VALIEVO, Sept. 25.
Valievo lies at the terminus of a narrow-gauge railway which joins the Belgrade-Salonika line at Mladinovatz. Along this single track of iron road the entire transport of the Servian Army is being effected. Westward come trains packed with food, fodder, munitions, and troops; eastward go long convoys crowded with maimed humanity. At Mladinovatz all this mass of commissariat and suffering must needs be transferred from or to the broad-gauge line. In this situation lies not the least of the problems which beset the Servians in their struggle with the Austrian invaders.
Valievo itself is a picturesque little town which in peace time is famous as the centre of the Servian prune trade. Its cobbled streets are, in the main, spacious and well planned. There still remain a few relics of the Turkish occupation—overhanging eaves, trellised windows, and the like—but these one must needs seek in the by-ways. I picture Valievo under normal conditions as one of the most attractive of Balkan townships.
Nor has the tableau lost anything in the framing, for it is encircled by a molding of verdant hills which run off into a sweep of seeming endless woods. The vista from my hotel window is almost aggravatingly English. Across the red-tiled roofs of intervening cottages rises the hillside—a checkerboard of grassy slopes and patches of woodland intersected by a brown road which runs upward until the summit, surmounted by a whitewashed shrine, amid a cluster of walnut trees, touches the gray sky.
But Valievo is not now to be seen under normal conditions. From the street below rises the sound of clatter and creak as the rude oxen wagons bump over the cobblestones. Morning, noon, and night they rumble along unceasingly, and whenever I look down I see martial figures clad in tattered, muddy, and blood-stained uniforms, with rudely bandaged body or head or foot. Every now and then a woman breaks from the crowd of waiting loiterers and rushes up to a maimed acquaintance. They exchange but a few sentences, and then she turns, buries her head in her apron, and stumbles along the street wailing a bitter lament for some husband, brother, or son who shall return no more. A friend supports and leads her home; but the onlooking soldiers regard the scene with indifference and snap out a rude advice "not to make a fuss." They brook no wailing for Serbs who have died for Servia.
The town itself has been transformed into one huge camp of wounded. All adaptable buildings—halls, cafés, school-rooms—have been rapidly commandeered for hospitals. Sometimes there are beds, more often rudely made straw mattresses, for little Servia, worn out by two hard wars, is ill-equipped to resist the onslaught of a great power. For 16 days a fierce battle has been raging near the frontier, and wounded have been pouring in much more rapidly than accommodation can be found for them.
And in the streets—what misery! The lame, the halt, the maimed. Men with damaged leg or foot hopping along painfully by the aid of a friendly baton; men nursing broken arms or shattered hands; men with bandaged heads; men being carried from operating shops to café floors; men with body wounds lying on stretchers—all with ragged, blood-bespattered remnants of what once were uniforms. One sees little of the glory of war in Valievo. The Servian Medical Staff, deprived on this occasion of outside assistance, and short alike of doctors, surgeons, nurses, and material, is striving heroically to cope with its task. Where they have been able to equip hospitals the work has been very creditably done. One building is almost exclusively devoted to cases where amputations have been necessary. It is clean, orderly, and the patients are obviously well cared for. Here, when I entered a ward of some thirty beds in which every man lay with a bandaged stump where his leg should be, I think I saw the Servian spirit at its best. They had been newly operated upon, their sufferings must have been great, and for them all the future is black with forebodings. There is no patriotic fund in little Servia. Yet amid all the pain of body and uncertainty of mind that must have been theirs they did not complain. All they desired to know was whether the Schwaba (Austrians) had been beaten out of Servia.
But it is when one leaves the organized hospitals and wends one's way through the crowds of wounded who block the pavements, and enters a lower-class café, that the appalling tragedy of it all fills even the spectator with a sense of hopelessness. There, like cattle upon their bed of straw, lie sufferers from all manner of hurts. They remain mute and uncomplaining, just as they have been dropped down from the incoming oxen transports. Their wounds—three, four, or five days old—have yet received no attention save the primitive first-aid of the battlefield. Blood poisoning is setting in; limbs that prompt dressing would have saved are fast becoming victims for the surgeon's knife. Most of them know the risk they run, for this is their third war—often, too, their third wound—in two short years. Yet the doctors cannot come, because every man of them is already doing more than human energy allows. It is a heartrending sight to look down upon this helpless mass and to realize that many of them have been sentenced to painful death for mere lack of primitive medical attention.
One wonders whether, now that half Europe has been transformed into a vast slaughterhouse, appeals for sympathy can be other than in vain.
Another "Happy Thought."