CHAPTER II
A SERBIAN AMBULANCE AT WORK—WE
START TO RETREAT
Next morning we all turned out at daybreak, and I got a better view of my surroundings. The ambulance itself consisted of one largish tent, where the patients lie on their clothes on very muddy straw, until they can be removed to the base hospital by bullock-wagon. This is done as often as transport permits. There were a few cases of dressings, drugs, etc., in the tent, and a small table for writing at. There were about twenty patients in at one time, some of them sick and some wounded. About a dozen little tents, similar to mine, for the soldiers and ambulance men, and two or three wagons completed the outfit.
There was a Serbian girl, about seventeen, helping; she was very unlike any other Serbian woman I had ever met, lived and dressed just like the soldiers, and was very good to the sick men. She spoke German very well, so that we understood each other and became very good friends; she gave me lots of tips, and though I had been under the impression that I knew something about camping out and roughing it, having done so already in various parts of the world, she could walk rings round me in that respect. The first thing the men did after I had had some tea with them by the camp fire was to set to work to convince me of the error of my ways, and to move my little tent back to its old spot before any harm could happen to me. We don’t have breakfast in Serbia, but have an early glass of tea, very hot and sweet, without milk.
The doctor came down shortly afterwards to prescribe for the men who were sick, and then a couple of orderlies and myself dressed the wounded ones, those who were able to walk coming out of the tent and squatting down on the grass outside, where there was more room, and light enough to see what you were doing. They kept straggling in all day from Baboona, where there was a battle going on; it was not far away, and the guns sounded very plain. There were not very many seriously wounded, but I am afraid that was because the path down the mountains is so steep that it is almost impossible to get a badly wounded man down on a stretcher. Any who are able to walk down do so, and they were glad to get their wounds dressed and be able to lie down. At lunch-time we knocked off for a couple of hours, and I went back with the doctor to his loft. We had lunch in great style, sitting on his bed, there being no chairs, and with a blue pocket-handkerchief spread out between us for a table-cloth. He said they were expecting to have a retreat at any moment, and that we must always be in readiness for it as soon as the order arrived. All the patients we had were to go off that afternoon if the bullock-wagons arrived. This question of transport is always a terrible problem; in many cases bullock-wagons are the only things that will stand the rough tracks, although here there was a good road all the way to Bitol, and had we had a service of motor-cars we could have saved the poor fellows an immense amount of suffering. Imagine yourself with a shattered leg lying in company with three or four others on the floor of a springless bullock-wagon, jolting like that over the rough roads for twenty or thirty miles. When I was in Kragujewatz we used to get in big batches of wounded who had travelled like that for three or four days straight from the Front, with only the first rough dressing which each man carries in his pocket.
The wagons came that afternoon, but only two or three for the lying down patients; several poor chaps who were so sick they could hardly crawl had to turn out and start on a weary walk of a good many miles to the nearest hospital at Prilip. One man protested that he would never do it, and I really didn’t think he could, and said so; however, the ambulance men, who were well up to their work, explained that it was absolutely imperative that all should get off into safety day by day, otherwise when the order came suddenly to retreat we might find ourselves landed with an overflowing tentful of sick and wounded men, and no transport available on the spot. “Go, brother,” they said kindly, “Idi polako, polako” (“Go slowly, slowly”), and fortified with a drink of cognac from the ambulance stores, and a handful of cigarettes from me, he and the others like him set off.
We all turned in prepared that evening, and I was cautioned to take not even my boots off. Later on, sleeping in one’s clothes didn’t strike me as anything unusual; in fact, two months later, when we had finished marching and arrived at Durazzo, it was some time before I remembered that it was usual to undress when you went to bed, and that once upon a time, long, long ago, I used to do the same.
In the middle of the night a special messenger arrived with a carriage from the English Consul at Bitol, advising me to come back at once, and that a motor-car would meet me in Prilip, and take me back to Bitol. I knew perfectly well that I should not be able to find the motor-car in the middle of the night in Prilip, which is as dark as the nethermost regions, there not being a lamp in the town, and that it would probably mean sitting up in the carriage in one of those dirty little streets all night; so I said all right, I would see about it in the morning, and went to bed again. In the morning I had another look at the telegram, and as it was not an order to go back, but only advising me strongly to do so, I said I meant to stop. They all seemed very pleased because I said I wanted to stick with the Serbians, and, as we all sat round the camp fire in the bitter cold of a November sunrise, we drank the healths of England and Serbia together in tin mugs full of strong, hot tea.
Later on during the day came another telegram, and I must say that the English Consul at Bitol was a perfect trump in the way he did his duty by stray English subjects and looked after their safety, before he finally had himself to leave for Salonica. A Serbian officer was sent out from somewhere, and he said that if I liked to throw in my lot with them and stop he would send out a wagon and horses, in which I could live and sleep, and in which I could carry my luggage. I hadn’t very much of the latter, and what I had I was perfectly willing to abandon if it was any bother, but he wouldn’t hear of that; and in due course the wagon arrived, and proved, when a little hay had been put on the floor to sleep on, a most snug abode.
The next day the wounded kept straggling in all day, faster than we could evacuate them, and when the order came at ten o’clock that night that the regiment was forced to retreat from Baboona, and that the ambulance was to start at once, we had sixteen wounded in the tent, twelve of them unable to walk. The Serbian ambulances travel very light, and half an hour after receiving our orders we were on the move, the men being adepts at packing up tents and starting at a moment’s notice. At the last moment, while the big ambulance tent was being taken down, a man with a very bad shrapnel wound in the ankle was carried in, and as it was blowing a gale, and we couldn’t keep a lamp alight, I dressed it by the light of a pocket electric torch, which I fortunately had with me. They said at first that he would have to go on as he was, but as I knew very well that it might be three or four days before he would get another dressing I insisted on them getting out some iodine, gauze, etc., and kneeling in the mud, and with some difficulty under the circumstances as the tent was being taken down over my head, I cut off his boot and bloody bandages (he had been wounded in the morning) and cleaned and dressed the wound. He was awfully good, poor fellow, though it hurt him horribly, and he hardly made a murmur. Then two ambulance men carried him out to the ox-wagon, three of which had appeared from somewhere, I don’t know where. I found the Kid, as I called her, had been working like a Trojan in the pitch dark and pelting rain helping the men through the thick slippery mud down the bank to the road, and had settled four men, lying down, in each wagon, that being all they could hold, and had also decided the knotty point which should be the four unlucky ones who had to walk—these four being, I may say, quite well enough to walk, but naturally not being anxious to do so. When they were all started off, she and I clambered into our wagon, and the whole cavalcade set off in the pitch dark, not having the faintest idea (at least, we had not, I don’t know if anybody else had) where we were going to travel to or how long for. We were a long cavalcade with all the ambulance staff, the Komorra or transport, and a good many soldiers all armed, and a most unpleasant night we had rumbling along in the dark, halting every few miles, not knowing whether the Bulgars had got there first and cut the road in front of us, or what was happening. It was bitterly cold besides, and as the Kid and I were black and blue from jolting about on the floor of our wagon I began to wonder how the poor wounded ever survived it at all.