With Major Protitch, we planned a scheme for disinfection of the village, but without a hospital in which to segregate patients, this was not an easy job.
CHAPTER XIII
The next dispensary to be started was at Lapovo, an important railway junction on the Belgrade-Nish line. On Sunday, July 18th, at 5 a.m., Colonel Guentchitch, the head of the Army Medical Service, accompanied me and one of our doctors to Lapovo to choose the site. The day was, as usual, a feast day, and we stopped on the way, at an artillery encampment, to watch the soldiers dancing the kolo. One soldier stood playing the fiddle, whilst fifty or sixty others were holding hands, and dancing, quite silently, in a circle round him. How could even their enemies have painted these simple-minded, clean-living peasant soldiers, as fierce, fighting-loving savages?
A suitable camping-ground was found adjoining and above the railway, on either side of a long one-storied building which was not yet completed; this could later be used as hospital with eighty beds.
The doctor of the reserve hospital in Lapovo, two miles from the station, invited us to lunch under the trees, in the field of the church compound. A requiem service was being held, and the church was full of peasant women. Upon the floor were many trays of food—the favourite cakes and fruits and flowers of the dead. When the service was over, the women picked up the trays and came outside and handed the food to their friends. They then carried the remainder of the food home; they could not take it to the dead in the cemetery, because the men had been killed in battle.
THE SERGEANT DISTRIBUTING BREAD WITH THE HELP OF
AN ADMONITORY ROD
Bread is on the ground in front of him
