“My name’s Radovitch. ’Merican citizen myself,” he said proudly. “Took out my last papers just ’fore I came over to fight for Serbia. Went to school five years in New York when I was a kid. Ever been in Chicago?”
“Of course.”
Radovitch’s excitement, increasing when he found I had been in Omaha (where he had worked in the stockyards), and Jerome, Arizona (where he had “dumped slag” in the copper smelter), reached its climax when I assured him that I had once played a game of baseball at Aldridge, a little coal-mining town in Montana, near the northern portal of Yellowstone Park.
“I got a store there, and a half int’rest in the baseball grounds and a dance-hall,” he cried; and he was just in the midst of an excited account of his rise to fortune in what he called the “hottest little ol’ camp in the Yellowstone,” when the din of two or three fresh machine-guns opening in unison drowned his voice, and a few minutes later a half-dozen rifle muzzles were poked over the edge of our refuge, while a gruff-voiced Serb corporal, in the khaki tunic of a British Tommy and the baggy breeches of a French Zouave, informed us that we were his prisoners.
Radovitch, with a sheepish grin on his face, threw up his hands with the classic cry of “Kamerad!” and then, shambling over opposite his captors, coolly bade them toss down a box of cigarettes for him and his “Merikansky” friend.
“Smashed mine when I fell,” he explained, sauntering back and offering me a “Macedonia.” “Wouldn’t you reckon we’d had about enough fighting in Serbia without these d—— d sham fights while we’re supposed to be resting up here in Corfu? It may be all right for new recruits; but you’ll have to admit that two years of the brand of scrapping we’ve been getting over yonder in those mountains is not going to put us on edge for play-fighting like this. But never mind, we’ll be back to the real thing again in a month or two. Come on along down to the camp and meet my Colonel. We were kids together in Prilep. Now he’s in command of three thousand men and I’m only a corporal; but just the same I could buy him out twenty times over.”
The bare outline of Radovitch’s story he told me that evening (after he had officially been “set free” again), as I trudged beside him across the hills to his camp; but it was not until he obtained an afternoon’s leave three or four days later, and took me for a stroll through the Serbian Relief Camp, that I learned he had been one of that immortal band of heroes who, disdaining to take advantage of the open roads to the Adriatic or Macedonia after Belgrade fell, made their way to a mountain fastness in the heart of their own country and stayed behind to wage such warfare as they could on the hated invader. What sort of a warfare this was—indeed, what sort of a warfare it is, for the band still survives, making up in an unquenchable spirit what it has lost in numbers—I then learned for the first time.
It was only the unexpected coming across a newly arrived comrade (suffering—and it looked to me, dying—from an open bayonet wound and an advanced and hitherto neglected attack of scurvy), that turned Radovitch from wistful reminiscence of Aldridge, Montana, and set him talking of the grim realities of the life he had been leading in Serbia, a subject on which I had found him strangely reticent up to that moment. The things he spoke of that afternoon covered only an incident or two of his life with a body of men who, steadily depleted and yet as steadily recruited from Heaven knows where, have furnished an example of bravery and devotion to an all but lost cause almost without a parallel even in a war in which bravery and devotion form the regular grist of the day’s work.
Because this band in question, although its exploits are even now being sung of by the Serbs along with those of the half-legendary heroes of their early history, is still a “force in being,” exercising in its sphere an influence of its own on the course of the war, it is necessary that the names of the villages and towns and mountains and valleys and rivers to which Radovitch so constantly referred in his narrative should be entirely suppressed. I may say, however, that later inquiry which I made at Serbian Headquarters at Salonika revealed ample evidence that the things he told me of—as well as others scarcely less remarkable of which the time has not yet come to write—occurred beyond the shadow of a doubt.
The mood to talk did not seize Radovitch until after he had led me to the summit of the hill behind the Relief Camp, from which lofty vantage the eye roved eastward across a purple strait to the snow-capped peaks of Epirus and Albania, westward to where what was once the Kaiser’s villa of Achilleon stood out sharply against the sombre green of the backbone ridge of the island, northward to where its twin castles flanked to right and left the white walls and red roofs of Corfu town, and southward to the dim outlines of Leukas and Cephalonia, thinning in the violet haze of late afternoon. Below, on three sides, was the sea, with the storied Isles of Ulysses bracing themselves against the flood-tide racing into the bay; above, a vault of cloudless sky, and round about a thousand-year-old forest of gnarled olives. It was the effect of all this, together with the sight of his friend from Serbia in the little tented hospital of the Relief Camp, which set Radovitch talking of things I had been vainly trying to draw him out upon ever since I met him. While the mood lasted he seemed to need no other encouragement than the attentive listener so ready to hand; when it had passed he was back to the mines of Montana again, deaf and blind to my every attempt to make him talk of Serbia and what had befallen him there.