CHAPTER V
WE SAY GOOD-BYE TO SERBIA AND TAKE TOTHE ALBANIAN MOUNTAINS
Thenext 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 thetrenches, 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 explainedto 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, guardingbridges, 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 clearedaway, 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 Imight 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.
A COLD HALTING PLACEPage 103
A COLD HALTING PLACE
Page 103
THE BLOCK-HOUSE WHERE WE ALL SLEPTPage 110
THE BLOCK-HOUSE WHERE WE ALL SLEPT
Page 110
In the evening we rode on by OckridaLake, 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 hewas, 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 neverwant 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 behindme 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 bigguns 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 betternot. “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 werebad 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 morninglight 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 peoplesubsist 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 awayfor 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 tobe 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 persuasiveabout 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.