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 everything that 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 should have 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 huge holly 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 costing Frs. 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 down to 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 to be 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 have something to 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 of bread. 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.

CHAPTER VIII

SERBIAN CHRISTMAS DAY AT DURAZZO—AEROPLANE
RAIDS

Next day was New Year’s Day, and everyone came up and wished me a Happy New Year, our English New Year, that is, as theirs, of course, did not come till thirteen days later, and we all hoped that the New Year might prove happier than the old one had been.