CHAPTER VII
ELBASAN—WE PUSH ON TOWARDS THECOAST
AN ENGLISH WOMAN-SERGEANT IN SERBIATHE AUTHOR IN KHAKIPage 148
AN ENGLISH WOMAN-SERGEANT IN SERBIATHE AUTHOR IN KHAKI
Page 148
Nextday 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 runningrivers 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 toFrs.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 byoffering 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. Itstill 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, sothe 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, andit 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.
SERBIAN SOLDIERS. A COLD CAMPPage 114
SERBIAN SOLDIERS. A COLD CAMP
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ROUND THE CAMP FIREPage 154
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 manand 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 camecrowding 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 theSerbian 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 thecompany 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 forFrs.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 Bulgariansand 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 mypatient’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 everythingthat 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 shouldhave 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 hugeholly 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 costingFrs.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 downto 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 tobe 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 havesomethingto 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 ofbread. 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.