on our appetites, we seemed rather to have turned against beans.
Though a corporal, I always messed with the officers.

The British Adriatic Mission were feeding the Serbian Army, and were
doing wonders, though owing to the constant arrival of fresh troops
and the scarcity of ovens for baking their bread (although they were
building fresh ones as fast as ever they could) the men were still on
half rations of bread, and some days had to have biscuits instead;
but, of course, the men could have eaten a lot more after their months
of starvation. Among other things they had had some coffee given to
them, but it was not much use, as they had no sugar, and the kindly
inhabitants of Durazzo had made a corner in sugar and put the price
up to Frs. 16 a kilo; so it was impossible to buy it for them, and
I racked my brains as to how I could get some at least for my own
company. I asked the head of the B.A.M., but he, of course, could not
make an exception of one particular company, even if it had an English
corporal (I had been made corporal on New Year’s Day, and promoted
sergeant three months later), but he said he would see what could be
done and turned the matter over to his Adjutant. He, being a young man
of resource, went to a Red Cross organisation and demanded a _year’s
rations_ of sugar for an English nurse. I do not know what the daily
ration of sugar for an English nurse may be, but, anyhow, one year’s
worked out at a good-sized case, which I brought back in triumph
(having borrowed a pack-horse in Durazzo for that purpose) and divided
up amongst my company, and perfect peace reigned in the camp, the men
all spending a very happy afternoon sitting round their little camp
fires, making endless little cups of sweet black Turkish coffee. I hope
the American Red Cross will forgive me for sharing my year’s rations
with belligerents if they should ever chance to read this.

I got myself into sad disgrace one day, however, by going away from
the camp without leave. An officer from another battalion was going to
lunch at another camp some miles away, and he invited me to ride over
with him. We started very early in the morning, and, as I could not
find the Commander of my company to ask leave, I just went. We stayed
there, not only for lunch, but for supper and all the evening as well,
and I would not like to say what time it was when we got back. The next
morning my company Commander pointed out to me one of the soldiers up
on the hillside doing four hours’ punishment drill, standing up there
with his rifle, accoutrements and heavy pack in the hot sun, and I
was told that on this occasion I should be let off with a reprimand
(although I had been three months in the Army and ought to know better
by this time), but if I did not see the error of my ways I should find
myself doing something similar to that next time, or five days’ C.B.
I got my revenge, however, a few days later, when he fell sick, and I
returned to my original vocation of nurse. He was a very docile patient
for a week, though after that he suddenly thought it was time to
reassert his authority, so got up one day when my back was turned, and
ate everything I had not allowed him to eat while in bed.

[Illustration: SERBIAN SOLDIERS IN THEIR OWN SERBIAN UNIFORMS, BEFORE
GETTING ENGLISH KHAKI

Page 183]

I had a telegram one day from Durazzo from my friend Miss Simmonds,
telling me to come and meet her in Durazzo at once. She and I had
worked together in the Serbian hospitals ever since the beginning of
the war, and as soon as she got my letter saying I was starting back
for Serbia she had left New York to join me again, but, of course,
could not find me, as by the time she got to Salonica I had disappeared
into Albania. She had been doing most wonderful work ever since,
organising relief for Serbian refugees and personally conducting
shiploads of them from Salonica to Corsica, Marseilles and goodness
knows where. Among other little odd jobs she discovered a whole colony
of them in Brindisi who had been without food for two days; so without
any further red tape proceeded to hire carriages, drive round the town
and buy up everything in the eatable line which was to be had wherewith
to feed them.

I at once borrowed a horse and rode out to Durazzo to meet her. I did
not know in the least where to find her there, but most of the people
in the town seemed to have heard of her, and I finally located her at
the Serbian Crown Prince’s house, where she had gone to be presented.
He was not going to see any more people that day, but when he heard
that I had arrived he very kindly said that he would see me too. I was
not exactly dressed to be presented to Royalty, as I was still wearing
the clothes (the only ones I had) in which I had come through Albania,
besides having just had a hot and dusty 10 mile ride, but that doesn’t
matter in wartime. He was most charming, and decorated us both with the
Sveti Sava medal.

After that we went on board her ship, in which she was sailing that
night with 1,500 refugees which she was taking to Corsica. We had a
busy evening, and had our work cut out for us feeding 1,500 refugees
on bully beef and biscuits. The ship, which was a small Greek one, was
simply packed, and it was no easy task on the pitch dark decks and down
in the holds.

I slept in town that night. One of the English officers was waiting on
the quay for me when I got back at midnight, and he had found me room
in an hotel. The hotels in Durazzo are the limit, but this one did at a
pinch. He asked the boy in the hotel if he could make us some tea. He
said he could as far as the boiling water went, but he had neither tea
nor sugar. A Serbian officer, a stranger to us both, who happened to
be passing on his way to bed, overheard this, and immediately said he
had both tea and sugar, which he would give us; and not only did he do
this, but came back afterwards and apologised for not having any cognac
to put into it. As my friend remarked, “Really the Serbians do give us
points in the way of manners; here is a man who, not satisfied with
seeing to the comfort of two people who are total strangers to him,
and providing them with his own tea and sugar, comes back and actually
apologises because he has not cognac as well!”

The next morning I went round to the British Adriatic Mission, and
while I was having breakfast there there was a most terrific crash,
followed by others in quick succession. I left my breakfast and
went out into the street to see what was to be seen. Five Austrian
aeroplanes were circling round and round overhead, apparently dropping
bombs as fast as they could. The streets of Durazzo are very, very
narrow, and the town is very small and very crowded. People were
running as hard as they could to get out of the way--at least, the
Italians were running, the Serbians always thought it beneath their
dignity to do so. I was standing with a Serbian artillery officer who
knew all about it and could almost always guess pretty well where they
were going to fall. Looking up into the clear blue sky you could see
the bombs quite well as they left the aeroplanes: first of all they
looked like a silvery streak of light, and then like a thin streak of
mist falling through the sky, till they hit some building with a crash,
smothering everyone in the neighbourhood with a powdery white dust.
Two of them fell in almost identically the same spot at the end of the
street about a hundred yards from us, and several more round about.
Another officer joined us presently who was very much annoyed because
he was in the middle of being shaved when the first bomb fell, and
the Italian barber had, without more ado, instantly dropped his razor
and fled, so that he had to come out with only half his face shaved.
He was rather glad afterwards, however, when he found out that had the
barber remained he would have had no face left to shave, as when we
walked back to the shop we found that a bomb had gone clean through
the roof and the barber was standing outside anathematising aeroplanes
for ruining his business. Altogether they dropped twenty-five bombs in
about a quarter of an hour within a radius of a little over a quarter
of a mile and killed a good many people.

There was a wide subterranean drain leading from the town to the sea,
and down this hundreds of Italians crawled, but I think if I were
given the choice of crawling down a Durazzo drain in close proximity
to some hundreds of the natives of that town or being killed by a bomb
I would choose the latter. One day previously some bombs had fallen
in the neighbourhood of a camp of Italian soldiers, who had to vacate
it. A company of hungry Serbians near by had with great presence of
mind seized the opportunity to go in and clear the deserted camp of
all the bread and everything eatable it contained, and they were
heard to express a wish afterwards that there might be a visitation
of aeroplanes every day. When it was all over I went back again,
and, finding the headquarters of the British Adriatic Mission still
standing, sat down to a fresh lot of bacon and eggs for breakfast,
such luxuries not being obtainable every day.




CHAPTER IX

WE GO TO CORFU


We remained near Durazzo for a month, the men resting and recuperating
after their hard time.

There were a lot of young recruits who had been brought through with
the Army from Serbia, but who had not yet been formally sworn in, and
one morning this ceremony took place. The whole regiment was formed
up in a square in the centre of which stood the priest with a table
in front of him, on which were a bowl of holy water, with a bunch of
leaves beside it, a Serbian Bible, and a large brass cross. All the
officers were drawn up in a double line facing the table, and the
recruits behind them again, with the whole regiment forming the other
two sides of the square and the band a little way behind.

The priest read a sort of short service, and then the flag-bearer
carried the regimental flag up to the table while the band played.
After that the priest walked all down the line of officers with the
basin of holy water in his hand, and dipping the bunch of leaves into
it sprinkled them each on the forehead and held up the cross for them
to kiss; when that was over the swearing in of the new recruits began,
and, as I had not yet been sworn in, I was one of them. We all stood at
the salute and repeated the oath all together, sentence by sentence
after the priest, swearing loyalty to Serbia and King Peter, and after
that we marched in single file past the table, removing our caps as we
did so for the priest to sprinkle our foreheads, and then kissed the
cross, the priest’s hand, and, last of all, the regimental flag. It was
a very impressive ceremony, winding up by the band playing the Serbian
National Anthem while we stood at the salute.

All the officers came up and shook hands with me afterwards and
congratulated me on now being properly enrolled as a soldier in the
Serbian Army.

We were getting very tired of the Adriatic coast, and now that we were
feeling rested again we were anxious to be once more on the move and
take the next step towards getting back to Serbia. Speculation was rife
as to where we were going to be sent to be reorganised and refitted; no
one knew for certain, and there were the wildest rumours about Algiers,
France, or Alexandria, but at last the glad news came that we were
really going, and to Corfu.

But there was still a six or seven days’ march to Vallona, where the
regiment was to embark. Doctors came round and every man was medically
examined to see if he was fit for the march, as those who were not were
to be embarked at Durazzo. We had heard that the road to Vallona was
very bad, and in some places knee-deep in mud and water, and nobody was
very anxious for the march if he could go from Durazzo, so one and all
declared that they had rheumatism or else sore feet; but eventually
only a small percentage, among them sixty men from the Fourth Company,
and about half a dozen officers, from the regiment were declared to be
unfit. I was perfectly fit, but, as I was told I might do whichever I
liked, I thought I might as well embark at Durazzo with those from my
own company; so on the 3rd of February we left our camp and went into
Durazzo to wait for the steamer, as it was uncertain which day she
would sail.

I and some of the officers who were not on duty took rooms in the town,
and there we had to wait for four days. We found some difficulty in
feeding ourselves; there seemed to be hardly anything to buy, and what
there was was at famine prices, and our Serbian 10-franc notes were
only worth three and a half Greek or Italian francs. We had to pay
50 francs for a bottle of common red wine, which anywhere else would
have cost a franc. One day some Italian doctors invited us to lunch at
their hospital; they were most excellent hosts, and it was a very large
and merry luncheon party. Hardly any two people could talk the same
language, and English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Serbian got
all mixed up together into a sort of Esperanto of our own.

Every day as regularly as clockwork, between half-past ten and eleven,
we had an Austrian aeroplane raid, and occasionally in the afternoon
as well, and we got so used to them that if we did not hear the first
bomb in time we used to gaze up into the sky and wonder why they were
so late, but the worst raid was when we were actually embarking.

Embarking is always a tedious business, and is always inseparably
connected in my mind with hours of standing about on your own weary
feet, like a flock of tired sheep, in weather that is always either too
hot or too cold, or else raining, patiently waiting for orders.

We were embarked on large flat barges, and sent off to two or three
small Italian steamers in the harbour. The one that I was on was
crammed with men, and we had just got alongside the steamer when an
aeroplane came exactly overhead. We made a fairly big mark with the
large crowded barge alongside the steamer, and it passed over us
three times, dropping bombs all around as if they were shelling peas.
Backwards and forwards it came, columns of water shooting up, now 50
yards to the right, now a little to the left, showing where the bombs
hit the water harmlessly, one of them barely clearing a hospital ship
at anchor. Every moment it seemed as if the next one must drop in the
middle of our barge, but we were pretty well seasoned to anything by
now, and, whatever may have been our inside feelings, we sat still
and stolidly watched sudden death hovering over our heads in the blue
sky, but it didn’t seem somehow like playing the game when we couldn’t
retaliate at all.

The Captain of the Italian steamer got so exasperated that he shouted
that he was not going to have his steamer sunk on our account, and
that we were to sheer off, as he would not take us on board at all;
so our tug towed us back to the pier for further orders, and we were
eventually sent off to another steamer.

I and the two officers I was with in the end found ourselves embarked
on one steamer, with most of the men from our own regiment on another,
and our servants and all our luggage on a third. By that time it was
about 1 o’clock, and, as we had been standing about in the hot sun
since 5 a.m. and had had nothing to eat, we began to feel as if we
should like some breakfast; so we were anything but pleased to be
told upon enquiry that nobody could get anything to eat on that ship,
neither officers nor men.

“Now then, Corporal,” said my company Commander to me,“you talk French;
go and see what you can do.” So I obediently went off to hunt up the
Military Commander of the ship. He first informed me that there was no
food on the boat, and that nobody could get anything until 8 o’clock
that evening, and seemed to be inclined to let the matter go at that,
but I was not going to take that answer back if I could help it; so
told him that I didn’t think much of his way of treating his English
Allies, whereupon, having turned that over in his mind, he said I could
have something alone. Of course that was no use; so after a little
more persuasion I finally got him to order the steward to serve dinner
to the two officers and myself in the saloon in about an hour as soon
as it could be got ready, and while waiting for it we could have some
coffee, if I could get anybody to make it for me. I accordingly went
round to the galley and interviewed the cook, who informed me that the
man who made the coffee was asleep in his bunk and I couldn’t wake him.

“Oh, can’t I?” I said (in the words of the man when told by the steward
that he could not be sick in the saloon), “you’ll see if I can’t.”

“Are you an officer?” he inquired, with that sort of veiled
impertinence that the lower class Italians and Greeks are such
past-masters of.

“No, I am not,” I snapped, “I am a corporal; now which is that
coffee-man’s cabin?” and, on it being pointed out to me, I beat such a
devil’s tattoo on the door with my riding-whip that in half a minute a
very tousled and sleepy head appeared, and enquired what on earth was
the matter. I told him I wanted three cups of coffee in the saloon _at
once_, and he was so astonished that he got up forthwith and made them,
and I went back in triumph to report, and felt rewarded on being told
that I had done very well.

The next morning we were transferred in Vallona harbour on to a big
Italian steamer, a fine boat, where they treated us very well. We
reached Corfu about 1 a.m., and disembarking began there and then. We
hung on till the last, as we had nowhere to spend the night, our tents,
blankets, etc., being on another boat, and I had not even an overcoat
with me and it was very cold, but at 3 a.m. we also had to go.

We had been looking forward to Corfu as a sort of land flowing with
milk and honey, with a magnificent climate and everything that was
good, but our ardour was rather damped when we landed at that hour at
a small quay, feet deep in mud, miles away from the town, and about 8
miles away from our camp, so we were told. We did not know in which
direction our camp was, and, even had we got there, would have been no
better off without a tent or blankets; so we spent the remainder of the
night sitting on a packing-case beside the sentry’s fire, and I was
glad enough to be able to borrow an overcoat from the Serbian officer
in charge of the quay, who was just going off duty.

There was one of the most beautiful sunrises I have ever seen, but
under some circumstances you feel you would most willingly barter the
most gorgeous panorama of scenery for a cup of hot tea.

We had a long, hot walk the next morning till we found our own
division, where the sixty men from our company were camped pending the
arrival of the Commandant of the regiment and the rest who were coming
via Vallona.

Corfu may be a lovely climate and a health resort and everything else
that is delightful at any other time in the year, but it was a bitter
blow to us when it rained for about six weeks without stopping after
our arrival, added to which there was no wood, and camp fires were
forbidden, I suppose for fear that the men might take to cutting down
the olive trees with which the island is covered. There was no hay
at first for us to sleep on, and the incessant wet, combined with the
effects of bully beef, on men whose stomachs were absolutely destroyed
by months of semi-starvation was largely responsible for the terrible
amount of sickness and very high mortality among the troops during the
first month of our stay there. This was especially the case among the
boys and young recruits, who, less hardy than the trained soldiers,
were completely broken down by their late hardships and died by
thousands on the hospital island of Vido. They could not be buried in
the small island, dying as they were at the rate of 150 a day, and the
bodies were taken out to sea. The Serbs are not a maritime nation, and
the idea of a burial at sea is repugnant to them. I heard one touching
story. An old man came to the island to see his son, but he had died
the day before. “Where is his grave?” he asked, “that I may tell my old
wife I saw his last resting-place. We had seven sons; six were killed
in the war, and he was the seventh and youngest.” The kind-hearted
doctor lied bravely and well. “That is it,” he said, pointing to a
little wooden cross among a few others, where some graves had been made
one day when it was too rough for the tug to call. How could he tell
the poor old father that even then his son’s body was lying out on the
wooden jetty waiting to be carried out to his nameless grave in the
blue Ionian Sea?

We found there had been some hitch in the commissariat arrangements,
and there was no food for our sixty men. We bought them some bread
next day, but bread was 3 francs a loaf, and a third of a loaf to a man
with nothing else was not enough to keep them going, while endless red
tape was being unwound before their proper rations came along. They
never made a complaint; but, though we could have bought bread for
ourselves, it nearly choked us with the men standing round silently
watching and wondering what we were going to do for them.

On the second morning, seeing an empty motor-lorry coming along, I had
a sudden inspiration and boarded it, dashing down the steep bank to
the road, telling them that I would be back in the evening from town
with something for them, and taking an orderly with me. It was about
fifteen miles’ drive into the town of Corfu, and I tramped about all
day in the pouring rain from one official to another, from the English
to the French, from the French to the Serbians, and back again to the
French, till I was heartily sick of it, and had I had the money would
have bought the stuff in the town and had done with it. There was
plenty of bread at the bakery, but, of course, they could not give it
to me without a proper requisition, which apparently I could not sign
because I was not authorised to do so. It was getting towards evening,
and I was beginning to despair, and was thinking of doing the best I
could with a hundred francs I had borrowed, when I thought I would have
one more try with the French authorities. I was wet through myself, as
I had had no time to stop for a coat when the lorry came along, and
had been too busy and too worried to get anything to eat all day, but
anyhow this time I managed to pitch them such a pitiful tale of woe
about the sufferings of the men, and the awful time I was having trying
to get them something to eat, that I quite softened their hearts,
and they said they would give me what I wanted without any further
signature, but that I must not make a precedent of this unofficial way
of doing business. I was overjoyed, and sent my orderly off at once to
hunt up a carriage, and we returned to camp in triumph about 9 o’clock
with a whole sackful of bread, another of tinned beef, and two large
earthenware jars of wine, which I bought on the way. There were plenty
of the men waiting, when they heard my carriage arrive, to dash down
to the road and carry the stuff up to the camp, and there was great
rejoicing over the success of my expedition. I was soon warm and dry
and having some supper myself. The men were all right so far, but
another day’s short rations would certainly have seen some of them sick.

The question of transport was fearfully difficult, and the French and
English authorities were working night and day to feed the troops, and,
of course, they could never have got through the work if things had
not been done in order; so I was duly grateful that under the special
circumstances they let me carry out such an unauthorised raid.

About a week later the rest of the company arrived about 10 o’clock one
evening, and a sergeant proudly told me that our Fourth Company were
all very fit and not a man sick or fallen out.

We moved to another camp up in the hills, a nice place, but very far
from anywhere, though I found that I could get about anywhere I wanted
to on the motor-lorries which used to come in with bread. The A.S.C.
drivers of these lorries must have had a hard time at first; the
roads were very bad and the weather shocking, and they were working
sixteen hours a day carrying supplies, but they were full of pity for
the deplorable condition of the Serbian soldiers, and were willingly
working night and day to alleviate it.

One of the English officers gave me a small Italian tent in place
of the little Serbian bivouac one I had been sleeping in. It was a
capital little tent, very light and absolutely waterproof. My orderly
built a foundation of stones about 2 ft. high, with the chinks filled
in with earth, and pitched the tent on the top of that, so that it was
quite high enough to stand up in and also to hold a camp bed and a
rubber bath, and he then made a nice little garden and planted it with
shrubs and flowers, with a little wall all round ornamented with red
bully beef tins with plants in them, and it looked awfully nice.

The thing we missed most was not being able to have any fires to
sit round. One day I came back on a lorry containing a load of wood
intended for somewhere else, but I had got past any scruples about
commandeering anything where my own company was concerned; so I
persuaded the driver to drop a few big logs off on the road at the
nearest point to our camp, and we had at least one small fire for
some time afterwards, and anybody who liked could come and boil his
billy-can and make his tea at that.

The Serbian Relief Fund was short-handed and very busy, and I obtained
permission to leave the camp for a few weeks and take up my quarters
in town to give them a hand. Several shiploads of stuff had just come
in, and everything had to be landed on the quay on lighters and then
removed from there at once, as the quay could not be blocked up, to one
or other of their two store-houses, which were at opposite ends of the
harbour. One of these store-houses had only just been acquired, and,
as it was about 6 in. deep in coal dust, it had all to be scrubbed and
cleaned out for the arrival of fresh bales, and that was my first job.
I got a gang of Serbian soldiers, and we had a strenuous day’s work
with the very inefficient tools at our disposal, but we managed by the
evening to get everything ship-shape and the floors clean, though we
all got rather damp and coal-dusty in the process.

The quay was a most interesting place, though I should have enjoyed the
work more if it had not poured steadily all day and every day, as there
was no cover anywhere. French, English, and Serbians were all working
there together, each trying to be the first to seize upon labour
and transport both by water and land for the particular job he was
responsible for. There were a number of ships in the harbour waiting to
be unloaded, and everyone was working as hard as he could, and things
were considerably complicated by the fact that hardly one of them could
speak the other’s language. It was quite a usual thing to find an
Englishman, who could not speak French, trying to explain to a French
official that he wanted a fatigue party of Serbian soldiers to unload a
certain lighter, and neither of them being able to explain to the said
fatigue party, when they had got them, what it was they wanted them to
do.

There was always a company of Serbian soldiers for work on the quay,
and a fresh relay of men came on at 6 a.m., at midday, and at 6 p.m.,
and you had to be there sharp on time if you wanted your men, or else
you would find they had all been snapped up by someone else. As I could
speak French and enough Serbian to get along very well, most of my work
was on the quay, and I was often called in to act as interpreter. As
I did not want to get down there at 6 a.m., however, I got a friendly
English corporal, who had to be on duty then, to get twice as many men
as he wanted himself, and then give me half of them when I came down.
I was rather afraid of the English Tommies at first, and thought they
would be sure to laugh at a woman corporal, but, on the contrary, there
was nothing they would not do to help me, and the French soldiers were
just the same.

I was superintending the unloading of some goods from a lighter one
day, which all had to be transferred to another lighter, and taken
across to the warehouse that evening. We were all very tired and wet,
and the men were slacking off, and it didn’t seem, at the rate we were
going on, as if we should get through before 9 or 10 o’clock that
night. The Serbian sergeant tried to buck them up, but the men were fed
up and were just doing about as little as they possibly could. It is
worse than useless to bully a Serbian soldier if he doesn’t want to do
anything; so, as I wanted to get back to the hotel to dinner, I went
on quite another tack. I told them I had been working for them all day
since early in the morning, and was tired and hungry, and that if they
were going to spend another three hours over the job I should get no
dinner. The effect was magical. They all at once got terribly worried
on my account, began to work like steam, and in an hour we had the
whole thing done, and they were enquiring in a brotherly manner if it
was all right, and if I would be in time for dinner now.

All these poor fellows working down on the quay had had their uniforms
taken away from them and burnt, and had been provided with a blue
corduroy suit for working in. Their old ones, though dirty, were warm,
and their new ones were very thin, and in most cases they had hardly
any underclothes; so whenever I had a gang of men working under me
down at the warehouse I used to fit them out with warm sweaters, etc.,
of which we had plenty, out of one of the broken bales. I used to
make them work hard for a couple of hours, and then sit down for five
minutes and have a cigarette, and then go on again for another hard
spell. The Serbian sergeants used to be very much amused at my methods,
but I always found they answered very well. They were always keen to be
on my gang, and everyone said I got more work out of them than anyone
else could.

[Illustration: OFFICERS SITTING OUTSIDE MY TENT

Page 220]

[Illustration: COLONEL MILITCH ON DIANA

Page 244]

There were a lot of new English uniforms, but the French authorities
would not issue them unless there were enough underclothes to go
with them, and these they were short of. However, I got a promise of
underclothes from the Serbian Relief Fund, and then my troubles began.
First I had to get a paper signed by the English saying they would
give them if the French approved; then another, signed by the French,
that they did approve and would give the uniforms; then one signed
by the Serbian Minister of War; then back to the French again to be
countersigned; then back to the Minister of War; then to the Serbian
warehouse, who refused to give them because I hadn’t got somebody
else’s signature, and so on and so on. To cut a long story short, it
took three whole days walking round Corfu in the pouring rain before I
could get all those papers sufficiently signed, including three visits
to the Minister of War, and even then the transport remained to be
found, as the motor-lorries were fully occupied carrying bread.

I had airily promised the French that I thought the English authorities
could give me the transport; so I went up to them, and they said they
would see what they could do.

“How much stuff have you?” inquired the officer in charge.

“Three thousand two hundred and fifty uniforms,” I replied, “and the
same number of vests and pants.”

“Well, that doesn’t tell me anything,” he said; “I want to know the
bulk and weight: you’re no good as a corporal if you can’t tell me
that. Let me know exactly by eleven o’clock to-morrow morning, and I’ll
see what I can do.”

Here was a poser, for, though I said at once that I would let him know,
I had not the faintest idea of how to work it out; but fortunately
bethought myself of my sheet anchor, the big English corporal on the
quay, who always seemed to be able to solve any difficulty; and, sure
enough, he did it for me, and I telephoned the required information.
In the end I got the stuff loaded on to a barge and took it myself
to a point about 2 miles from my camp, whence it was carried up by a
company, and we had the proud distinction of being the first regiment
to be fitted out in new, clean English khaki uniforms.

When not on the quay there was plenty to do in the warehouses, sorting
out the bales, or taking them across the harbour in our little tug,
which was quite a journey, but I eventually got a chill and had to lay
off for a bit, as the result of one wetting too many.

I used to go back to camp every Saturday afternoon and Sunday, and I
always managed to take up a couple of cases of something, generally
given me by the Serbian Relief Fund; either things for the ambulance
or condensed milk or golden syrup for the men. Condensed milk was very
much appreciated, as it meant that they each got a big bowl of _café au
lait_ for breakfast for three mornings, whereas, as a rule, they don’t
have anything until lunch.

One day an incident occurred which touched me very greatly. The
non-commissioned officers and men of the Fourth Company formed a
committee among themselves and drew up an address, which they presented
me with, and which a man in the regiment who knew English afterwards
translated for me as literally as possible. An English major, to whom I
once showed it, told me if that were his he should value it more than a
whole string of medals, and as that is how I feel about it, coming as
it did spontaneously from my own men, I put the translation in here:

  “To the high-esteemed
  “MISS FLORA SANDES,
  “CORFU.

 “Esteemed Miss Sandes!

 “Soldiers of the Fourth Company, 1st Battalion, 2nd Inf. Rgmt.,
 ‘Knjaza Michaila,’ Moravian Division, 1st (Call) Reserves; touched
 with your nobleness, wish with this letter to pay their respects--and
 thankfulness to you; have chosen a committee to hand to you this
 letter of thankfulness.

 “Miss Sandes!

 “Serbian soldier is proud because in his midst he sees a noble
 daughter of England, whose people is an old Serbian friend, and to-day
 their armies are arm-in-arm fighting for common idea, and you Miss
 Sandes should be proud that you are in position to do a good, to help
 a Serbian soldier--Serbian soldier will always respect acts of your
 kindness and deep down in his heart will write you kind acts and
 remember them for ever.

 “Few months have passed since you came among us, and you shared good
 and bad with us. During this time you have often helped us to pass
 through hardships, buying food for us, and financially.

 “Thanking you in the name of all the soldiers, we are greeting you
 with exclamation:

 “Long life to our ally England,

 “Long life to Serbia,

 “Long life to their heroic Armies,

 “Long life to noble Miss Sandes!

 “_Naredniks_ (_Sergeant-Majors_)--

  “Milcontije Simitch
  “Rangel Miloshevitch

 “_Podnaredniks_ (_Sergeants_)--

  “Milisav Stamenkovitch
  “Yanatchko Todorovitch
  “Bozidar Milenkovitch

 “_Kaplars_ (_Corporals_)--

  “Vladimar Stankovitch
  “Milan Jovanovitch
  “Dragutin Rangjelovitch
  “Aleksa Miloshevitch
  “Zaphir Arsitch

 “_Vojnitsi_ (_Soldiers_)--

  “Milivoye Pavlovitch
  “Milorad Taskavitch
  “Rangel Mladenovitch
  “Dragoljub Milovanovitch
  “Alexandar Iwkovitch

 “4th Comp., 1st Battl., 2nd Inf. Rgt.

  “No. 1024 (Official Stamp).

 “To Miss Sandes, Corporal, volunteer of this Comp.--

 “Please receive this little, but from heart of my soldiers,
 declaration of thankfulness for all (for help) that you have done for
 them until now, and in time, when they are far away from dear ones and
 loving ones at home.

 “To their wishes and declaration I am adding mine and exclaim:

 “Long life to our dear ally England,

 “Long life to heroic Serbian Army,

  “Commander of the Company,
  “JANACHKO A. JOVITCH.

  “13/26 February, 1916.
  “Ipsos (Corfu).”




CHAPTER X

THE “SLAVA DAY” OF THE SECOND REGIMENT


The companies used to take turns at working at the ports for about
three weeks, and when our turn came the men were very pleased, as they
much preferred it to doing drill, and they were able to occasionally
get into the town also. We were camped about a mile and a half outside
the town, but I thought it was the nastiest camp that I had ever been
in--a very small crowded piece of ground with no shade, so that when
the weather was hot we were perfectly roasted, and when it was wet,
when you tried to climb up the narrow steep path to it, you slipped
back two steps for one you went up, in the thick slippery mud.

I gave up my room in town, as our camp was close enough to walk to. I
could make myself understood pretty well in Serbian by now, though,
of course, I made awful mistakes, as it is by far the most difficult
language I have ever come across to learn, there being no books to
help one. One can only pick it up by ear; so it is no wonder if I was
occasionally misunderstood.

One day I told my orderly to go and fetch my thick coat, which he
would find on a chair in my room, and bring it to me in camp. He duly
arrived back about an hour afterwards with the coat _and_ the chair,
which he had carried all through the town, and was much discomfited
at the howls of laughter with which we all greeted him. I asked him
what the land-lady had said to his removing her furniture like that,
and he confessed that she had made a few remarks, but, as she spoke
nothing but Italian and he nothing but Serbian, they passed lightly
over his head, and he triumphantly carried out what he had taken to be
my orders. He was a capital orderly, always cheerful and willing. One
day he told me, in answer to some remark of mine, that as my orderly
he would not have to fight. “Will you fight with us going back to
Serbia, like you did in Albania?” he asked. “Why, of course I shall,
Dragoutini,” I said. His face beamed. “Then I shall go with you and
fight beside you,” he declared emphatically.

We went back to our camp in the hills when our three weeks were up, and
to our great joy we heard that we were to embark almost immediately for
Salonica.

They let us stay a day longer than was intended in order to celebrate
the regimental “Slava day,” which is a great festival, and the whole
regiment was _en fête_ for the whole day. The Crown Prince Alexander
himself came, and a great many French and English officers and a few
ladies.

It was held in a beautiful big, flat glade, just below the camp, with
huge big spreading trees. There was a large marquee decorated with all
the different flags of the Allies, and everybody had been busy for
the last week making paths and generally beautifying the place, and
practising for the big march past of the regiment.

We had a variety of talent in our regiment; among others a young
student of sculpture. Building four high pillars of clayey mud flanking
the path leading to the marquee, he carved on each a beautiful
bas-relief. The first one represented a haggard, weary, beaten Serbian
soldier going into exile; the next a Serbian soldier re-equipped,
holding his new rifle in his hand, his expression full of fierce
determination, standing in a striking attitude with his face to the foe
again; while on a third was the head of a woman with a look of patient
expectancy on her beautiful face, representing the women who were
waiting in Serbia for the return of their sons and husbands to deliver
them from the bondage of the hated Austrian-Bulgarian oppressors. They
were most striking figures, and some day that young Serbian soldier
will become known as a very great sculptor.

It was an ideal spot for a _fête_, and we hoped anxiously that the
weather, which had looked rather threatening, would hold up. The whole
regiment was astir very early, and we were all drawn up under the trees
before the guests arrived.

I was talking to the Colonel, when he suddenly asked me where my
company was drawn up.

“Just behind the Third,” I replied, pointing over in that direction.

“Well, come over there with me, I want to speak to them,” he said,
and we went over, I wondering what he was going to say, and was more
than astonished when I found the surprise in store for me. They all
sprang to attention, and then, with me standing by his side, he made
them a long speech, which all the other companies round could hear
also, and said that he was promoting me to sergeant on that their
great regimental “Slava day.” Generally you are just promoted, and it
is entered in the books in the ordinary way, and it was a very great
honour to have a public sort of ceremony like that, especially on
such a day. They all shouted “Jivio” three times for me when he had
finished, and, though I felt extremely shy and embarrassed, I was very
much pleased.

All the officers in the regiment and a great many of the men came up
and shook hands with me afterwards, and congratulated me, and the
Commander of the battalion sent his orderly off for some spare stars
which he had, and fixed my second ones on my shoulders there and then.

Later on the General of the First Army, who was one of the guests, when
he heard I was one of his soldiers, also added his congratulations; in
fact, I have never in my life had so much handshaking and patting on
the back.

Presently the Crown Prince arrived and the rest of the guests. The
whole regiment, headed by the band and the regimental flag, marched
past him and saluted, and to see these fine healthy-looking fellows,
with their swinging stride, you would never have guessed they were the
same men who had gone through that terrible retreat in the Albanian
mountains and arrived at Corfu in such a deplorable condition two
months before.

The guests all sat down to lunch in the big marquee, and after that
there were songs, dancing, etc. The Crown Prince had to leave early,
but said he would come back again later on.

I had invited two of my friends from the English hospital, and they
enjoyed themselves immensely, and we all--guests, officers and
men--danced the “Kolo” and all the other Serbian national dances
together until evening.

Later on there was another big lunch and a great many speeches from the
representatives of the English, French and Italian Allies. True to his
promise Prince Alexander came back later in the afternoon, specially to
chat with the soldiers, among whom he walked about in the friendliest
manner, enquiring after their families, how they had been wounded,
etc., etc. It was easy to see how popular he is with his Army, and how
pleased and proud the men were as they crowded round him.

We kept it up the whole day and late that night after all the guests
had gone, in spite of the fact that we should have to be astir very
early next morning, as we were to embark for Salonica.

We had a very hot, dusty tramp down to the embarking stage, and I had
very bad luck, as I lost my dog “Mali,” who was a most faithful little
brute, though it would be hard to describe his breed. He was a stray
who had attached himself to an officer and afterwards been handed over
to me, and he was always at my heels, never quitting me for a moment
and sleeping in my tent. Even when I was dancing the previous day he
had nearly upset several people in his anxiety to keep close to me.
It was only about half an hour before the boat sailed that I missed
him. In the immense crowd of soldiers he had lost sight of me for a
moment, and then could not trace me, and someone eventually told me
that they had seen him starting back along the hot, dusty road to camp
looking for me, and, as I dared not miss the boat on his account, I had
reluctantly to give up the search.

The boat was a fine French Transatlantic boat, but the first day out
at sea was very rough, and the men, who are anything but good sailors,
lay about prostrate, declaring that they would rather have ten days’
continuous battle on land than one day on board ship.

However, Easter Sunday was very fine, and we all landed next day quite
fit at Salonica. Our camp was up on the hills about seventeen miles
from the town. It was a lovely place, and had the further advantage of
having a spring of very good mineral water, which was a great luxury,
as the drinking water around Salonica is not good as a rule.

The transportation of the Serbian Army from Corfu to Salonica was going
on apace, and within a few weeks the whole force was safely landed
without a single casualty.

The men were fully equipped down to the very last button--new English
khaki uniforms, belts, rifles, water-bottles, absolutely everything.

I went home on a couple of months’ leave, leaving them full of spirits,
and eagerly looking forward to the time when we could get another whack
at the enemy, and march victoriously back into Serbia; and with any
luck I hope some day to be able to describe how we accomplished it, and
the triumphal entry into Nish which we are always talking about.


  Printed in England by W. H. SMITH & SON, The Arden Press,
  Stamford Street London, S.E.