"Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow."
(From the picture by F. Matania. By permission of the Sphere.)
This picture shows old King Peter and his court retreating on foot through the snows of winter into the wilds of Albania.
In those November days heartrending scenes were witnessed on the Serbian hills, now white with the first snows of winter. Fugitives in ox wagons, in country carts, and on foot, men, women, and little children, thronged the roads—a long procession of woe. The army which, a year ago, had flung the Austrians out of the country, was now a mere remnant of 150,000 famished and weary men. With it marched our British Naval Brigade and its guns. The devoted doctors and nurses, who had for nine months been ministering to the wounded and diseased, were scattered far and wide. By roundabout roads some of them reached the Allies at Salonika; others gained the Adriatic coast; and some, such as Lady Paget, remained and trusted to the tender mercies of the Bulgarians. Retreating with the army were the officials of the Court and the Government. Perhaps the most pathetic figure of all was the Serbian King, racked by rheumatism and sore of heart because his age and infirmities prevented him from fighting in the ranks with his heroic people. But behind all his sorrows there was a ray of hope. His army, though but a remnant, was still an army, and not a broken and dispirited mob. It would live to fight again.
So, for the Allies, the year 1915 closed in gloom. A visitor from Mars, presented with a map of the German conquests, might have been pardoned had he proclaimed the two Kaisers victorious. From the Yser to the Dvina, from the Baltic to the Bosphorus, and thence to the Tigris, they and their fellow-conspirators were masters of 177,000,000 people. They had driven the Russians before them; they had made another Belgium of Serbia; the French and British had failed in their Eastern enterprises, and could not break through in the West. The Germans loudly boasted of their triumph; but, to their amazement, there was no sign of war-weariness or faint-heartedness amongst the Allies. Conscious that the enemy had passed the first flush of his mighty strength, the Allies endured the heaviness of the night, and, while waiting for the morning,
"Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph; Held, we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake."