At the end of November the Serbian army, with the Government and
thousands of refugees, arrived at the ancient towns of Prizren and
Pe['c]. It was at the rambling old patriarchal town of Pe['c] that the
Serbian soldiers had to do a thing which even their marvellous
optimism could not endure--most of the field guns had now to be
destroyed, after a few years of crowded and victorious life. An
American correspondent, Mr. Fortier Jones, tells us[95] how a gunner
asked to be photographed beside his beloved weapon, and how, when he
wanted to leave his address, he suddenly realized that with the loss
of this gun he would be a mere homeless wanderer. It was not
surprising that these steel-built stoics, than whom all French and
British witnesses agree there are no better fighters in the world,
should have broken down at this ordeal. As for the chauffeurs, they
were busy polishing their cars and cleaning their engines--presumably
through force of habit--prior to the breaking up of all these
touring-cars and lorries. Some were saturated with petrol and set on
fire, others were exploded with hand grenades, but the most
imaginative method was to drive the car up to that place, two or three
miles from Pe['c], where the road to Andrievica turned into a
horse-trail on the side of the precipice. Here the chauffeur would
jump out, after having let in the clutch and pushed down the
accelerator--and the car would leap into space, three or four hundred
feet over a mountain torrent. From this point the _via dolorosa_
stretched away precariously, at first a winding path of ice and then a
track across the snowdrifts of the barren uplands. The Serbian
Government had offered to construct this very necessary road to
Andrievica; the engineer, one Smodlaka, undertook to build it in three
months, but Nikita's Minister replied that the Austrian prisoners,
whom it was proposed to use, were mostly in the grip of spotted fever.
This was not the case, and one of the results of there being no road
was that nearly all the supplies from Russia for the Montenegrins were
abandoned at Pe['c]. Cold, starvation and exposure took a fearful toll
among the straggling wanderers--between 1000 and 1500 were cut off and
murdered by savage Albanians (whose considerate treatment of the Serbs
is highly praised by their champion, Miss Edith Durham. Reviewing in
the _Daily Herald_ a book of Serbian tales that have precious little
to do with Albania, she goes out of her way to laud, in those days of
the terrible retreat, the kindliness of her proteges.) As we have
mentioned, of the 36,000 boys who accompanied the army in order to
escape the Austrians, only some 16,000 reached the Adriatic, where it
was said that there was nothing human left of them except their eyes.
They had lived on roots and bark of trees, they drank the water into
which decomposed corpses had been thrown. Of the 50,000 Austrian
prisoners--many of them Yugoslavs--about 44,000 died in the course of
their eight weeks' retreat; none of them were heard to complain or
seen committing any brutal act. Very many Englishwomen were included
in this long procession; old King Peter walked a good deal of the way,
the Archbishop of Belgrade brought the relics of Stephen the
First-Crowned and was followed by priests with lighted tapers, and
Marshal Putnik, whom exposure would have killed, was carried all the
way inside a primitive sedan-chair.... "Whence do you come and what
are you?" asked a Serbian woman[96] of the wounded and dying. "We
are," they replied in prose that reminds one of Mestrovi['c], "we are
the smouldering torches with which our country is kept warm. In the
heart of one's native land there is neither truth nor justice--we love
our native land; this love is a barrier against human love; the heart
of one's native land is great and selfish and it throbs--in this heart
is the faith of all our hearts, we love our native land. We watch
over it and we defend it and we love, though the lettering upon our
tomb be enveloped in ivy. Formidable is its victory, and we will march
along, not asking whether anybody will return. We love our native land
and even when the blood is thickening inside our throats and we are
carrying our entrails in our hands." Though they were Serbs they had
forgotten how to sing; it was some time later that the words, now
famous, of "Tamo daleko" burst from the inspired lips of a simple
soldier and were taken up by his companions: "There, far away, far
away by the Morava, there is my village, there is my love...."
"They came exhausted into Scutari, one by one or in small groups,"
says Monsieur Boppe, the French Minister,[97] "some of them on
horseback, some on foot; here and there one saw a trace of military
order, but most of them had no weapons. They looked as if they could
not march another mile, these moving skeletons, so painfully they
crawled along, so haggard, so emaciated, with a colour so cadaverous
and eyes so dull. This mournful band of brothers struggled into
Scutari for days, beneath the rain and through the mud. No bitterness
came from the lips of those who had undergone every privation; as if
impelled by destiny, they passed along in silence; from time to time,
indeed, one heard them say 'hleba' (bread)--that was the only word
they had the strength to pronounce. For several days the majority of
them had had nothing to eat, and in the cantonments where they were
lodged outside the town their Government could only provide a meagre
ration." A hundredweight of maize cost 300 francs in gold.... But what
of the women who had remained in Belgrade? Miss Annie Christi['c],
whose unflagging work for her people is so well known in this country,
has told us how the Austro-Hungarians started paying out relief money
to the families of State officials. They advertised their generosity
on a large scale, but the amounts were very small, and many women were
too proud to accept this dole from the enemy. They preferred to do any
kind of work offered by the municipality of Belgrade. Thus one saw
women in furs or smart clothes--the remnants of former days--trundling
wheelbarrows of stone for road repairs, or carrying heavy loads.
Delicately nurtured girls could be seen working at the slaughterhouse
among the entrails and offal for twelve hours on end. The wife of a
professor scrubbed office floors for many months before her husband at
the front could send her any money. Street-sweeping was a common
occupation for women of all classes.
"We rescued the gallant Serbian army," said the Italians, in the
course of a long and rhetorical placard which in 1919 they pasted up
throughout Rieka and the Adriatic lands they occupied, and which was
not more convincing than the caravan of Dalmatian mayors whom, after
the War, they very proudly exhibited in Paris, a suave official from
the Embassy acting as the showman. (The Italian authorities had taken
in hand the election of these mayors--save Signor Ziliotto of Zadar,
who was elected by his fellow-townsmen.) ... When the wretched Serbs
who found themselves staggering through central Albania--among them
large numbers of boys so young that they would not have been called up
until 1919--when they hoped to reach the Adriatic at Valona, they were
told that this route was barred to them. Having eluded the Austrians,
the Germans and the Bulgars, they were left by the Italians to die of
starvation and fatigue. It may well have seemed to them, as to Bedros
Tourian, the Armenian poet, that "All the world is but God's mockery."
When King Peter, worn out by the journey and his ailments, reached
Valona by way of Durazzo, he was ordered by the commandant of that
place to depart with his suite--which consisted of four
persons--within twenty-four hours.... In the middle of December a
French relief mission arrived on the Albanian coast, General de
Mondesir reached Scutari and a large British mission under General
Taylor landed at Durazzo. These did what was possible to save the
remnants of the Serbian army. But, after a short time, a fresh series
of obstacles arose. The King of Montenegro, very loyal to the
Austrians, facilitated their advance across his country. Thus it was
impracticable for the Serbs to concentrate and to embark from those
few wooden huts which are called, in Italian, San Giovanni di Medua.
Between the bare cliffs and the sea the miserable men and boys and
women were compelled to plod towards the south. One hundred and fifty
thousand survivors were eventually carried by the Allies to Corfu.