That evening was very different to the previous one. Lieut. Jovitch had a roaring fire of pine logs built in a little hollow, just below what had been our firing line, and he and I and the other two officers of the company sat round it and had our supper of bread and beans, and after that we spread our blankets on spruce boughs round the fire and rolled up in them. It was a most glorious moonlight night, with the ground covered with white hoar frost, and it looked perfectly lovely with all the camp fires twinkling every few yards over the hillside among the pine trees. I lay on my back looking up at the stars, and, when one of them asked me what I was thinking about, I told him that when I was old and decrepit and done for, and had to stay in a house and not go about any more, I should remember my first night with the Fourth Company on the top of Mount Chukus.
The next morning our blankets were all covered with frost and the air was nippy, but got warmer as the sun got up, and one soon gets used to the cold when one is always out of doors.
We took up our positions again behind the same line of rocks soon after sunrise. In the afternoon the firing got very hot, and the Bulgars got a sort of cross fire on, so that the bullets were also spitting across the plateau where we had our fire last night, and they seemed to be getting up nearer round another ridge. Our cannon were posted somewhere below on our left commanding the road, and we could watch how things were going on between them and the Bulgarian artillery by the puffs of white smoke. We had a few casualties, but not so very many.
We stayed there all day till dark, and it got very cold towards sunset, kneeling or lying on our tummies; sometimes we just sniped as we liked, and sometimes fired by volley as the platoon sergeant gave the order, “Né shanni palli” (“Take aim, fire”). I had luckily always been used to a rifle, so could do it with the others all right.
One drawback to Chukus was that there was very little to eat and no water, or at least hardly any, it having to be fetched in water-bottles from a long distance, or melted down from the snow which still hung about there in deep drifts. We used to fill billy-cans with snow and melt it over the fire. The men had long ago finished their ration of bread which they carried in their knapsacks and only had corn cobs, which they roasted over the camp fires; we had also almost run out of cigarettes and tobacco.
About 9 p.m. the order came to retire; coming up the mountain was bad enough, but going down was worse. It was lucky there was a moon. We went down a different side along a path covered with thick slippery mud and very steep, and, as I had no nails in my boots and not much soles, I found it hard to keep my feet. Half-way down we met another battalion, and I was delighted to meet my old friend whose “Slava day” we had celebrated on the top of Mount Kalabac, and who wanted to know what in the world I was doing here. We found the horses at the bottom, and then the men marched, and I and those of the officers who had horses rode all night through a long defile in the mountains. It was a very narrow track, with a mountain up one side and a precipice on the other which effectually prevented one from giving way to the temptation to go to sleep while riding.
We picked up the rest of the regiment soon after daybreak and halted there. I already knew nearly all the officers, and they all wanted to know what I thought of Chukus. We sat round the fires for some time laughing and joking and then all went on to within a few miles of Elbasan. I thought we were going to camp there, but we still had another five or six miles’ march to the outskirts of Elbasan. Since I had joined this company we had had a day’s fighting, then a twelve-hour march, starting at 3 a.m. with a climb to the top of Chukus thrown in, 36 hours’ pelting rain, two days’ continuous fighting, nothing but a few cobs to eat, and now had been marching since 9 o’clock the night before, yet as we turned at 5 o’clock in the afternoon into the swampy field where we were to camp they had enough spirit left to respond to their company Commander’s appeal, “Now then, men, left, right, left, right; pull yourselves together and remember you are soldiers,” and this was only a sample of what they had been doing for weeks past.
CHAPTER VII
ELBASAN—WE PUSH ON TOWARDS THE
COAST
