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.