I have had many strange meetings--strange in place and attendant
circumstance--in various and sundry odd corners of the world, but,
everything considered, I am inclined to think my encounter with
Radovitch, toward the end of last March, was the strangest of them
all.
It was on the gorgeously flower-carpeted slope of a mountain-side
in----. But let that transpire in its proper place.
There had been hint of gathering activity in the marching troops on
the roads, and I knew that some kind of a skirmish was on from the
scattering spatter of rifle-fire above and to my right; but that I had
actually blundered in between the combatants was not evident until the
staccato of a suddenly unmasked machine-gun broke out in the copse
below. I did not hear the familiarly ingratiating swish of speeding
bullets, and only an occasional twitching in the oak scrub told of a
skirmishing soldier, but it was plain that if the rifles were firing
in the direction of the machine-gun, and the machine-gun was firing in
the direction of the rifles, the position of my shivering anatomy
came pretty near to blocking a portion of the restricted little neck
of atmosphere along which the interchanged pellets must make their
way. One never learns it until he is under fire--especially
rifle-fire--for the first time, but the faculty for taking cover, for
making oneself inconspicuous at the approach of real or fancied
danger, is one of the few things in which the more or less degenerate
human of the present day suffers the least in comparison with that
fine and self-sufficient animal, his primitive ancestor.
I hurdled neatly over a natural “entanglement” of magenta-blossomed
cactus, dived through a bosky tunnel in the gnarled oak scrub, and
landed comfortably in the matted mass of soft maiden-hair where the
water dripped from the side of a deep hole excavated by the village
brick-makers in taking out clay. There was ample cover from anything
but high-angle artillery fire on either side; so, picking out a bed of
lush grass with a cornflower and buttercup pillow, I stretched in
luxurious ease to let the battle blow over.
The rifles spat back at the woodpecker drum of the machine-gun for a
minute or two, then quieted suddenly and gave way to the crashing of
underbrush and the chesty ’tween-the-teeth oaths that tell of
charging men. Scatteringly, in ones and twos and threes, they began
stumbling by above my head, now revealed by the quick silhouette of a
set jaw and forward-flung shoulders, and now by the glint of a bobbing
bayonet, but mostly by those guttural swearwords which mark the
earnest man on business bent. One of them--a gaunt-eyed Serb in the
faded horizon-blue uniform of a French _poilu_--who passed near enough
to the rim of my refuge to allow of a three-quarters length glimpse of
him, carried a squawking golden-hued hen by the feathers of her
hackle, and I was just reflecting how every other soldier that I had
ever known would have put a period on that tell-tale racket by
extending his grip round the windpipe, when Radovitch came down to
join me. Not that he had anything of the ulterior intention of seeking
cover that brought me there--quite to the contrary, indeed. I saw him
running hard and low (as every good soldier goes into grips with his
foe), burst out of the thicket, saw him straighten up and try to
swerve to the right as the hole suddenly yawned across his path, and,
finally, saw the quick tautening of the scaly yellow loop of
earth-running aloe root which deftly caught the toe of his shambling
boot and defeated the manœuvre.
There was little of the fine finesse of my own soft landing in the
whacking “kerplump” which completed the high dive executed by
Radovitch after his contact with the aloe root. His gun out-dived him
and cut short its parabola with the bayonet spiking a fern frond on
the opposite bank, but his broad, bronzed Slavic face was the first
part of Radovitch himself to reach the bottom, so that all the inertia
of the bone and muscle in his firmly-knit frame was exerted in driving
the ivory crescent of the teeth of his back-bent lower jaw in a swift,
rough gouge through the yielding turf. He pulled himself together in a
dazed sort of way, sat up, rubbed the grass out of his eyes, and
kneaded gently the strained joints of his jaw to see that they were
still swinging on their hinges. Reassured, he spat forth sputteringly
asphodel and anemone and the rest of his mouthful of flower-bed,
completing the operation by running an index finger around between the
lower teeth and lip to remove lurking bits of earth and gravel.
There was something strangely familiar in that index-finger operation,
and it was the sudden recollection that was the identical way in which
we used to get rid of the gridiron clods that had been forced under
our football nose-guards which was responsible for my fervent
ejaculation of surprise. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but it
was probably something akin to “I’ll be blowed!”
The look of dazed resentment on Radovitch’s grass-and dirt-stained
face changed instantly to one of blank surprise. The poor strained jaw
relaxed, and he turned on me a stare of open-eyed wonder.
“Where in ’ell d’you come from?” he gasped finally; and then, “You
speak English?”
When, ignoring the former query, I grinned acquiescence to the latter,
he came back with, “Ain’t ’Merican, are you? Don’t know New York, do
you?”
On my admission of guilt on both charges, he crawled over and gripped
my hand crushingly in his grimy paw.
“My name’s Radovitch. ’Merican citizen myself,” he said proudly. “Took
out my last papers just ’fore I came over to fight for Serbia. Went to
school five years in New York when I was a kid. Ever been in Chicago?”
“Of course.”
Radovitch’s excitement, increasing when he found I had been in Omaha
(where he had worked in the stockyards), and Jerome, Arizona (where he
had “dumped slag” in the copper smelter), reached its climax when I
assured him that I had once played a game of baseball at Aldridge, a
little coal-mining town in Montana, near the northern portal of
Yellowstone Park.
“I got a store there, and a half int’rest in the baseball grounds and
a dance-hall,” he cried; and he was just in the midst of an excited
account of his rise to fortune in what he called the “hottest little
ol’ camp in the Yellowstone,” when the din of two or three fresh
machine-guns opening in unison drowned his voice, and a few minutes
later a half-dozen rifle muzzles were poked over the edge of our
refuge, while a gruff-voiced Serb corporal, in the khaki tunic of a
British Tommy and the baggy breeches of a French Zouave, informed us
that we were his prisoners.
Radovitch, with a sheepish grin on his face, threw up his hands with
the classic cry of “Kamerad!” and then, shambling over opposite his
captors, coolly bade them toss down a box of cigarettes for him and
his “Merikansky” friend.
“Smashed mine when I fell,” he explained, sauntering back and offering
me a “Macedonia.” “Wouldn’t you reckon we’d had about enough fighting
in Serbia without these d---- d sham fights while we’re supposed to be
resting up here in Corfu? It may be all right for new recruits; but
you’ll have to admit that two years of the brand of scrapping we’ve
been getting over yonder in those mountains is not going to put us on
edge for play-fighting like this. But never mind, we’ll be back to the
real thing again in a month or two. Come on along down to the camp and
meet my Colonel. We were kids together in Prilep. Now he’s in command
of three thousand men and I’m only a corporal; but just the same I
could buy him out twenty times over.”
The bare outline of Radovitch’s story he told me that evening (after
he had officially been “set free” again), as I trudged beside him
across the hills to his camp; but it was not until he obtained an
afternoon’s leave three or four days later, and took me for a stroll
through the Serbian Relief Camp, that I learned he had been one of
that immortal band of heroes who, disdaining to take advantage of the
open roads to the Adriatic or Macedonia after Belgrade fell, made
their way to a mountain fastness in the heart of their own country and
stayed behind to wage such warfare as they could on the hated invader.
What sort of a warfare this was--indeed, what sort of a warfare it
_is_, for the band still survives, making up in an unquenchable
spirit what it has lost in numbers--I then learned for the first time.
It was only the unexpected coming across a newly arrived comrade
(suffering--and it looked to me, dying--from an open bayonet wound and
an advanced and hitherto neglected attack of scurvy), that turned
Radovitch from wistful reminiscence of Aldridge, Montana, and set him
talking of the grim realities of the life he had been leading in
Serbia, a subject on which I had found him strangely reticent up to
that moment. The things he spoke of that afternoon covered only an
incident or two of his life with a body of men who, steadily depleted
and yet as steadily recruited from Heaven knows where, have furnished
an example of bravery and devotion to an all but lost cause almost
without a parallel even in a war in which bravery and devotion form
the regular grist of the day’s work.
Because this band in question, although its exploits are even now
being sung of by the Serbs along with those of the half-legendary
heroes of their early history, is still a “force in being,” exercising
in its sphere an influence of its own on the course of the war, it is
necessary that the names of the villages and towns and mountains and
valleys and rivers to which Radovitch so constantly referred in his
narrative should be entirely suppressed. I may say, however, that
later inquiry which I made at Serbian Headquarters at Salonika
revealed ample evidence that the things he told me of--as well as
others scarcely less remarkable of which the time has not yet come to
write--occurred beyond the shadow of a doubt.
The mood to talk did not seize Radovitch until after he had led me to
the summit of the hill behind the Relief Camp, from which lofty
vantage the eye roved eastward across a purple strait to the
snow-capped peaks of Epirus and Albania, westward to where what was
once the Kaiser’s villa of Achilleon stood out sharply against the
sombre green of the backbone ridge of the island, northward to where
its twin castles flanked to right and left the white walls and red
roofs of Corfu town, and southward to the dim outlines of Leukas and
Cephalonia, thinning in the violet haze of late afternoon. Below, on
three sides, was the sea, with the storied Isles of Ulysses bracing
themselves against the flood-tide racing into the bay; above, a vault
of cloudless sky, and round about a thousand-year-old forest of
gnarled olives. It was the effect of all this, together with the sight
of his friend from Serbia in the little tented hospital of the Relief
Camp, which set Radovitch talking of things I had been vainly trying
to draw him out upon ever since I met him. While the mood lasted he
seemed to need no other encouragement than the attentive listener so
ready to hand; when it had passed he was back to the mines of Montana
again, deaf and blind to my every attempt to make him talk of Serbia
and what had befallen him there.
“How did your band get together in the first place?” I had asked, “and
what sort of men was it made up of? Was there some kind of
organisation before the retreat, or did you simply drift together
afterwards?”
“It must have been mostly ‘drift,’” replied Radovitch. “Probably the
Government and our generals knew we’d have to give way when the
Austrians and Bulgars together came at us, but none of the rest of us
ever dreamed we couldn’t wallop the whole bunch. So I don’t think
there is much truth in the yarn about the band of ‘blood brothers’
that had been formed in advance. We were about evenly made up at the
start of men who wouldn’t leave the country and men who couldn’t leave
the country. The first were mostly mountain men of the region we went
to. There were a lot of ex-brigands among them, and most of them had
been fighting the Turk, or the Bulgar, or the Government, or each
other, all their lives. It was to the way these fellows knew the
country, and how to live off it and fight in it, that we owed most of
our success. The rest of us were all sorts of odds and ends who had
fallen out of the retreat but had still been able to keep out of enemy
hands.
“At first this particular mountain region--which later became our
stronghold, and is now the only part of Old Serbia in which the enemy
has never set foot--was but a refuge, and for a few weeks we were
pretty hard put to find enough to live on. It was touch and go for
food all of the first winter, and we lived mostly by night raids on
straggling Austrian supply trains. But before long we rounded up
enough sheep and goats to keep us going, and in the spring got one of
the little mountain valleys under cultivation. Since last
summer--except for vegetables, which we had no luck with--food was one
of our least troubles.
“We had plenty of rifles from the first. A Serb will drop his clothes
before he will his gun, as you will find if you ever see our army in
action where a river has to be forded. Many a man straggled in to us
without pants or shirt, but never a one that I ever heard of without
his rifle, We were also tolerably well fixed for cartridges, because
a man don’t use one in raiding or fighting from ambush to a hundred he
pots off in the trenches. We always managed to have enough for our own
regular army rifles, and after we got well started raiding, Austrian
rifles and munition came in faster than we ever had use for them. We
could have done with an extra machine-gun or two before we had our
stone-rolling defence organised, and before the Austrians had learned
that it didn’t pay to try and crawl in and pull us out of our holes.
But before the winter was over we had enough spare ‘spit-firers,’ so
that we didn’t mind risking the loss of one or two by taking them
along on raiding parties.
“The lay of the mountains made the whole _mesa_[4] just one big
natural fort, and I miss my guess if in all the world there’s another
place of the same kind so easy to defend and so hard to attack. The
mountains are steeper and rockier than that main range of Albania you
see across there against the sky, and that’s going some. I never
struck anything half so rough in all the summers I put in prospecting
in Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. Only one of the passes had a cart-road
up to it, and only three had mule trails. At two or three other
places a man could scramble up by using his hands, but everywhere else
he would need to have ropes and scaling ladders.
[4] Table-land.
“At every one of the passes--including the one of the cart-road--a
half-dozen good rock-rollers, with plenty of ‘ammunition,’ could put
the kibosh on an army, and you may bet we saw to it that there was no
shortage of pebbles on hand. For the first week or two my fingers were
worn pretty near to the bone from handling rocks. The only way the
Austrians could have got the best of us, once we had made ourselves at
home, would have been with not less than a dozen regiments of their
Kaiser Jaeger, mountain batteries and all; but by the time this fact
sunk into them the Italians were keeping them so busy that they
probably figured they couldn’t spare any such number of Alpine troops
for side-shows. Anyhow, they never even gave us a good run for our
money in the way of attacks, though of course some of the raiding
parties came in for pretty bad punishings every now and then.
“The one thing that we needed most, first and last, was dynamite. If
we could have got hold of even half a ton of it in the first month or
two, before the Austrians got their patrols organised, we could have
done no end of harm in blowing up bridges and tunnels where they had
been missed in the rush of the retreat, and upsetting communications
generally. When we finally did begin to get hold of powder, all the
danger-points were so heavily guarded that we never got a fair chance
at them. Once, with fifty men armed with knives, we rushed the guard
at an important bridge and cleaned up the lot before a shot was fired.
But something must have been wrong with the fuse or caps, for the
dynamite placed under the near abutment never exploded, and there
wasn’t time to go back and do the job over. The next time we tried the
same tactics it was on a tunnel, but here they had an ambush ready,
and only about a dozen of the hundred men who were in the raid ever
came back. The smoothest piece of tunnel work ever brought off was not
done by our gang at all, but by a much smaller one that worked in the
region of Uskub for a while, led by a Serbian Intelligence Officer
from Salonika who had been dropped there a month before from an
aeroplane. They descended into a very important pass in broad
daylight, seized a train of empty freight cars that was waiting on a
siding for a south-bound troop-train to go by, held it until a signal
arranged for in advance told them the troop-train was entering the
north end of the longest tunnel in that part of the country, and then
turned the freight loose into the other end. We had word later that
never a man was brought out alive, but the best effect of the job was
its setting afire the lime rock in the heart of the mountain and the
blocking of traffic for many months.
“This southern band--after recruiting up to over a thousand men at one
time, and making life miserable for the Austrians for nearly four
months--ran short of food in mid-winter and had to break up. Its
leader, however, disguised as a Bulgar soldier, worked his way back
through the enemy lines, and after just missing being potted by the
first Serb patrol he ran into after crossing the Cerna, reached
Salonika in safety with a complete report of what he had seen during
five months in hostile territory. It was the slickest job of the kind
that has been put through in this neck of the war. The guy’s name
is----, and, unless he’s off on another lay of the same kind, you can
probably see him in Salonika.[5]
[5] Through the courtesy of the Crown Prince of Serbia, the
writer, on his subsequent visit to Salonika, was granted an
interview with the Intelligence Officer in question, and expects
shortly to have permission to write a complete account of what
was undoubtedly not only one of the most daring, but also one of
the most successful exploits of the war.
“As I was telling you,” resumed Radovitch, “dynamite was the one thing
we felt the need of more than anything else, and yet--perhaps the one
big thing we did wouldn’t have been half so big (and maybe it would
have failed completely) if we’d had the powder to go about the job the
way we planned to do it in the first place. Did you ever hear what
happened to the Austrian force that was camped in the ---- Valley last
spring?”
“I remember reading one of their bulletins,” I replied, “which
admitted losing a battalion or two in a flood in that region. But that
was due to ‘natural causes,’ wasn’t it? Didn’t a broken dam have
something to do with it?”
“Natural causes and a busted dam did have something to do with it,”
said Radovitch with a grin; “but nature in this case had some active
assistance, and that was where we came in. It wasn’t just a battalion
that went down-stream, either; it was more like two of their big
regiments--the whole of the main force they had shivvied together to
bottle us up with. It was the best thing we did by a mile; and, as I
told you, it wouldn’t have been half the clean-up it was if we’d had
in the first place the powder to do it in the ‘regular way.’ If we
_had_ had the powder, we’d never have given Providence a chance, and,
believe me, it was nothing but Providence that could have worked
things round the way they finally came out.
“You see, it was this way,” went on Radovitch, settling back
comfortably and smiling the pleased smile of reminiscence that sits on
the face of a man who recalls events in which he has taken keen pride
and enjoyment, “the most open approach to our mountain country was by
the gorge up which ran the cart-road. There was a good-sized area of
watershed draining out this way, so that the little river running
through the gorge was a pretty powerful stream even in low water--a
good bit bigger than the old Firehole in Yellowstone Park. This river
flowed out of the main mass of the mountains into a fine bowl of an
uplands valley, and then on out of that, through a rough range of
foothills, in another gorge. At the head of this last gorge is a
natural site to store water, and there--as a project of an old
Government reclamation scheme that had been held up halfway for lack
of money to go on with--a high dam had been built which backed up a
deep, narrow lake four or five miles long.
“The Austrians had a small force in the little village in the valley
of the lake, and patrolled four or five miles of the cart-road into
the mountains, but the main lot of them were camped below the second
gorge in an open, triangle-shaped valley that ran up from the plain to
the foothills. It was a good, safe, healthy, well-drained camp, well
above the top marks of spring high-water. The only threat to it was
the lake behind the dam in the valley above, but, unluckily for them,
they didn’t know all the facts about that dam.
“The truth was that this dam was built to hold up a lake half again as
deep as the one then there, but poor engineering and scamp contracting
combined to make it too weak to stand the pressure up to the level
intended. The English engineer who came to inspect it put a mark about
two-thirds of the way up, and warned that it wouldn’t be safe to ever
let the water rise above that height. As a precaution, it had been the
custom every February or March, before the spring thaw came, to drain
off the water of the lake during the month or two before the run-off
was the greatest, so that there was plenty of margin against the
floods shoving up the level above the danger-point. The Austrians were
good enough engineers to know that it was a rotten dam, but they
didn’t seem to have the sense to start lowering the water level before
the spring freshets set in.
“Of course we didn’t have to set up nights to figure what a break in
the dam--if only it came sudden enough--would do to the main Austrian
camp; but the contriving of ways and means to bring about that ‘sudden
break’ seemed to have us guessing from the first. The simple and
natural thing would have been to try and work down a couple of raiding
parties on either side of the lake, rush the guards at the dam with
knives (as we did later at the bridge I told you of), plant two or
three charges of dynamite, touch off the fuses, and beat it back to
the hills. If we’d had enough powder, probably that’s the thing we’d
have tried, but with what success it’s hard to say. The chances
against anything like a ‘clean job’ were anywhere from ten to fifty to
one. In the first place, there was the chance of some of the raiders
running into an Austrian patrol or sentry and starting something
before they ever got near the dam. Then there was the chance that the
rush at the dam might not go off quietly enough to keep from bringing
the force in the village down on us and making it hopeless to try and
place the powder, even if we had cleaned up the guards. Or, if we did
get the powder placed, there was the chance that we might fail to
explode it (as happened at the bridge); or even if it did explode, it
was no cinch that the dam would go all at once, or that the camp below
wouldn’t be warned in time to get clear. Yes, I’m sure it was a good
fifty-to-one that one of these things would have upset the apple-cart
if we’d happened to be in shape to try and do the job with dynamite.
And once we’d showed our hand, of course, the Austrians had only to
let the water out of the lake or move the lower camp, and the game was
up for good.
“But the hundred or so sticks of forty per cent. ‘giant’ we had in
stock were out of the question to tackle the job with, and so no move
was made that might have stirred the enemy’s suspicions of what we had
in pickle for him. So, far from taking any precautions as the flood
season approached, he only let the water go on rising in the lake and
extended the main camp a hundred yards nearer the river. We talked
over a hundred plans in the long winter nights, but it was not till
the snow began to turn slushy at noonday, along towards the middle of
March, that we hit on one that seemed to promise a chance of success.
“We had been hoping all along that the Austrians might let the water
go on piling up behind the dam until it gave way, but it was not till
one day when our scouts brought word that the gates had now been
opened, with the evident intention of holding the lake at a level
which they figured at about ten feet above the danger-point, that it
occurred to us that we might do something to help the good work along.
Nobody ever recalled afterwards whose idea it was, but a dozen of
us--officers and men together, in the Serbian fashion--suddenly found
ourselves waving our arms and getting red in the face discussing a
plan for building a little dam of our own, backing up as big a lakeful
of water behind it as we could, and then turning it loose on the big
lake below at the crest of the spring floods. If any of us had had any
engineering sense we’d have known that we couldn’t build--with no
tools but a few axes and spades, and no materials but what nature had
put there--a dam in a year big enough to be of any use, let alone in a
month. But having no sense to speak of in things of that kind, we went
ahead with the job, and, with the luck of fools, pulled it off.
“There was a fine site for a dam at the upper end of the cart-road
gorge, where it looked as though a solid barrier thirty feet high
would back up a lake something like three-quarters of a mile long and
from a quarter to half a mile wide. We began by building a ‘crib’ of
pine-trunks thirty feet wide--which was to be filled with boulders
and gravel. On our pencil plan of it, it was to be heavily buttressed
from below and slope from both sides till it was only ten feet wide at
the top. Our idea was to make it as much like a fort as possible, so
that if the Austrians piped it off from an aeroplane they would think
we were only working on defences. A hole was to be left in the middle
for the river to flow out through, as we didn’t intend to store water
till the big rains and thaws set in. As it was rainy or windy every
day from the time we started to work, the Austrians--as far as we ever
knew--did no flying over the mountains, so that we had no worry on
that score.
“Upwards of five hundred husky Serbs can do a deal of work,
but it didn’t take more than three days of log-rolling and
rock-packing to show that--even at the pace we were hitting it--that
hundred-yard-long, thirty-feet-high dam wouldn’t be finished before
the next season, and that, even if we did get it done some time, the
stuff we were putting in it was too loose to stop water. It was at
this stage of things that I had _my_ big idea. I had worked in
hydraulic mines in the West, and while we had nothing to rig up a pipe
and nozzle from, there _was_ a chance to divert a little mountain
torrent that came tumbling down from the snows only a few yards below
our dam site. Why not, I suggested, build up only a narrow crib of
boulders and pine logs to act as a barrier, and then bring over this
little torrent--it was flowing about a hundred miner’s inches at this
time--and let it sluice down the loose ‘conglomerate’ from the
four-hundred-foot-high cliff through which it flowed? Because no one
had anything else to offer, we decided to try the thing.
“We used up a good half of our poor little store of powder in making
the cut to bring over the stream, but the job was mostly easy digging,
and we finished it in three days. My young ‘hydraulic’ sure tore down
a lot of rock and gravel, but, as we couldn’t rig up anything to
confine it properly, it only spread out in a big ‘fan,’ which in turn
was sluiced away by the river. That fairly stumped us, and when on top
of it a big storm came on and brought down a flood that washed away
all our cribbing, we chucked up in disgust our project of ‘harnessing
nature’ against the Austrian and began to plan raids again.
“All that night it rained cats and dogs, and when I looked out of my
hut the next morning the river was over its banks and humping it like
a ‘locoed’ mustang. But the funny thing was that the cascade from the
little stream we had diverted seemed to have disappeared. At first I
thought it had bucked its way back into its old channel, but when I
went down to look I found that it had been ‘swallowed’ up by the
cliff. Five times as big as on the night before, it came tumbling down
over an up-ended stratum of slate, to disappear in a foamy
yellow-white spout into a deep crack it had sluiced into the soft
‘conglomerate.’ At the bottom of the cliff it came boiling out from
under the angling slate-layer in a stream that looked to be about
equal parts of gravel and water. My baby ‘hydraulic’ had evidently
undermined a sloping section of the cliff for a hundred feet or more,
and only the tough slate stratum was staving off a big cave-in. How
big a cave-in it was going to be, and what it was going to lead to, I
never guessed.
“The warm rain kept plugging down all day, and was still pelting hard
when I went to sleep that night. Towards morning I was waked up with a
roar a hundred times louder than any snow-slide I ever heard, and then
came a jar that rocked the whole valley. I felt sure a piece of the
cliff had come down, but didn’t have the least hunch that anything
like what the first daylight showed up had come off. The first thing I
saw as the dark slacked off was the shimmer of a flat stretch of
water in the bottom of the valley, a lake--just as if it had been
dropped from the sky--right where we’d been trying to start one
ourselves.
“The cliff had broken back a couple of hundred feet or more all the
way to the top, and in falling had piled up clear across the head of
the gorge. On the near side it was about one hundred and fifty feet
high, on the farther side something like sixty.
“With the rain still pouring pitchforks and the snow melting all over
the mountains, water was coming down at a rate that had the lake
rising at the rate of two feet an hour all morning, and better than
half that fast even when it began to spread out over the valley floor
in the afternoon. The storm kept right on for three days. The second
morning there was twenty-five feet of water at the dam, on the third
forty feet and on the fourth near to fifty. The lake by this time was
both bigger and deeper than the one we’d planned to make ourselves.
“By good luck the streams ramping down from the mountains into the
gorge below the slide kept two or three times its average flow in the
river, and so the Austrians--who didn’t know its habits very
well--failed to notice that anything unusual had come off up-stream.
Our scouts reported that the water in the lower lake had not risen
much, and that it seemed to stand at about fifteen feet above the
danger mark. The Austrians, they said, did not appear to be paying any
more attention to the dam than usual.
“We were hoping that the storm would hold until enough water was
backed up to bust the dam on its own, but when it began to clear on
the fourth day it was plain the best way out of it was to give the
thing a push on our own account. We didn’t have a hundredth of enough
‘giant’ to do the job, so had to rig the best makeshift we could by
turning the still husky stream of my ‘hydraulic’ right along the
sloping top of the slide and off down into the gorge.
“It was about midday when we set it sluicing, and all afternoon it
licked off the loose earth as if it was sugar. By dark half the near
end of the slide had slushed away, and the wall that still held was
beginning to bulge and cave with the seep forced through from the
other side. Half an hour later our pitch-pine torches showed the water
bubbling through all the way along, and we knew it was time for us to
clear out. It was none too soon either, for the last man was just out
of the way when a heavy sort of rolling-grind started, and
then--whouf!--out she went.
“I’ve been in ‘Yankee Jim’s’ Canyon of the Yellowstone when the flood
behind the break-up of the ice-jam in the lake came down, but that was
a rat-a-tat to the roar that sounded now. The mountains themselves
were shaking, and the movement started the ‘hanging’ snow-slides all
the way down the gorge. It must have been a racket like that when the
world was made. The lake was drained of all but mud in ten minutes,
and it must have been about twice that long before a new sound broke
in--a roar so deep that it seemed to almost be a rumbling from under
the earth. But we knew that it was the big dam going--that our work
was done for that night.
“The next morning at daybreak every man in shape to stand the climb
over a mountain path we knew--the road down the gorge had been scoured
out clean--dropped down from three sides on the little Austrian force
in the village where the dam had been, and killed or captured the
whole bunch. Then we pushed on to the top of the foothills looking
down to the plain. Where the main Austrian camp had been was a slither
of smooth mud, dotted with the stumps of snapped-off trees; and just
that, and no more, was all we could see as far as our eyes could
reach.
“And just so,” cried Radovitch, leaping to his feet and shaking a fist
toward the serrated sky-line to the north-east, beyond which ran the
roads to Monastir and Prilep and Uskub; “just so, when the time comes,
will the whole ---- ---- herd of the swine be swept out of Serbia!”