Our way lay through a narrow gorge, and the road was atrocious, and, in the dark, dangerous; and as the chauffeurs were exhausted, with the constant strain, and lack of sleep, we decided at 3 a.m. to call a halt till dawn at 5.30. After that came a steep hill up to Prepolatz, the old Turkish frontier.
At the base of this hill lay Banya, and a long stretch of flat muddy road, which was blocked, from end to end, with a solid phalanx of wagons, all motionless, as if they were carved in stone. Round the far corner the hill began, and what was happening there, no one could see. I was waiting on my weary horse for our turn to move, when a young captain of a commissariat column came up, and in excellent English, invited me to come and drink a glass of tea with him in his camp by the side of the road. He recognised me because he had visited our Kragujevatz hospital in the old days. He was encamped with his large column in a sea of mud, and we sat round his fire on little stools which sank deep into the slush; but I enjoyed the tea, which helped to keep me awake during a weary halt.
It was sometimes a little difficult to discriminate between times when it was right that we should be shunted out of the line by a more important column, and times when we must hold our own. For artillery columns, of course, we always gave way, but sometimes extra officious under-officers, in control of columns, would try and bounce us out of the line illegitimately, and that required the fierce-eye business. Serbian officers were invariably courteous, and though I refused to take undue advantage of sex, they often smuggled us into the line when we might otherwise have had long to wait.
At Banya, our Artillery Major's double, who was also an artillery officer, appeared, and he immediately arranged that our column should follow his convoy, and others had to stand aside. Soon after that, the Major arrived, and rode with me for a little while on his way again to place his guns. He introduced me to another officer who had lately been embarrassed by the arrival from Berlin of his German wife and seven children, who were all now travelling with the convoy.
The cars, as usual, took the hill wonderfully, and went on and waited for the column at Prepolatz, near the old Turkish fort. This was the boundary of Old Serbia, the entrance to the newer Serbia of recent conquests, and my heart ached for our Serbian comrades, who must now say good-bye to the best-loved and most-prized portion of their country, and leave it, with all that was most precious to them, in the enemy's hands; knowing that the enemy would now eat bread from corn which they had not sown, and drink wine from vineyards which they had not planted; whilst the sowers and the planters, the owners of this fertile soil, were fleeing, a spectral nation to a spectral land, without clothes, without money, without food; but, all honour to them, never without hope, because they were never without an ideal. Will the day ever come, I wondered, when "the arrogance of the proud shall cease and the haughtiness of the terrible be laid low?"
The Major and I were glad to rejoin the cars which carried the food, and to eat a hurried sandwich. I had had nothing since the captain's glass of tea in the early morning; the Major never seemed to eat. We reached Dubnitz at 9.30 p.m.—a twenty-four hours' trek. Our field-kitchen oxen had broken down, and we had to send others to help bring the field kitchen in. It arrived next morning after we had left for Dole Luzhan, and it followed us.
We left at 8 o'clock, on a twelve hours' trek. A snow blizzard, with intense cold, made the conditions unpleasant for us, and deadly for the beasts. Continued cold, exhaustion from forced marches, and increasing lack of food, made the track a shambles. The well-aimed ball of death was knocking down oxen and horses, like ninepins, all along the road. One of our riding horses died also to-day from cold and exhaustion. It was bad enough to see these poor beasts dead along the road, but it was still worse to see them dying, and to know that all they needed for restoration to life, was warmth and rest and food. I thought of the Blue Cross Society, but even they could have done nothing, as there was no time; enemies on three sides were always close behind us.
When we arrived at the village we found that the cars, which had gone on in advance, were standing in two feet of water. The chauffeurs and the staff had gone into a cottage to dry their clothes, and in the meantime, a stream which ran across the road had expanded into a lake. The cottage was also surrounded by the flood, and the doctors and nurses were carried out by the gallant chauffeurs, who then waded up to their knees and rescued the cars.
We found camping-ground for the column in an Arnaut (Albanian) village, and we ourselves slept in the cars upon the road; the snow was too deep for tent pitching.