The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell

From time to time news came of this or that group of nurses or doctors who had joined the retreat, had been taken prisoner, or on their own had reached safety; but Reuben Cowder could get no clew to Nancy’s whereabouts, though he worked day and night, interviewing every returning soldier or civilian of whom he heard, sending agents to Salonika and to Corfu to search. It was not until the opening of the year 1916 that news came to him that he trusted. This was when three of his daughter’s companions in the Serbian unit reached London. They brought him the first trustworthy report of what had happened to Nancy when the invasion began, and while they could give no assurance that she was still living they at least left him the hope that this might be true. How improbable the girls felt this to be, they took care not to let the distracted man know.

Their story, so far as it interested Reuben Cowder, was soon told. The approach of the Austro-Hungarians from the north and the Bulgars from the west had begun the middle of October. The Serbians, who, through the months since the first invasion, had been accumulating stores and preparing for a second attack, welcomed the enemy, confident of their ability to drive him back. Their confidence was quickly destroyed. The mass thrown against them was overpowering. Nish was taken early in November by the Bulgars, while by the middle of the month the army from the north was sweeping Valievo. Nancy’s unit, unable to believe that they were in danger and unwilling to desert now that every day was multiplying the wounded, remained at their posts until the population was ordered out.

They quickly determined not to abandon the fleeing people. They would go with them, a traveling unit. Two great ox carts were secured, and their stores and a few of the most helpless patients loaded into them. Two native women who had become particularly useful were taken, and thus equipped these dauntless young women voluntarily threw themselves into the great river of Serbs flowing southward.

Of the terrors and hardships of that journey the girls passed over lightly. It was needless to torture Nancy Cowder’s father, they felt. They told him only that a week after they started Nancy had become separated from them, that Nikola Petrovitch and one of their Serbian women attendants were with her at the time, and that as they were in a part of the country well known to both of them, they, in all probability, finding it impossible to overtake their own party in the rush and confusion of the fleeing mob, had sought to find a way out by another route, or had taken refuge in some mountain farm or village known to Nikola and unlikely to be reached by the enemy troops. This was the most hopeful thing they could tell him, and they made the most of the possibility, assuring him again and again that Nikola, although on crutches, was now strong and so good a mountaineer and so devoted to Nancy that he surely would find a place of safety for her. It was a slim hope—but it was a hope.

If the girls had had the courage to tell Reuben Cowder the truth about their parting with Nancy, he probably would have held the hope that she had escaped as lightly as they did; but that they could not do. They urged him, more for his own sake than for hers, to go himself to Corfu or Salonika, and arrange for a search party of Serbians familiar with the western mountains. This would at least occupy him. And so, early in January, 1916, he left London.

Armed with every conceivable passport and credential that sympathetic friends and officials could provide, he made straight for Durazzo,—the Albanian port held then by the Italians—the port from which so many of the refugees had been transferred to Corfu, to Corsica, and to Italy. It seemed to him sometimes on his journey that he was following a call. “Durazzo!—Durazzo!”—rang in his ears, whispered itself to him in his sleep.

So impelling was his conviction that he must at once get there that all contrary counsels, whatever their source, left him unmoved, and so to Durazzo he went, arriving the third week of the month. The Austro-Hungarians were already in Albania; they had taken ports to the north. It looked very much as if Reuben Cowder had arrived only in time to witness the Italian evacuation.

Searching for a lost one in that confusion was heart-breaking work. What was one woman among the thousands lost and dead in that horrible flight before the advancing army! The valleys, the hillsides, the crannies of the mountain on the route that they had traveled, were filled with hideous proofs of the anguish and death that marked the escape of the Serbians. Fully half of the army and of the civilian hordes that followed it were scattered or dead. Durazzo had been filled for weeks with the laments of those who sought fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, children—and never found them.

When he told the officials all he knew of Nancy since she left Valievo in November, he was assured that there was not a chance in a hundred—one despairing official said a thousand—that she was alive.

True, she might have gone through with some group which had reached Corfu or Corsica or Italy, but the probabilities were that in that case she would have cabled. It was not likely that she was alive if she had fallen behind. True, she might be concealed in some mountain hamlet, but no searching party was possible under any auspices now. “You would have to bring over an American army to protect you, and I understand you Americans are too proud to fight,” one bitter, over-worked Italian Red Cross official flung at him. In all his determined, well-ordered, effective life, Reuben Cowder had never experienced before what he acknowledged to be a hopeless situation. This was hopeless.