"Come," he cried, "you are one of us. You shall have the greatest honor of us all."
Dragging me to the edge of the precipice, where had a Bulgarian officer seen him a burst of shrapnel would have greeted him, he planted his feet firmly against a solid rock.
"Lean over!" he cried enthusiastically.
Holding to his hands, my arms straining behind me, I leaned far over the edge of the precipice. I seemed suspended over the very heart of the battle. It seemed for a moment as though the spirit of the war had caught me up and flown with me where the whole fabric of the world conflict was being woven beneath my feet.
"Now," cried the Major, "you are further into Serbia—Serbia reconquered—than the bravest of our brave have been. No Serbian fighting man has yet been so close to Monastir."
The fineness of his compliment could not have been excelled.
I had been told that I might remain upon the summit of Dobrpolje an hour, but the scene fascinated me so and my soldier escorts were so chivalrous that they gave in to me and it was not until nightfall that they dragged me away to the rear, although we had reached the summit about midday.
Once more we were in the backwash of the battle. The roads were lined with stretcher bearers and in the stretchers lay men whose blood dripped through the canvas and stained the dust of the roads—the dust for which they were fighting and dying and suffering the tortures of the damned.
From the postes de secours they were taken to the rear in carts, and the steady rumble of the heavy wheels reminded me of the passing of the tumbrels in the "Tale of Two Cities."
At one point we passed about 800 Bulgarian prisoners and they did not seem at all unhappy at being out of the fighting. It is a commentary on the nature of the Serbians that they gave cigarettes to the prisoners, although the Bulgars have committed nameless atrocities against their foes and have devastated thousands of acres of prune trees, thus destroying a lucrative and immense Serbian industry.