Soon the crackling and sputtering fire of the Mannlicher rifles was rippling up and down the lines; the whole front from Pristina to south of Marcovitza blazed flame, and the last big battle of Serbia's resistance was on. Two lines of men, the one thick and heavily equipped, the other attenuated and half-starved, were locked together in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle.
As though to afford a proper setting for the scene, nature herself broke into a wild fury; overhead the sky darkened, then the black clouds burst into a howling storm, full of cold sleet and rain. Amidst the black, stark hills, in a ceaseless downpour, men trampled and slipped through the clay mud, dripping wet from head to foot, stabbing, shooting, hurling hand bombs, until this peaceful valley echoed to the shouts and roar of combating armies.
And as the first day's fighting increased in intensity, the fury of the elements overhead intensified, and presently it was impossible to distinguish the roar of the big cannon from the deep crash of thunder; intermingling with the shouts and cries of men roared the blast of the gale as it whipped over rocky eminences.
Here again was raised that dreaded battle cry: "Na nosh! Na nosh!" With such a shout a whole regiment of the fierce Shumadians leaped out of its trenches and tore across the intervening ground between its trenches and the rocks of a near-by eminence which a force of Magyars had made into a position. Haggard from pain and starvation, their hair long and matted, some still in ragged uniforms, but most of them in the sheepskin coats of peasants, their eyes bloodshot with rage, they formed not a pleasant picture to the intrenched Huns. The rifle fire from the eminence leaped to a climax; the Hungarians knew they were fighting for their lives. In the horde rushing up the steep slope lay an appalling danger. Up they surged, without firing a shot, the bayonets gleaming in the lightning flashes. Among the rocks appeared white faces behind black rifle barrels. And then, with one fierce yell, the men in the shaggy sheepskin coats were hurling themselves in among the men in blue-gray uniforms. For a few brief moments there was a wild mêlée; then the men in blue-gray broke and ran.
Such scenes were common throughout the three or four days of the battle.
What made the resistance of the Serbian soldiers so fierce was the knowledge possessed by each that there was no alternative to victory but a retreat into those white, bleak wilds behind him. And there was not a Serbian boy in those ranks who did not realize what a winter's march through that country would mean.
From the fall of Nish, in fact, the Serbians had been fighting with their backs to a wall, and grim and bloody were the struggles between Serb and German in the wild tangle of hills that surrounded the Plain of Kossovo. Quarter was neither given nor asked, and unlucky was the too venturesome Austrian regiment that penetrated the Serbian lines the first few days without sufficient support.
"The 184th Regiment," said one of the soldiers' letters, which were published in the Austrian papers, "went into a valley and was never seen again." One Serbian regiment, stationed to hold the mouth to a small valley, to cover the retirement of another Serbian regiment, remained at its post for four days, fighting off the greater part of an Austro-German division, until, of the 1,200 men of the original detachment, only sixty-three remained on their feet, and most of those wounded.
To his credit be it said that the aged King of Serbia remained with his battling men to the end. While the guns were thundering against Pristina and the thin line of the last resistance was frenziedly holding back the German and Bulgarian lines, there came to an ancient church, which was under fire, a mud-stained old man in a field service uniform. The few foreign correspondents who saw him pass into the church did not recognize in this old man, bent, haggard and unshaven, the king who had sat on the throne of Kara-Georgevitch—the grandson of that famous swineherd.
Before the high altar the old man knelt in prayer while a group of staff officers stood at a distance, watching him in silence. The crash of bursting shrapnel came to them from outside and once a window was shattered and the little church was filled with splinters of flying glass and still the King of Serbia knelt at his devotions, praying that at the last moment his kingdom might be saved from destruction.