On leaving Koshumlja that morning we ourselves saw the King. He was riding with a small retinue, hardly an assumption of state, and to one of us particularly the little cavalcade had something about it that was infinitely pathetic. A brief quotation from one of our diaries will explain why:—
"At Koshumlja to-day we saw the King. Curiously enough this is the first time that I have come across him since I have been in Serbia, though Alice saw him at Tarpola. He is a fine old man, and trouble, sickness, and age have not bowed him. And meeting him thus my mind goes back—how many years it may be I should be afraid to guess. I was a small boy spending my holidays with my people at Vevey, on the Lake of Geneva, and at the hotel we struck up an acquaintance with Prince Peter Kara Georgevitch. He was then in the prime of life, tall, dark, handsome—not yet married. He used to talk to us quite unaffectedly of his hopes and ambitions. King Milan was, of course, the prime enemy.
"'One day I shall come into my own.' I can quite well remember him saying that.
"And it was true. Destiny—call it what you will—gave him the coveted throne. And now, a dozen years later, he has lived to see a fresh shuffle of the cards. How they will fall it is still for time to show."
We made but poor progress that day, and it was not to be wondered at. The congestion of traffic was amazing. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that from Koshumlja to Prishtina there was an unbroken stream of vehicles of the most varied kinds, though the ox-wagon predominated enormously. With these were soldiers and civilians on horseback; soldiers and civilians on foot; oxen laden and unladen; pack-horses; buffaloes, donkeys, and mules; dogs on the leash or running with their masters; men, women, children, and beasts jostling each other in the confusion of hurried flight. It was not so much the retreat of an army as of a whole nation.
Yet all was orderly and in the main good-tempered. The soldiers were kept to their respective "trains," and were well under the control of their officers. There were as yet no ghastly roadside sights, but now and again came presages of what was to be—the fall of a tired horse, the overturning of a cart, and once we were sickened by seeing a couple of frightened oxen, with wagon attached, precipitate themselves over the low parapet of a bridge into the torrent that flowed below. There was little or no excitement, and the empty space was rapidly filled up; it was not well to fall out of rank, if one could help it.
We soon gave up hope of reaching Prishtina that night. Midday to-morrow, the chauffeur promised us. In this confidence we consumed two of our tins of sardines during the day—it was not much for lunch and dinner—leaving the third for breakfast. And therein lay a catastrophe, for when we came to open the tin, hungry after another wakeful and uncomfortable night, the contents proved to be hopelessly bad! We made a meal off dry bread, and it did not improve our tempers to see our companions devour a pig's head between them. There was something revolting in the way they picked the bones.
That day progress was slower than ever; we did not seem able to make any headway at all. By midday we could scarcely have advanced half-a-dozen miles. It became increasingly clear that we should have to spend a third night among the petrol-cans—if not a fourth and fifth. That was bad enough in itself, but what about food?
Our companions did not seem to mind a bit. They were in no hurry and, considering that they had lost practically all they possessed in the world, wonderfully cheerful. But we were anxious to get to Prishtina and rejoin our friends who might be concerned about us; we were nervous on their account, too, since, though there had been no attack upon the main road, we had heard a great deal of firing going on among the hills, and we knew that the route by which they proposed to travel came at times—especially at the old Turkish frontier which we were approaching, very near our own.