LA BELLE HÉLÈNE OF ALEXINATZ
A SKETCH OF THE SERVIAN WAR-TIME
I
It has been the fashion among soldiers to sneer at the fighting in the Turco-Servian campaign of 1876. I am ready to own that the strategy was a little mixed, and that the tactics were of the most rough-and-ready kind; but if ever a military writer cares to analyse its events crowded into the time between the beginning of July and the end of October, he will not fail to recognise that it was no bad work for the raw militia of a principality with a gross population of barely a million and a half, to make a stubborn stand against the forces of such an empire as Turkey, even in that empire’s decadence. No State could have had a more vulnerable frontier line. From the confluence of the Drina with the Save on the west, round her border to the Danube at Widdin, Servia on three sides was, so to speak, embedded in Turkish territory. The fierce Bosnians threatened her on the west; Albania marched with her on the south; on her east loomed Abdul Kerim Pasha from his base at Nisch, and Osman Pasha, the hero of Plevna, was a standing menace on the Widdin side of the Timok river. Struck at on four different points, Servia was, nevertheless, able to hold her foes at bay till that October afternoon when, determining for once to lay aside Fabian tactics, Abdul Kerim’s Turks pushed home their attack on the lines of Djunis, and turned the fire of the captured batteries on Tchernaieff’s camp at Deligrad. It should be remembered that Servia began the contest with a single brigade of regular soldiers, which perished as a force in the earlier encounters; that she maintained the struggle with militia levies and untrained volunteers; that until the Russian volunteers came to her aid, she had not a dozen officers who had any save the most rudimentary knowledge of the profession of arms; and that the sum total of her public revenue from all sources scarcely exceeded half a million sterling.
II
From the point of view of the war correspondent, the campaign, at least on the Servian side, fairly bristled with adventure and with opportunities for enterprise. There were few days on which a man, keen for that species of pleasure, could not, somehow or other, find a fight in which to enjoy himself. If he stood well with the military authorities—and the easiest way to do this was to manifest a serene indifference to the possible consequences of hostile fire—he was impeded by no restrictions in regard to his outgoings and incomings. He would be told of an impending fight in time to be present at it; and, fighting or no fighting, he was always welcome to what fare might be the portion of a staff that certainly did not hanker after luxuries. If he were content to rough it cheerily, and was always ready to “show a good front” with the first line of an attack, and the rear of a retreat (which latter was occasionally extremely hurried), he was treated en bon camarade by every one, from the general to the subaltern. When Tchernaieff himself was eating that curious composition known as paprikash, and drinking the dreadful plum brandy which its makers call zlibovitz, the correspondent could live without beef-steaks, nor count it a grievance that there was no champagne to be had.
The easiest way into Servia for an invading force was down the valley of the Morava, a fine river, which, flowing close to the Turkish camp at Nisch, entered the principality a few miles south-east of the town of Alexinatz. Athwart its valley, some seventeen miles lower down than Alexinatz, stretched the lines of the entrenched camp at Deligrad, where, according to the original Servian plan, the great stand against the invading Turk was to be made. But as that person manifested little activity, and in fact, so far from invading, himself submitted to be invaded, time had served to devise and execute an advanced defensive line in front of Alexinatz. The position had the radical fault that it could be turned with ease, when there would ensue the danger that its defenders might be cut off from a retreat on Deligrad; but it had natural features of great strength against an enemy who might prefer a direct assault to a turning movement. South and east a great upland formed a continuous curtain to the quaint little town. Round the western bluff of this height flowed the gentle Morava, on the other side of which stretched a wide fertile valley, partly wooded, partly cultivated. It was this valley, prolonged as it was both to the north and south, that constituted the weakness of the Alexinatz position; nor was the hasty line of entrenchments drawn athwart it, or the earth-work covering the bridge of boats across the Morava, any adequate counterbalance to this weakness. As for the upland curtain, by the beginning of August that naturally strong position had been artificially strengthened by a continuous defensive line, studded by near a score of redoubts armed with twenty-four and twelve-pounders, emplacements intervening for the guns of the field artillery batteries. General Tchernaieff was himself in command, with some 13,000 Servian militia of the first levy, and a considerable number of Russian volunteers, both officers and men.
III
The days in Alexinatz were by no means dull. None of its population had as yet fled; and for the stranger who had acquired some Servian, there was even a little society. There were two hotels in the place—the “Crown,” where most of us correspondents lived, because the people there did not insist on more than two persons occupying the same bedroom; and the “King of Greece,” whither we used to betake ourselves to drink our coffee, since the fille de comptoir was a pretty Servian girl, whom the Figaro correspondent had christened “La Belle Hélène.” Poor Hélène! before the armistice she had died of typhus fever in that rottenest of holes, Paratchin; but in her heyday at Alexinatz she was an extremely cheery young person, full of not wholly artless coquetry, and prone to stimulate rancorous jealousies among the idle suppliants for her smiles.
Villiers and myself took but few opportunities to bask in Hélène’s smiles. One while we were away on the foreposts, actually inside the Turkish territory, and where from the hill-top on which, with a handful of reckless desperadoes like himself, Captain Protopopoff, a Russian soldier of fortune whom I had already known in the Carlist war, kept watch and ward, we could see the spires of Nisch itself, with the Turkish camps lying under the Sutar Planina and the fort-crowned Mount Goritza. Then we were off, through Fort Banja and Kjusevatz—where we found the gallant Horvatovitz in the very thick of a brisk fight with the Turks—to Saitschar on the eastern frontier, just in time to be driven out of that place along with Colonel Leschanin and its Servian defenders at the hands of Osman Pasha, abandoning momentarily that curious inactivity of his on the green heights on the other side of the Timok. It was a horrible nightmare, that night march from out the evacuated Saitschar. Cannon roaring, flames lighting up the valley, gusts of thick smoke driven athwart the hill faces, the heaven’s lightning flashing in competition with the lightning of man; a narrow steep road crammed with fugitives fleeing from the wrath behind them; women clamouring wildly that the Turk was close behind them; children shrieking or sobbing; animals—oxen, sheep, goats, swine, and poultry—huddled in an inextricable entanglement in the road of retreat. Two months later, when the Servians made an unsuccessful attempt to retake Saitschar from Osman Pasha, Villiers and I were to listen again to the angry shriek of his shells, and the cruel bicker of his musketry fire.
IV
It was not till Saturday, August 19, that Alexinatz heard that species of music. On that day a Turkish column dashed into the Morava valley and fell upon the Servian advance-positions. There was some hard fighting, but the Servians for that day at least held their own, and prevented the Turks from getting farther forward than the village of Supovatz. But on the Sunday, the latter, reinforced from Nisch, renewed the offensive in force and with vigour. The Servians, who had also been reinforced, made a sturdy fight of it out in front of Tessica. From that village, where I had spent the night, I had early sent word back to the surgeons of the St. Thomas’s Hospital ambulance, who had pushed up to the front at Alexinatz, that they would find plenty of employment about Tessica; and about noon had ridden back to meet them. Near the bridge-head I encountered them, Mackellar in command, with Sandwith, Hare, and poor Attwood in the waggon with him; and, turning, went forward with them to what seemed a suitable spot for a Verband-platz, at a cross-road where the wounded had already gathered pretty numerously. As they tumbled out, pulled off their tunics, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work, I took the precaution to turn their waggon round, with the horses’ heads in the direction of Alexinatz, since the road was too narrow for quick and easy turning, if anything should occur to crowd it. But it was more from routine than from any serious apprehension that I did this; for the Servians seemed prospering fairly well in the long, hot struggle with their Turkish assailants.
After a rapid scurry to the front, I had returned to the Verband-platz, and was giving assistance there, when all at once I chanced to look up. I had become engrossed with the dressing business, and had been neglecting to watch the fighting. To my amazement, I could see no Servians out to the front. There were soldiers there, but they were blue-jacketed Turks, darting forward and firing at intervals. A straggling fire was discernible behind us, so that, in fact, we were between two fires. The Servians had melted away all of a sudden, and were in sudden, panic-stricken retreat. Our attention awakened, we could hear the scurry of the fugitives along the road flanking the field in which we were at work. Not a moment was to be lost, for already we could hear the shouts of the Turks; the wounded, unable to walk, were bundled into the waggon, from which the driver had fled without warning us; the surgeons scrambled up somehow; and I, hitching my saddle horse behind, took the reins, because I knew the roads and also how to drive. Our waggon was the rear-guard of all the force that had been holding the Tessica front. The Turks made a dash to intercept us; but the little horses could gallop, and it was a time to let them out. Presently we overtook the wreck of the stampede, and bored our way into the chaos. Provision waggons, cannon, tumbrils, and waggon-loads of wounded men were hurrying in pell-mell confusion among galloping cavalry-men and running foot-soldiers. The rout lasted till within two miles of the bridge-head, and there was a time when I thought the Turks would enter Alexinatz with the Servian fugitives. But a fresh front had quickly formed by troops rapidly drawn from out the Alexinatz defensive line; the officers exerted themselves vigorously to arrest the stampede, and the Turks did not seem to care to profit by their good fortune.
V
The isolated combat of this Sabbath was but the prelude to four days’ as stubborn fighting as I have ever witnessed. The Turks seemed to have made up their minds to carry Alexinatz at any cost; but apparently failed to recognise at how little cost the position might be made untenable for the Servians by a wide turning movement down the valley on the left bank of the Morava. They had hardened their hearts for the desperate effort of winning by sheer direct fighting a position of extraordinary strength when so assailed. The Monday opened with a fierce cannonade from the Turkish batteries directed against the Servian troops holding the broken terrain in front of the entrenched position, and this artillery preparation was followed in the afternoon by a series of furious infantry attacks. With flaming volleys the Turks swept forwards over the hedges and through the copses, with a confident steadfastness that boded ill for the militiamen waiting waveringly to confront them. As the Turks came on, I watched the Servian line give a kind of shudder; then it broke, the men huddling together into groups, as if they had thought of forming rallying squares, firing the while wildly. They rallied again on the edge of a wood, but the Turkish cannon had followed fast in the track of the Turkish fighting line, and opened fire on the Servians just in the act of attempted re-formation. As they broke and ran, courting the cover of the woods, the Turks followed them up steadily, slowly, inexorably! By nightfall the Turkish skirmishers were holding the wooded bottom of the valley, out of which rose the long bare slope that constituted a natural glacis to the line of Servian entrenchments drawn across the crest of the upland-curtain which covered the town of Alexinatz. That entrenched line carried, the Bashi-Bazouks would be in the streets of Alexinatz half an hour later.
There was no lull in the fighting on the following day, although the Turks held their hand for the time from the effort to storm the entrenched position. They fought their way on the left bank of the Morava, closer in towards the bridge-head, and got so forward with their artillery as to be able to throw shells into the town itself. On the Alexinatz side of the river they concerned themselves with driving in the Servians from their advanced positions round towards the south-eastern flank of the entrenched face, fighting hard for every step of ground which they were able to gain.
Of the detached incidents of this day I have no record. I wrote as I rode, making short notes as events occurred, and tearing the leaves out of my note-book and sending them into the town for despatch by the post to my colleague at Belgrade, who telegraphed from the Austrian side at Semlin everything that reached him from the front. But no post went out that night, nor would it have carried my leaflets if it had, since the officer who undertook to deliver my letter at the post-office was killed by a shell when crossing an exposed point in his way into the town. My memory of the day is a blurred confusion of continual musketry fire, of short stands ever to lapse into sullen retirements, of wounded men who had to be abandoned to the cruel fate that awaited them from the ruthless Turks, of burning thirst, of blistering heat, of that sense of depression which reverses always give to the spectator, alien though he may be. Villiers, worn with fatigue and exposure, had gone back into the town with the English surgeons, who, with the gallant and energetic Baron Mundy for their coadjutor, had been toiling all day long in a hollow until the Turkish shells began to fall thick and fast among the wounded whose condition they were striving to ameliorate.
VI
After nightfall I followed them; but not to eat or to rest. For nobody in Alexanitz that night was there either food or rest. Poor little Hélène was sobbing in a corner over a young Servian sergeant who had been brought in sore wounded, and who, she told us with streaming eyes, was her sweetheart. The townsfolk, spite that shells were dropping in their streets and firing their houses, were loth to quit the place to which were linked all their associations and all their interests. The night was one long horror: cannon roaring through the fire-flecked darkness, shells whistling through the air and crashing into the houses, the rumbling of the waggons carrying in the wounded, the groaning of the poor creatures torn by bullet or shattered by shell. We spent the whole of it in the hospital, for the claims of common humanity had converted Villiers and myself into nurses, and in company with a most resolute, tender, and composed Russian lady, we did our best to help the surgeons. It was a dread experience, even to one who had seen much war.
The hospital and its vicinity were littered with broken and mangled human beings. Through the long terrible night, Baron Mundy, Mr. Mackellar, and their young comrades toiled on unremittingly, amputating, extracting, probing, bandaging. No sooner was a batch of wounded attended to and cases affording a chance of life disposed of, than fresh cargoes were in waiting, now from the other side of the river, now from the other scene of action in front of the entrenchments on the heights. Several hundreds of cases were hurriedly seen to during the night by the English ambulance surgeons alone; but the proportion of wounded brought in was but small compared with the numbers of poor wretches left to the ruthlessness of the Turks during the sudden retreats of the Servian soldiery. The Russian ambulance was doing its work of humanity as assiduously as were our own countrymen, and a few Servian surgeons were behaving with courage and assiduity, in marked contrast to too many who were good for nothing in any sense. Although daylight was certain to bring an exacerbation of the long struggle, there was surely no human being in Alexinatz that night who was not glad when the young rays of the morning sun came glinting through the lurid pall of smoke that overhung the town.
To this fearful night succeeded a bloody day. The Turks had been massing all night behind cover, around the fringes of the bare slopes in front of the entrenchment line, and, after a preliminary artillery duel, their gallant infantry darted forward to attempt the storm of their strong position. It was a bold undertaking, fought out with stubborn valour, for the effort was renewed over and over again.
There was little variety in the method of the Turkish assaults. Let a sketch of one which I find in my note-book serve for a description of them all. The short jotting was made while I watched. “The Turks, in loose order, jump out of the lateral hollow and come on at the double, under cover of a shower of shells. The Servian guns open with shrapnel, and a Gatling mitrailleuse rains bullets on the charging Turks. At five hundred yards the Servian infantry behind the breastworks open fire. The Turk reply, and still keep pressing forward, falling fast as they come. They make a rush, headed by a gallant leader. A hundred yards more, and the forwardest of them are on the lip of the ditch. The leader rolls into it, shot, and his voice rings no more above the din of the strife. His followers waver, stagger, then turn and run. The assault has been repulsed.”
These efforts lasted till sundown, when the slopes leading up to the entrenched line were strewn with Turkish dead. In the early evening, Tchernaieff, rightly believing that the Turks were discouraged, took the offensive, and attacked them on both banks of the Morava. There was desperate fighting all night; but when morning dawned it was apparent that the Turks were slowly and sullenly falling back from every point. Tchernaieff, striking them hard as they went, sent them “reeling up the valley” till they had recrossed their own frontier. No longer for a time did the people of Alexinatz hear the cannon thunder, or start at the near rattle of the musketry fire.
VII
The same afternoon I started for Belgrade, eager to regain communications with my newspaper. Political complications had arisen there, the interest of which detained me in the Servian capital—with the less reluctance that all seemed quiet for the time in the upper Morava valley. Villiers I had left in Alexinatz, with the tryst that I was to rejoin him there as soon as circumstances would permit; and I was sure that were there signs of trouble in the air, I should promptly hear from him by telegraph. At length I was free to quit Belgrade, and started on my return journey to Alexinatz early in the morning of Friday, Sept. 2, travelling right through. As I was nearing Tchupria in the small hours of the following morning, a carriage dashed past me, travelling at great speed. Tchupria I found, although it was three o’clock, already awake and agitated. On every lip were the words, “Alexinatz has fallen!” “How have you heard?” I asked of the landlady of the inn. “It was told us by the English lords who drove through about half an hour ago. They were almost the last to escape from the place!”
Here was news indeed! Who were the English lords? What had happened to Villiers? How had it fared with our courageous comrades, the English surgeons? I pressed on, to the chorus of “Alexinatz is fallen,” through Paratschin, and on to Raschan, a village only a few miles short of Deligrad. As I drew rein at Raschan, there caught my eye the figure of a man slumbering on the broad shelf outside the window of a butcher’s shop. It was Mackellar. As he rubbed his eye, he told me the news in scraps. On the previous day the Turks had come sweeping into the Morava valley, on the opposite bank from Alexinatz, had driven the Servians in on their bridge-head, and had actually touched the river between Alexinatz and Deligrad. He and his mates had been in the field all day, had got cut off from Alexinatz, and had swum the river and got to Raschan here somehow, after an uncommonly unpleasant night. Mackellar knew nothing as to the fate of Alexinatz, but feared that at the best it was surrounded. On an adjoining slab, Mr. (now Sir William) MacCormac was reposing, and in a house close by were the other surgeons. Mr. MacCormac could tell more of Alexinatz than Mackellar had been able to do. He had been there with Colonel Loyd-Lindsay in the interests of the British Red Cross Society, and had been in the field among the wounded until nightfall. After dark the Turkish musketry fire had drawn closer and closer in on the place; the news spread that the bridge had been carried, and then there came the clamour that the Turks were actually fighting their way into the town. It had seemed wise to get away from the place when as yet there was the possibility of leaving it; and Colonel Lindsay and he had therefore started with a couple of companions. Colonel Lindsay had pressed on to Belgrade—it was his carriage I had passed near Tchupria: he (Mr. MacCormac) had halted in Raschan to ascertain the fate of the other surgeons, and in the hope that there might be opportunities for him to be of service in organising assistance to the wounded.
All this was interesting enough; but there were two matters as to which I could learn nothing specifically—what had befallen Alexinatz, and how Villiers and my servant were faring in all this turmoil and confusion. Villiers had been left by MacCormac finishing his dinner in the hotel; Colonel Lindsay had offered to take him out, but he had declined the offer somewhat curtly, and gone on with his dinner. When I heard this, my anxiety for the young man was sensibly alleviated. I knew Villiers to be cool without being rash, and I drew the inference that he had not regarded the plight of Alexinatz as quite so desperate as it had appeared to the “English lords.” So I pursued my way to Deligrad, where I found the troops holding that position, on the alert, but in no state of unwonted excitement. And on the roadside at Deligrad I found my servant guarding a waggon which contained the collective baggage of Villiers, the surgeons, and myself. Andreas had been sent out of Alexinatz by Villiers about midnight with the baggage, as a precautionary measure; when Andreas had left Villiers, that composed young man was going to bed. Up till then Alexinatz had not fallen into the hands of the Turks. The fighting had died out; but Tchernaieff had given orders that all the civilian inhabitants were to evacuate the place at daylight.
Andreas made me some coffee—it was still early morning—and then I started forward on the Alexinatz road. Presently I met the long column of civilian inhabitants, who had quitted the place by the General’s order. It was at once a mournful and a laughable procession. Here a weeping woman, with two children on her back, was trying to drive a little flock of miscellaneous live stock—goats, a cow, three pigs, and about a dozen geese; there a man was wheeling his bed-ridden wife in a wheelbarrow.
A long convoy of piled-up waggons crawled along the dusty road. From the apex of one of these poor “Belle Hélène” hailed me sadly; her sergeant was dead, and she had no future worth caring for. The current of Alexinatz emigration lasted for several miles; and close on its rear came tramping a long column of Servian soldiers, at the head of which rode General Tchernaieff and his staff. Neither scare nor hurry was apparent; no flankers lined the peaceful-seeming march; no roar of cannon or rattle of musketry broke the monotone of the tramp of feet and hum of voices. What did it all mean? Well, one problem was solved; there was Villiers, with a cigarette between his lips, as he strode along on foot chatting with Tchernaieff’s aide-de-camp. The sententious young man seemed rather bewildered by the eager warmth of my greeting. Why this quite uncalled-for emotion? I had made the tryst with him that we should rendezvous in Alexinatz. Well, for his part, he had been loth to break troth, and had only come away when he saw no prospect of procuring food. No single civilian was left in all Alexinatz; you could not even buy a piece of bread; and he respectfully submitted that, with all imaginable anxiety to keep faith, he could not see his way to living on air.
As he talked, Tchernaieff pulled on one side and informed me of the military situation. The Turks had meddled no more with Alexinatz since their previous discomfiture. Their new scheme was to mask it, and press past it northward down the left bank of the Morava. This had involved driving in what force he had been maintaining in the valley on the left bank; and it was their doing of this that had brought about the battle of the previous day. It was necessary for him, with part of the troops that had been holding Alexinatz, to retire on Deligrad, there and thereabouts to oppose the new line of the Turkish advance; but he had left to garrison the Alexinatz lines General Popovitz with 5000 men. Alexinatz had not fallen, nor although its situation was obviously precarious—hence the evacuation of the civilian population he had thought himself bound to enforce—was there any prospect of its immediate abandonment.
VIII
And so the General rode on. It seemed to me that the best way to give evidence that the story of the fall of Alexinatz was untrue was to go there, and despatch telegrams from the place, of whose fall assured tidings had been disseminated far and wide. So Villiers and I took the road by which he had travelled, and plodded our way into empty Alexinatz. It presented an aspect of strange weird loneliness. Not even the cats had been left behind. Popovitz was living in a shed away at the bridge-head, and his soldiers were disposed along the line of the entrenched position in the reverse slope of the upland curtain. No creature was in all that place, whose normal population was close on 10,000 souls. All the doors had been left open. We strolled into the “Crown,” to find the kitchen hearth cold, and what had been our bedroom stripped stark of furniture. Then we went down to the “Greek King,” and gazed on the deserted counter at which “La Belle Hélène” had been wont to preside. On a trestle in a corner of the hospital, where the surgeons had been slaving a fortnight previously, there lay a dead man, her sweetheart. He had died, no doubt, during the night in the midst of the bustle of evacuation, and the heedless Servian orderlies had not troubled to see to the poor fellow’s interment. We were idle, we two, so we carried him out into the garden, and hid him in a shallow grave under the blossoming standard roses. This done, we tramped along the silent streets out to where, at the bridge-head, honest Popovitz had his rough quarters. As we went, Villiers told me the story of the previous day.
The fighting had been very hard, and there had been a time when he had believed the Turks were bent on crossing the Morava, and taking the place in reverse, on the side where it was unprotected. But even had they persevered in this intention, he had realised that there would still remain open the line of retreat out to the east in the direction of Banja, and that it would be quite time for him to go when he saw the troops commencing their evacuation. As the evening drew in, it had been clear to him that the Turks were gaining no ground. He had previously listened to a good deal of heavy firing around Alexinatz, and had learnt to form an estimate of its distance, so when the clamour arose that the bridge had been taken, and when scared breathless men—who ought to have kept their heads better—had panted out that the Turks were “at the bottom of the street,” he had gone out and listened, and had made up his mind that the firing was as yet a good two miles away at the least. And then he had come in and gone on with his dinner, as became a sensible man, and when he had been pressed to come away with the departing people of his nationality, had been unable to recognise the urgent necessity of the hurried retreat.
Popovitz was very civil, and allowed me to despatch a telegram; but could not ask us to luncheon, for the very good reason that he had no luncheon for himself. So we left him, and returned into the silent town. Up at the head of the main street there was, we bethought ourselves, a pretty cottage inhabited by an old Tâtar, who, in the days when the quickest route between Western Europe and Constantinople was through Belgrade, Alexinatz, Nisch, Sophia, and Adrianople, used to accompany the King’s messengers, who had to ride without a halt, save to change from one horse to another, that long rough journey. He was an interesting man, this old Tâtar, with his tales in a broken composite of many languages, of the long winter gallops through the snow-wreaths with Heneage or Johnson, when the wolves would chase the emissary of Britannic majesty, and the Albanian robbers would strive to make prize of him. We had been wont to sit with him in his garden-bower, and listen to his polyglot yarns of the old rough days when he, now bent and shrivelled, thought nothing of riding 800 miles at a stretch. We bethought ourselves now of the old fellow’s cottage, as likely to furnish the most comfortable quarters; and since there was more of the Turk than the Serv in the old Tâtar, it was possible that he might not have cared to clear out with the other inhabitants. We found him at home, sitting quietly in his own leafy porch under the great hanging bunches of grapes; he was too old, he said, to go travelling now, and had resolved to stay and take his chance. Stay he did later, when Popovitz went and left Alexinatz to him and the Turks; and badly enough did he fare at the hands of the latter. The Bashi-Bazouks promptly killed the poor old fellow.
Well, he was as kind to us as his means permitted of. He had neither meat nor wine, but he made us coffee, and gave us bread and grapes, and he gave us sleeping-quarters as well; but when I remember the insect-horrors of that night, I shudder still. Next morning, recognising that empty Alexinatz was extremely stupid, and that probably there would be some fighting soon away in the Krusevatz direction, we paid our farewell respects to Popovitz, took leave of the friendly old Tâtar—the “last man” of Alexinatz, and started back to Deligrad on as hot a walk as ever I remember. We had to make a detour to avoid a handful of Circassians who had crossed the Morava on a foray, and found great amusement at a wayside tavern in the boasting of some Servian militia, who claimed that they had done doughty battle with the Tcherkesses, and driven them back across the river. When I ventured to point out that the barrels of their pieces were clean, they lost their tempers, and threatened to shoot us—a menace which we could afford to smile at, since the old muskets had lost their locks. We never went back to Alexinatz again, but stout Popovitz held the place till the Servian strength was shattered on the heights of Djunis in the end of October; and he then evacuated it only by order of Tchernaieff. Had he been left there one day more, it would have remained with the Servians under the terms of the armistice; but before that came into effect the Turks had occupied Alexinatz, and it was Fazli Pasha’s headquarters during the following winter. When the peace was signed, and its people came back to what had been their homes, they found the place a wreck. The Turks had made firewood of everything that would burn.