“How did your band get together in the first place?” I had asked, “and what sort of men was it made up of? Was there some kind of organisation before the retreat, or did you simply drift together afterwards?”
“It must have been mostly ‘drift,’” replied Radovitch. “Probably the Government and our generals knew we’d have to give way when the Austrians and Bulgars together came at us, but none of the rest of us ever dreamed we couldn’t wallop the whole bunch. So I don’t think there is much truth in the yarn about the band of ‘blood brothers’ that had been formed in advance. We were about evenly made up at the start of men who wouldn’t leave the country and men who couldn’t leave the country. The first were mostly mountain men of the region we went to. There were a lot of ex-brigands among them, and most of them had been fighting the Turk, or the Bulgar, or the Government, or each other, all their lives. It was to the way these fellows knew the country, and how to live off it and fight in it, that we owed most of our success. The rest of us were all sorts of odds and ends who had fallen out of the retreat but had still been able to keep out of enemy hands.
“At first this particular mountain region—which later became our stronghold, and is now the only part of Old Serbia in which the enemy has never set foot—was but a refuge, and for a few weeks we were pretty hard put to find enough to live on. It was touch and go for food all of the first winter, and we lived mostly by night raids on straggling Austrian supply trains. But before long we rounded up enough sheep and goats to keep us going, and in the spring got one of the little mountain valleys under cultivation. Since last summer—except for vegetables, which we had no luck with—food was one of our least troubles.
“We had plenty of rifles from the first. A Serb will drop his clothes before he will his gun, as you will find if you ever see our army in action where a river has to be forded. Many a man straggled in to us without pants or shirt, but never a one that I ever heard of without his rifle, We were also tolerably well fixed for cartridges, because a man don’t use one in raiding or fighting from ambush to a hundred he pots off in the trenches. We always managed to have enough for our own regular army rifles, and after we got well started raiding, Austrian rifles and munition came in faster than we ever had use for them. We could have done with an extra machine-gun or two before we had our stone-rolling defence organised, and before the Austrians had learned that it didn’t pay to try and crawl in and pull us out of our holes. But before the winter was over we had enough spare ‘spit-firers,’ so that we didn’t mind risking the loss of one or two by taking them along on raiding parties.
“The lay of the mountains made the whole mesa[4] just one big natural fort, and I miss my guess if in all the world there’s another place of the same kind so easy to defend and so hard to attack. The mountains are steeper and rockier than that main range of Albania you see across there against the sky, and that’s going some. I never struck anything half so rough in all the summers I put in prospecting in Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. Only one of the passes had a cart-road up to it, and only three had mule trails. At two or three other places a man could scramble up by using his hands, but everywhere else he would need to have ropes and scaling ladders.
[4] Table-land.
“At every one of the passes—including the one of the cart-road—a half-dozen good rock-rollers, with plenty of ‘ammunition,’ could put the kibosh on an army, and you may bet we saw to it that there was no shortage of pebbles on hand. For the first week or two my fingers were worn pretty near to the bone from handling rocks. The only way the Austrians could have got the best of us, once we had made ourselves at home, would have been with not less than a dozen regiments of their Kaiser Jaeger, mountain batteries and all; but by the time this fact sunk into them the Italians were keeping them so busy that they probably figured they couldn’t spare any such number of Alpine troops for side-shows. Anyhow, they never even gave us a good run for our money in the way of attacks, though of course some of the raiding parties came in for pretty bad punishings every now and then.
“The one thing that we needed most, first and last, was dynamite. If we could have got hold of even half a ton of it in the first month or two, before the Austrians got their patrols organised, we could have done no end of harm in blowing up bridges and tunnels where they had been missed in the rush of the retreat, and upsetting communications generally. When we finally did begin to get hold of powder, all the danger-points were so heavily guarded that we never got a fair chance at them. Once, with fifty men armed with knives, we rushed the guard at an important bridge and cleaned up the lot before a shot was fired. But something must have been wrong with the fuse or caps, for the dynamite placed under the near abutment never exploded, and there wasn’t time to go back and do the job over. The next time we tried the same tactics it was on a tunnel, but here they had an ambush ready, and only about a dozen of the hundred men who were in the raid ever came back. The smoothest piece of tunnel work ever brought off was not done by our gang at all, but by a much smaller one that worked in the region of Uskub for a while, led by a Serbian Intelligence Officer from Salonika who had been dropped there a month before from an aeroplane. They descended into a very important pass in broad daylight, seized a train of empty freight cars that was waiting on a siding for a south-bound troop-train to go by, held it until a signal arranged for in advance told them the troop-train was entering the north end of the longest tunnel in that part of the country, and then turned the freight loose into the other end. We had word later that never a man was brought out alive, but the best effect of the job was its setting afire the lime rock in the heart of the mountain and the blocking of traffic for many months.
“This southern band—after recruiting up to over a thousand men at one time, and making life miserable for the Austrians for nearly four months—ran short of food in mid-winter and had to break up. Its leader, however, disguised as a Bulgar soldier, worked his way back through the enemy lines, and after just missing being potted by the first Serb patrol he ran into after crossing the Cerna, reached Salonika in safety with a complete report of what he had seen during five months in hostile territory. It was the slickest job of the kind that has been put through in this neck of the war. The guy’s name is——, and, unless he’s off on another lay of the same kind, you can probably see him in Salonika.[5]
[5] Through the courtesy of the Crown Prince of Serbia, the writer, on his subsequent visit to Salonika, was granted an interview with the Intelligence Officer in question, and expects shortly to have permission to write a complete account of what was undoubtedly not only one of the most daring, but also one of the most successful exploits of the war.