But, as usual, in the town it was "Nema! nema!" everywhere. The only triumph was a tiny bunch of tallow candles, and a promise from the Prefect of bread for to-morrow. Always bread to-morrow; never bread to-day. But we met an officer who knew us, and he kindly insisted on treating us to cups of coffee, at a café which had open doors for the last time. No food was procurable. We were on our way back to camp, when in the street, a man came towards us carrying—we couldn't believe our eyes—three shining silver fish upon a string. They were not trout, but memories of happy fishing days in Norway, Sweden, Finland, gave this fish an added glory. We stopped him and asked if he would sell them. The sight of them made us fastidious towards thoughts of bully beef awaiting us in camp, and we would have given almost anything he asked. He would not sell them, but to our surprise he said: "I will give you this as a present," and he put the largest fish into my hands, and at that moment I thought Andreavitza, with its mountain setting, and its picturesque church, the most lovely townlet in the world. In camp we slept round the fire as usual, under the espionage of the highest mountains of Montenegro.
Next morning, Sunday December 12th, we were late in starting, as we had to wait for the return of the men sent to fetch the bread from the military station in Andreavitza. When the sergeant saw the fifty loaves (25 kilos), he brought with him to the distribution, an admonitory rod, to ensure that no man should take more than his due share. As long as bread was procurable, the men need not starve, as trek ox could always be sacrificed, and I frequently had the melancholy task of deciding that the weariness of death was coming over such and such an ox; he had been lovely and pleasant in his life, and now in his death, he must be divided. And for ourselves, our supply of mealie meal, and rice, and beans, still held out. We saw too much of the inward ways of oxen, along the road, to be keen to eat the roast beef of Montenegro. We had said good-bye to butter, jam, milk, sugar, and biscuits, long ago, but we were, of course, in luxury compared with many thousands, and we had long outgrown the absurd habit of thinking that it is necessary to take nourishment every two or three hours.
And now, on this Sunday, to our surprise, we found ourselves upon a road which was more like a Corsican, than a Montenegrin road. Steep, very steep, all day long, but with excellent surface and excellently graded. We were grateful, as it allowed us to be more polite than we had been of late, to the wondrous scenery. But even now, only in a distant fashion. The beauty of Nature depends, for each one of us, upon what the mind reads into it, and the mountains of Montenegro, reflected from every stone, the hungry hearts of an exiled people.
By the evening we were amongst the hill-tops; the mountains of Montenegro and Albania were all around us, naked, precipitious, and inhospitable rocks, with occasional gloomy forests of beech, and fir trees, interspersed. Majestic, magnificent, and the magnitude of outlook, wonderful, no doubt, but my heart refused to praise this sarcophagus of hope. How could mountains be beautiful which enclosed such sorrow? How could their air invigorate, when it carried, not the scent of flowers, or the breath of the sea, but the stench of the unburied dead? As empty shells, upon the hills, reveal the presence in the past, of the waters of the sea, so the bones of men upon these mountains, will, in the future, betray the wave of human life, which flowed westwards to the coast.
The river at Andreavitza had been, when we saw it, green, of a colour which no painter could ever hope to mix; but I found myself comparing it to a green satin ribbon, which is a detestable thing. The river fell in fine cascades, and should, to a sympathetic ear, have sounded the arpeggio of the common chord of Nature; but I only heard the thumping of a child's fists upon the piano. And now the sunset hues amongst the hill-tops were, to me, the funeral colours of the dying sun, and the crimson gleam slowly spreading over the dead white snow, was bloodstain which would never melt.
Moist clouds, and mist, came down from heaven to try and veil the harshness of the mountains, in gossamers of mauve and purple, dragged from the setting sun, but they could not veil the memory of the suffering they enclosed; suffering of battle-fields and suffering worse than that of battle-fields.
We turned our eyes impatiently again to the road scenes. We were much interested in trying to induce a pony, which had been abandoned on the road, and was now recovering, to come with us: we needed all the four-legged help we could get. Colson and Jordan cheered it on with bundles of hay, and a touch of stick, and brought it into our night's camp. This latter was in a thick beech wood. The ground was our bed, and the dead beech leaves were our mattresses. During the night we had a scare of Arnauts, when a number of men rushed past us, shouting excitedly, but they were only in pursuit of a thief. If he was caught, he would be shot; if he was not caught, he would die of starvation. Death! Death! everywhere. Always Life fleeing from Death, and always Life overtaken in the end.