We had been looking forward to Corfu as a sort of land flowing with milk and honey, with a magnificent climate and everything that was good, but our ardour was rather damped when we landed at that hour at a small quay, feet deep in mud, miles away from the town, and about 8 miles away from our camp, so we were told. We did not know in which direction our camp was, and, even had we got there, would have been no better off without a tent or blankets; so we spent the remainder of the night sitting on a packing-case beside the sentry’s fire, and I was glad enough to be able to borrow an overcoat from the Serbian officer in charge of the quay, who was just going off duty.
There was one of the most beautiful sunrises I have ever seen, but under some circumstances you feel you would most willingly barter the most gorgeous panorama of scenery for a cup of hot tea.
We had a long, hot walk the next morning till we found our own division, where the sixty men from our company were camped pending the arrival of the Commandant of the regiment and the rest who were coming via Vallona.
Corfu may be a lovely climate and a health resort and everything else that is delightful at any other time in the year, but it was a bitter blow to us when it rained for about six weeks without stopping after our arrival, added to which there was no wood, and camp fires were forbidden, I suppose for fear that the men might take to cutting down the olive trees with which the island is covered. There was no hay at first for us to sleep on, and the incessant wet, combined with the effects of bully beef, on men whose stomachs were absolutely destroyed by months of semi-starvation was largely responsible for the terrible amount of sickness and very high mortality among the troops during the first month of our stay there. This was especially the case among the boys and young recruits, who, less hardy than the trained soldiers, were completely broken down by their late hardships and died by thousands on the hospital island of Vido. They could not be buried in the small island, dying as they were at the rate of 150 a day, and the bodies were taken out to sea. The Serbs are not a maritime nation, and the idea of a burial at sea is repugnant to them. I heard one touching story. An old man came to the island to see his son, but he had died the day before. “Where is his grave?” he asked, “that I may tell my old wife I saw his last resting-place. We had seven sons; six were killed in the war, and he was the seventh and youngest.” The kind-hearted doctor lied bravely and well. “That is it,” he said, pointing to a little wooden cross among a few others, where some graves had been made one day when it was too rough for the tug to call. How could he tell the poor old father that even then his son’s body was lying out on the wooden jetty waiting to be carried out to his nameless grave in the blue Ionian Sea?
We found there had been some hitch in the commissariat arrangements, and there was no food for our sixty men. We bought them some bread next day, but bread was 3 francs a loaf, and a third of a loaf to a man with nothing else was not enough to keep them going, while endless red tape was being unwound before their proper rations came along. They never made a complaint; but, though we could have bought bread for ourselves, it nearly choked us with the men standing round silently watching and wondering what we were going to do for them.
On the second morning, seeing an empty motor-lorry coming along, I had a sudden inspiration and boarded it, dashing down the steep bank to the road, telling them that I would be back in the evening from town with something for them, and taking an orderly with me. It was about fifteen miles’ drive into the town of Corfu, and I tramped about all day in the pouring rain from one official to another, from the English to the French, from the French to the Serbians, and back again to the French, till I was heartily sick of it, and had I had the money would have bought the stuff in the town and had done with it. There was plenty of bread at the bakery, but, of course, they could not give it to me without a proper requisition, which apparently I could not sign because I was not authorised to do so. It was getting towards evening, and I was beginning to despair, and was thinking of doing the best I could with a hundred francs I had borrowed, when I thought I would have one more try with the French authorities. I was wet through myself, as I had had no time to stop for a coat when the lorry came along, and had been too busy and too worried to get anything to eat all day, but anyhow this time I managed to pitch them such a pitiful tale of woe about the sufferings of the men, and the awful time I was having trying to get them something to eat, that I quite softened their hearts, and they said they would give me what I wanted without any further signature, but that I must not make a precedent of this unofficial way of doing business. I was overjoyed, and sent my orderly off at once to hunt up a carriage, and we returned to camp in triumph about 9 o’clock with a whole sackful of bread, another of tinned beef, and two large earthenware jars of wine, which I bought on the way. There were plenty of the men waiting, when they heard my carriage arrive, to dash down to the road and carry the stuff up to the camp, and there was great rejoicing over the success of my expedition. I was soon warm and dry and having some supper myself. The men were all right so far, but another day’s short rations would certainly have seen some of them sick.
The question of transport was fearfully difficult, and the French and English authorities were working night and day to feed the troops, and, of course, they could never have got through the work if things had not been done in order; so I was duly grateful that under the special circumstances they let me carry out such an unauthorised raid.
About a week later the rest of the company arrived about 10 o’clock one evening, and a sergeant proudly told me that our Fourth Company were all very fit and not a man sick or fallen out.
We moved to another camp up in the hills, a nice place, but very far from anywhere, though I found that I could get about anywhere I wanted to on the motor-lorries which used to come in with bread. The A.S.C. drivers of these lorries must have had a hard time at first; the roads were very bad and the weather shocking, and they were working sixteen hours a day carrying supplies, but they were full of pity for the deplorable condition of the Serbian soldiers, and were willingly working night and day to alleviate it.
One of the English officers gave me a small Italian tent in place of the little Serbian bivouac one I had been sleeping in. It was a capital little tent, very light and absolutely waterproof. My orderly built a foundation of stones about 2 ft. high, with the chinks filled in with earth, and pitched the tent on the top of that, so that it was quite high enough to stand up in and also to hold a camp bed and a rubber bath, and he then made a nice little garden and planted it with shrubs and flowers, with a little wall all round ornamented with red bully beef tins with plants in them, and it looked awfully nice.