ROUND THE CAMP FIRE
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 man and 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 came crowding 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 the Serbian 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 the company 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 for Frs. 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 Bulgarians and 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 my patient’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.