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.