The Flaming Sword in Serbia and Elsewhere

by M. A. Stobart

CHAPTER XLI

The first few miles of the road were passable, over an uncultivated plain, but as the mountains of Montenegro closed sulkily behind us, the mountains of Albania opened threateningly before us. The grass plain became a swamp, and soon we were playing the same old game, wading and splashing through mud and water, no road traceable. The Albanian mountains were evidently twin brothers to the Montenegrin fiends, and after we had crossed a river, with a bridge broken off at both ends, our route lay across an expanse of basaltic rock, which looked impossible for horses and oxen.

By that time it was dark, and it seemed wise to wait till daylight to attack the new enemy, so we bivouacked in a tiny grass enclosure, near an old ruined chapel. The field belonged to an Albanian, who promptly told us to be off, but the sight of money, five dinars, and a promise of five dinars for wood, mollified him, and he became friendly, and he even said he would sell us a sheep for the men's supper. The time went on, and the sheep never arrived. I kept asking Sandford and Merton about it, and they kept saying it would come soon. Then, finally, they confessed that they had not bought it because it was too expensive. Of course, it was more expensive than it would have been in normal times, but if it kept men from starving, it was cheap at any price, and I insisted that it should be fetched. They went away as though to buy it, and came back saying that the Albanian owner had gone to bed, and couldn't bring the sheep in from the hills in the dark. Flaming-eye business; I would not be defeated, so I discovered where the Albanian lived, and went with Vooitch to his house, over stone walls and boulders and through the usual bogs.

It was a one-roomed cabin built of stone, and without windows. We knocked at the door, opened it and walked in, before there was time for anyone to deny us entrance, and in the dark, we stumbled over—the sheep! This made V. and me laugh so much, we couldn't talk for a minute. We couldn't see if the Albanian had been in bed, but he came quickly to us. We told him that we had come to fetch the sheep for supper. "But would we pay for it?" "Why, of course. How much did he want?" "20 dinars" (about 11s. 8d.). "All right. Here's the money. Now please help us to carry the sheep to the camp." It was a tiny creature, and he and V. carried it, bleating, in their arms. When we had climbed the last stone wall, and the men, who were sitting round their empty fires, saw the sheep, they shouted with joy and excitement, "Dobro, Maika; dobro, dobro." In a marvellously few minutes that poor little beast was in joints, cooking on the various fires, round which the different little groups of men sat, and, later, slept. Were Sandford and Merton really so unadaptable that they couldn't bring their consciences to pay 20 dinars for an article which, in normal times should only have cost 12? Or was there another alternative? I later reported my suspicions at Headquarters, and, in the meantime, I watched that the men did not suffer.

On Saturday, December 18th, we saw at once that it was good-bye to our hopes of a better road between Podgoritza and Scutari. Our route this day was, if possible, worse than anything we had yet encountered. Huge boulders, with deep mud-holes between, dead oxen, dead horses, dead men, every few yards. Sometimes thick scrub, with spiky thorn bushes, and with slippery foothold, was interlarded with the mud and boulders; then came basaltic rocks, superimposed in fantastic fashion, and mountainous boulders, with beech scrub, and berberis, and juniper between; but always, whatever else there might or might not be, there was mud, two and sometimes three feet deep. To-day this was of a rich red colour.

In one wood there were many dead men. In a patch of grass near one poor fellow, who was lying, where he had fallen, in the snow, green buds of young snowdrops were bravely peeping through the dead leaves, as though to adorn his grave. Beside him was his tin mug, from which he had been drinking his last drink of melted snow. For him no roll of honour; for his family no news of "killed in action." But when the war is over, and other men return, his place in the home, and the places of thousands of his comrades, will be empty. We picked bunches of snowdrops in that wood whilst waiting, during moments of a congestion of oxen, men and horses, which was now worse than ever. In another wood a long halt had to be made, whilst convoys ahead of us, took precedence at the narrow exit. One convoy which said it had been waiting there for two days, had with it hundreds of oxen, and was on the point of pushing past us, but, at the critical moment, a friendly officer came to the rescue, claiming that our horses should have precedence of oxen, and he shouted and insisted and bluffed and pushed, both our column and his own, which was even smaller now than ours, into the line. He came with us, and we bivouacked together for the night, in a tiny walled paddock, a couple of miles (over rocks and mud) above the end of the Lake of Scutari, and outside the hut of an Albanian.

The latter, as usual, at first refused us the hospitality even of his field, but he eventually yielded to the money bribe. The captain and his lieutenant supped with us. We gave them hashed and warmed tinned Serbian meats, of which we still had a few, with white beans, and a second course of boiled rice, which was one of our mainstays. We were a quaint-looking group as we sat round the fire, all smothered to the waists in thick red mud. We were obliged to let it dry upon us, as there was no water to wash it off. We had no change of clothes; we had left the last relics of such superfluities behind, when the carts were burned.

We could see, from the convergence of columns from all directions, that we should have trouble to-morrow in getting into the line of the narrow track along which we must travel. So we were up at 4.30 on Sunday, December 19th, and as the result of combined tactics, our two columns eventually pushed into the narrow track of mud and rock.

Some distance below us, was the north end of the Lake of Scutari, and it was cheering to see the beginning of the lake upon which stood—at the other end—Scutari, our goal. We hoped that our route would be beside the lake, as that would at least mean certainty of water, but we never touched it at any point.