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.