The Flaming Sword in Serbia and Elsewhere

by M. A. Stobart

We arrived at Natalintzi at 10.30 a.m. after only one serious breakdown. One of our cars skidded into a ditch, but the motor lorry pulled it out. I always made a rule, on all occasions, that all carts and wagons should keep together when travelling. There were sometimes heartburnings over this, but it was, none the less, a necessary precaution.

The Prefect and the Mayor received us graciously, and lunched with us under our church trees, and by the evening all tents were pitched and stores unpacked. And already next day the success of the dispensary was assured. The good tidings that medical help was at last available had spread, and patients at once arrived. Also, that same evening, the doctor was sent for to attend a woman too ill to be moved; but for the help she then received the woman would have died.

Here, as always in Serbia, we were reminded of the dominance of war as a factor in the lives of the people. I asked one old woman who came to see the doctor, how old she was; she didn't know, but she turned to another old crony who was standing near and said: "Let's see, in which war was I born?" Her friend told her it was the 1848 Austrian war; and thus her age was focussed.

The weather was broiling hot, but many of the peasants wore thick sheepskin waistcoats lined with wool. I asked an old man how he would manage to keep warm in winter, if he were not too hot in such a waistcoat now. He replied, astonished at my question, "In winter I wear two."

I visited this dispensary again in a week's time, and found that more than three hundred people had already been treated. All was working excellently. The peasants had no idea of how to nurse themselves, or how to take sanitary precautions, and their remedies against disease were quaint. To cure a headache, they applied a salad of potatoes and onions, and to heal a wound they rubbed charcoal into it and covered it with leaves.

A woman patient arrived that day at the dispensary in a serious condition; she had been accidently shot in the neck, with bullets from a revolver fired by her neighbour's little boy. It was necessary to take her to our Kragujevatz hospital, and she was placed in the motor ambulance which was taking me back. Her nearest relatives agreed to this; but some of her friends heard that she was being taken to a hospital; that, in their eyes, meant death, so they rushed up to the cart as we were starting, and protested and shouted at us and at the poor woman; a crowd at once collected, and if we had not driven off promptly, the woman would have been snatched from us.

Another day when I went to visit the dispensary and to take stores, I found the little unit struggling gallantly with an epidemic of small-pox, which had broken out in a scattered village three or four miles from Natalintzi. They asked me to go with them to see some of the patients. Major Protitch was with me, and we all drove a little way in the car, and then walked along mud lanes and over fields of kukurus.

One of the nurses (Willis) and the cook (Chesshire) had bravely encamped in a disused school-house, finding that the journey backwards and forwards at all hours of the day and night was impracticable. They met us and took us to a cottage, in which all the members of the family were either ill, or dying, or dead, from small-pox. The walls, both outside and inside, were covered with primitive paintings of figures and of trees. The cottage contained a tiny kitchen-living room and a tinier bedroom. The windows of the bedroom were all closed, the lesson of the necessity of fresh air not yet learnt, for in the nurses' absence the windows were always shut.

In the bedroom were two beds; on one bed a girl of about twenty lay dying, and on the other was a girl of about twenty-two, also in a critical condition. Their faces were smothered in confluent small-pox, their features scarcely recognisable. Another daughter had just died, and still another, younger, was recovering. Willis and Chesshire had been making a brave fight for the life of the dying girl, and had personally fed her day and night, because the relations, in accordance with custom, had for the last few days refused to give her food, thinking that death was near. But they had yesterday, in full view of the girl, who was conscious and had watched the proceedings, prepared the funeral tray, laid with the girl's favourite food and drink.

The people were curiously ignorant about the danger of infection, and friends from their own, and from other villages, would come in and sit on the beds of the small-pox patients, and spend an hour or two, and then go home and rejoin their families. Small wonder that epidemics played havoc in the country.