The first few miles of the road were passable, over an uncultivated
plain, but as the mountains of Montenegro closed sulkily behind us, the
mountains of Albania opened threateningly before us. The grass plain
became a swamp, and soon we were playing the same old game, wading
and splashing through mud and water, no road traceable. The Albanian
mountains were evidently twin brothers to the Montenegrin fiends,
and after we had crossed a river, with a bridge broken off at both
ends, our route lay across an expanse of basaltic rock, which looked
impossible for horses and oxen.
By that time it was dark, and it seemed wise to wait till daylight to
attack the new enemy, so we bivouacked in a tiny grass enclosure, near
an old ruined chapel. The field belonged to an Albanian, who promptly
told us to be off, but the sight of money, five dinars, and a promise
of five dinars for wood, mollified him, and he became friendly, and
he even said he would sell us a sheep for the men's supper. The time
went on, and the sheep never arrived. I kept asking Sandford and Merton
about it, and they kept saying it would come soon. Then, finally, they
confessed that they had not bought it because it was too expensive. Of
course, it was more expensive than it would have been in normal times,
but if it kept men from starving, it was cheap at any price, and I
insisted that it should be fetched. They went away as though to buy
it, and came back saying that the Albanian owner had gone to bed, and
couldn't bring the sheep in from the hills in the dark. Flaming-eye
business; I would not be defeated, so I discovered where the Albanian
lived, and went with Vooitch to his house, over stone walls and
boulders and through the usual bogs.
It was a one-roomed cabin built of stone, and without windows. We
knocked at the door, opened it and walked in, before there was time
for anyone to deny us entrance, and in the dark, we stumbled over--the
sheep! This made V. and me laugh so much, we couldn't talk for a
minute. We couldn't see if the Albanian had been in bed, but he came
quickly to us. We told him that we had come to fetch the sheep for
supper. "But would we pay for it?" "Why, of course. How much did he
want?" "20 dinars" (about 11s. 8d.). "All right. Here's the money. Now
please help us to carry the sheep to the camp." It was a tiny creature,
and he and V. carried it, bleating, in their arms. When we had climbed
the last stone wall, and the men, who were sitting round their empty
fires, saw the sheep, they shouted with joy and excitement, "Dobro,
Maika; dobro, dobro." In a marvellously few minutes that poor little
beast was in joints, cooking on the various fires, round which the
different little groups of men sat, and, later, slept. Were Sandford
and Merton really so unadaptable that they couldn't bring their
consciences to pay 20 dinars for an article which, in normal times
should only have cost 12? Or was there another alternative? I later
reported my suspicions at Headquarters, and, in the meantime, I watched
that the men did not suffer.
On Saturday, December 18th, we saw at once that it was good-bye to
our hopes of a better road between Podgoritza and Scutari. Our route
this day was, if possible, worse than anything we had yet encountered.
Huge boulders, with deep mud-holes between, dead oxen, dead horses,
dead men, every few yards. Sometimes thick scrub, with spiky thorn
bushes, and with slippery foothold, was interlarded with the mud and
boulders; then came basaltic rocks, superimposed in fantastic fashion,
and mountainous boulders, with beech scrub, and berberis, and juniper
between; but always, whatever else there might or might not be, there
was mud, two and sometimes three feet deep. To-day this was of a rich
red colour.
In one wood there were many dead men. In a patch of grass near one poor
fellow, who was lying, where he had fallen, in the snow, green buds of
young snowdrops were bravely peeping through the dead leaves, as though
to adorn his grave. Beside him was his tin mug, from which he had been
drinking his last drink of melted snow. For him no roll of honour; for
his family no news of "killed in action." But when the war is over, and
other men return, his place in the home, and the places of thousands
of his comrades, will be empty. We picked bunches of snowdrops in that
wood whilst waiting, during moments of a congestion of oxen, men and
horses, which was now worse than ever. In another wood a long halt had
to be made, whilst convoys ahead of us, took precedence at the narrow
exit. One convoy which said it had been waiting there for two days,
had with it hundreds of oxen, and was on the point of pushing past us,
but, at the critical moment, a friendly officer came to the rescue,
claiming that our horses should have precedence of oxen, and he shouted
and insisted and bluffed and pushed, both our column and his own, which
was even smaller now than ours, into the line. He came with us, and we
bivouacked together for the night, in a tiny walled paddock, a couple
of miles (over rocks and mud) above the end of the Lake of Scutari, and
outside the hut of an Albanian.
The latter, as usual, at first refused us the hospitality even of his
field, but he eventually yielded to the money bribe. The captain and
his lieutenant supped with us. We gave them hashed and warmed tinned
Serbian meats, of which we still had a few, with white beans, and a
second course of boiled rice, which was one of our mainstays. We were
a quaint-looking group as we sat round the fire, all smothered to the
waists in thick red mud. We were obliged to let it dry upon us, as
there was no water to wash it off. We had no change of clothes; we had
left the last relics of such superfluities behind, when the carts were
burned.
We could see, from the convergence of columns from all directions, that
we should have trouble to-morrow in getting into the line of the narrow
track along which we must travel. So we were up at 4.30 on Sunday,
December 19th, and as the result of combined tactics, our two columns
eventually pushed into the narrow track of mud and rock.
Some distance below us, was the north end of the Lake of Scutari, and
it was cheering to see the beginning of the lake upon which stood--at
the other end--Scutari, our goal. We hoped that our route would be
beside the lake, as that would at least mean certainty of water, but we
never touched it at any point.
After standing blocked during four hours in the mud, we advanced four
yards. There was evidently some extra bad place causing the crush
ahead of us; the horses had had no food, either last night or this
morning, except from nibblings on the nearly bare paddock, and the
delay might prevent us from reaching hay to-day. A slow move, a yard at
a time, brought us eventually to a wood, and we understood the cause
of the delay. I think nothing but the knowledge that the enemy--four
enemies--were close behind, could have heartened the thousands of
weary, hungry, dispirited soldiers, to urge their skeleton animals
forward over the difficulties and obstructions which now met us.
Owing to the size, and number of the trees, there was only one narrow
track, and progress was only possible in single file; the descent to
the level of the lake, was steep and slippery, over a jumble of huge
boulders, half-covered with melting snow, and ice, fallen tree trunks,
deep mud-holes, and dead bodies. In one hole, we had to trample over
the bodies of three horses, one on the top of the other, the top one
not yet dead. Bodies of men who were dead were lifted to the side of
the track; the oxen and horses had to be left where they fell.
But bad and treacherous as the track was, there was never time for
hesitation; thousands of animals, and of soldiers, were pushing into
you from behind, and if, leading your pony, you fell, you would be
trampled on, and your pony would never rise again.
The most imaginative dreamer, after a supper of lobster and port wine,
could scarcely dream a more complete nightmare. But our staff came
through, as usual, with flying colours, smothered from head to foot
with the aggressive red mud, but without loss of an ox or pony.
After some hours of horrors in this wood, we eventually emerged on to a
narrow lane which was a sea of gelatinous and slippery mud; two steps
forward, and one back. In places it was so deeply sticky that Vooitch
had to haul my legs out, one after the other, as if they were things
apart from me, whilst I looked on. This was refreshing, as it made us
laugh at Vooitch's opportunity of pulling the chief's leg. We must
continue till we reached the military station, or some place where hay
could be found. Sandford and Merton had been sent on to find hay and
bread, and they greeted us with the familiar "Nema." But our captain of
last night had also gone ahead, and to our joy, in the evening, when
it was dark, and there were symptoms of fatigue amongst the staff,
and rain was falling, as it had fallen, in heavy showers all day, he
appeared on the road, and said that he had found some kukurus, both
for his, and for our animals, and a good camping-place for us near
him. In return we gave him some of his favourite rice for supper, and
porridge of mealie meal, before we started in the morning.
It was his "Slava" day, and in celebration of the event, he killed an
ox, and gave us some beef, which we cooked almost before it was dead;
we were very hungry, and we tried to pretend that it wasn't tough. But
in the meantime another column, which was camping near us, also had a
"Slava" day, and they celebrated it by killing one of our oxen. Our
man, to whom the ox belonged, hadn't a sense of humour, so I had to see
the officer in command of the offending column and get compensation.
We had been in luck's way here, with plenty of wood, and that, to a
Serbian, is almost of as much importance as bread. I think that perhaps
one of the reasons why Serbian soldiers disliked Montenegro, was the
universal lack of firewood. War brings men back to primitive ideas,
or lack of ideas, about things. For those engaged in war, a tree is
never an oak, a beech, a willow, a fir, the marvellous result of growth
and decay, birth and death, in mysterious process, during hundreds of
years--a thing of beauty to be admired--it is firewood. Likewise, man,
the evolutionary keystone in a process of marvels which we can only
dimly divine, is not a human body, the shrine of an immortal soul: he
is a soldier, reared like a pheasant, to be shot. And yet the Churches,
which should lead the evolutionary movement of progress, adopt the
attitude of the lamb before the shearers, and raise no protest. The
human race flatters itself that it is advancing in civilisation: it
mistakes the movement of the merry-go-round for progress.