Uskub is a Smell on one side of which is built a prim little French town finished off with conventionally placed poplars in true Latin style; and on the other side lies a disreputable, rambling Turkish village culminating in a cone of rock upon which is the old fortress called the Grad.
The country about Uskub is a great cemetery, and on every hand rise little rounded hills bristling with gravestones like almonds in a tipsy-cake. Strange old streets there are in Uskub. One comes suddenly upon half-buried mosques with grass growing from their dilapidated domes, a refuge only for chickens; some deserted baths, and in the midst of all, its outer walls like a prison and with prison windows, the old caravanserai.
We crept to its gateway and through a crack saw visions of a romantic courtyard. The gate was locked, and we asked a little shoemaker—
"Who has the key?"
"It is now a leather tannery," he answered, and directed us to a shoemaker in another street. This was full of shoemakers, and we chased the key from shop to shop. It was like "Hunt the slipper." At last we ran it to earth in the second waistcoat of a negligent individual in a fez.
How happy the merchant of old must have felt when he entered the courtyard after a long journey! The court was big and square, with a fountain in the centre, the pillars were blue, and the arches red. Tiers upon tiers of little rooms were built around; the expensive ones had windows and the cheap ones none, and the door of each was marked by the smoke of a thousand fires which had been lit within. Underneath were cubby holes for the merchants' goods, and behind it all was a great dark stable for the animals. Once shut up in the caravanserai one was safe from robbers, revolutions, and the outside world. Lying in the doorway, as if cast there by some gigantic ogre in a fit of temper, were two immense marble vases, and two queer carved stone figures. Who made these figures? Mystery—for Turkey does not carve. The old caravanserai no longer gives protection to the harassed traveller, it only cures his boots, for it has fallen from sanctuary to shoemakers, and the leather workers of Uskub cure their hides therein. Hence, despite its beauty, we did not loiter long, for we have ever held a bad smell more powerful than a beautiful view.
Why don't towns look tragic when their bricks reek of tragedy? Why is industrial misery the only form in which the cry of the oppressed is allowed to take visible shape and to make the reputation of Realist artists? In Uskub is concentrated the whole problem of the Balkans and of Macedonia. Her brightly painted streets are filled with Serb, Bulgar, and Turk, each disliking the rule of the other, the Bulgar hating the Serb only worse than the Turk because the Serb is master. To the inquiring mind it is problematic how much of this hate is national, and how much political. Deprive these peasant populations of their jealous, land-grabbing propagandist rulers, and what rancour would remain between them? Intensive civilization, such as has been applied to these states—civilization which has swept one class to the twentieth century, while it leaves the others in its primitive simplicity—seems always to produce the worst results. Nations can only crawl to knowledge and to the possessions of riches, for politics to the simple are like "drinks" to the savage and equally deadly in effect.
Can the problem ever be resolved? Can Serbia with half her manhood wiped out stand against her jealous neighbours? The creation of a lot of small states on republican principles seems a far-fetched idea, and yet it seems the best, especially if the menace of Turkey were removed, for there is little doubt that Turkey, rearmed by the German, might make one more effort to regain her lost territory under conditions vastly different from those which ruled in the Balkan conflict. Macedonia, Albania, and what is now Turkey in Europe, each made self-governing under the shield of the Alliance—why not?—and Serbia as compensation allowed to expand towards the north into territories which are wholly Serb in nationality and in feeling.
We went through the pot market, whose orange earthenware was glowing in the sun, and came upon an old house with such a wonderful ultramarine courtyard that we went in to look. Over the door was written Old Serb Café Jansie Han. After sketching there we entered the inn for coffee, and sat at tables made of thick blocks of marble smoothed only at the top. The innkeeper said it was built in the days of the Czar Duchan. If this were true, one would say that never had the interior been whitewashed since then. But there was an air of cosiness about it, and we visited it several times after. Near by was a little church with a wonderful carved screen and a picture of Elijah going to heaven in a chariot drawn by a pink horse, with the charioteer bumping along on a separate cloud, which served as the box. We watched the sun set from one of the tipsy-cake hills, sitting on a gravestone with an old Turkish shepherd, who seemed to derive great comfort from our company.
The mountains around reflected the rosy lights of the sun in great flat masses.
The muezzin sounded from the many minarets, and twilight was on us. Uskub, romantic, dirty, unhealthy Uskub, was soon shrouded in mist; a vision of unusual beauty.
One thought of the awful winter it had passed through, when dead and dying had lain about the streets. Typhus, relapsing fever, and typhoid had gripped the town. Lady Paget's staff, while grappling with the trouble, had paid a heavy toll, as their hospital lay deep on the unhealthy part of the city. For a time the citadel was in the hands of an English unit. Before they were there it was a Serbian hospital, and the staff threw all the dirty, stained dressings over the cliff, down which they rolled to the road. The peasants used to collect these pestiferous morsels and made them into padded quilts. Little wonder that illness spread! In the summer Lady Paget's hospital withdrew to some great barracks on the hill. The paths were made of Turkish tombstones, which were always used in Uskub for road metal.
The hospital staff was saddened by the recent death of Mr. Chichester, who had, like ourselves, just returned from a tour in the western mountains, where he caught paratyphoid and only lived a few days.
One of the doctors had been in Albania, on an inoculating expedition. At Durazzo he had been received by Essad Pacha, who was delighted to have his piano played, and to watch the hammers working inside. Like Helen's babies, "he wanted to see the wheels go wound." The piano and piles of music must have been a memento of the Prince and Princess of Wied and of their unhappy attempts at being Mpret and Mpretess—or is it Mpretitza, or Mpretina? The music was still marked with her name, and was certainly not a present to Essad.
The stamp of the English was on Uskub. Prices were high. One Turk offered us a rubbishy silver thing for fifteen dinars; and Jan laughed, saying that one could see the English had been there. Without blushing the man pointed to a twin article, saying he would let that go for five dinars.
What caused us to feel that we had wandered enough? Was it the awful cinematograph show which led us through an hour and a half of melodrama without our grasping the plot, or was it that the large copper tray we bought filled us with a sense of responsibility?
At this wavering moment Lady Paget held a meeting of her staff. We lunched there, and part of the truth leaked out after the meeting.
The Bulgars really were coming in against us, and in a day or two we were to see things.
That decided the matter. We went to the prefect's office for our pass. Firstly, we were ushered into a room occupied by a man in khaki, whose accent betrayed that he hailed from the States. He was "something sanitary," and belonged to the American commission, so we tried again. This time the porter took us up to a landing, said a few words into a doorway, and left us standing. As he was wandering in our vicinity, Jo tried one of her two talismans: it is the word "Preposterous" ejaculated explosively, and is safely calculated to stagger a foreign soul. The other is a well-known dodge. If a person bothers you, look at his boots with a pained expression. He will soon take himself off—boots and all.
The talisman worked, the pass was quickly managed, and we had but to spend our time among the shops again. We resisted the seductions of an old man with fifty knives in his belt, who reminded Jo of a horrible nightmare of her infancy.
In her dream a grandfather with a basket had come peddling. Suddenly his coat, blowing aside, revealed not a body, but a busy sewing-machine in excellent working order. In her agitation, Jo fell out of bed.
We sat consuming beer outside a café decked with pink flowered bushes in green boxes. One of the antique dames who cook sausages in the shadow of the cafés brought us a plate each—funny little hard things—and we bought cakes and nougat from perambulating Peter Piemen.
The station platform was like the last scene of a pantomime. Every one we had met on our journeys rushed up and shook us by the hand.
First a Belgian doctor, from Dr. Lilias Hamilton's unit in Podgoritza. He said Mrs. G. was also in the town, and that the others were all coming shortly. Then we met a young staff officer from Uzhitze, who was noted for his bravery. The train came in and we stumbled up to it in the dark. There was a crowd of women about the steps in difficulty with heavy bags. Jan ran forward to help one. She turned round. It was a sister from Dechani. The rest turned round. It was the whole Russian mission from Dechani.
We proceeded along the corridor, and ran into two men. We mutually began to apologize.
"Hello," we said, "how did you get here?" They were two Americans we had met in Salonika.
We got our seats and went out of the train by the other door. As we passed the compartment we saw a familiar face. It was the little French courier.
"Quel pays," he said, bounding up. "Et les Bulgars, quoi?"
"Good Lord," said Jan. "Let's go out and get some fresh air."
The only people lacking to complete the scene were the Sirdar and Dr. Clemow.
A doctor who had just arrived from Salonika asked us to look after four English orderlies who, new to the country, were travelling to the Red Cross mission at Vrntze. With them were two trim, short-skirted, heavy booted, Belgian nurses, who were going to a Serbian field hospital.
The train crawled. At times it was necessary to hold one's breath to see if we were moving at all. It was always possible that the Bulgars had blown up a bridge or so. One could imagine an anxious driver, his eyes fixed on the line in front, looking for Bulgarian comitaj.
The travellers were restless. Our little French courier stood in the corridor looking fiercely at the black night; his back view eloquently expressive of his opinion of the Balkans.
Later on we all slept. A frightful braying sound awoke us.
No, not Bulgars—only the band. Same band, same station, same hour, same awful incompetence.
So the princess had nothing to do with it!
Trainloads bristling with ragged soldiers passed us—open truck-loads of them, carriage tops covered with sleeping men, some were clinging to the steps and to the buffers.
Nish station had lost its sleepy air. Every one was energetically doing everything all wrong. The four orderlies and the two Belgian sisters were minus their passports. Some one had taken them away. These were run to earth in the station-master's office, and as the party had no idea where to go, we suggested they should come with us to the rest-house.
The first person we met there was Dr. Clemow.
"Have you got the Sirdar with you?" we asked.
He answered that he had brought Paul, the young Montenegrin interpreter, with him. The English units in Montenegro had been recalled, and he had come to Nish to try to rescind the order for his unit.
The town was at its gayest. The cloud had not yet dimmed the market. Peasants poured in, knowing nothing of the Bulgars, little thinking that they would be flying, starving, dying, in a few weeks' time. A Chinese vendor of paper gauds had come into the town, and all the pretty girls were wearing his absurdities pinned on to their head kerchiefs. One girl was so fine and bejewelled that we photographed her, to the delight of her lover, who stood aside to let us have a good view.
A man was selling honey in the comb accompanied by his bees, which must have followed him for miles. They testified their displeasure at his selling their honey by stinging him and most of the buyers.
No one seemed to know when the train was leaving. Station-master, porters, all had a different tale. At last we decided to risk seven o'clock in the evening, and the four orderlies and ourselves, copper tray and all, bade farewell to the Belgian sisters, who had cut off their hair, and wandered across to the station. The train arrived two hours late and stood, ready to go out, guarded by tatterdemalions with guns.
"You can't get in yet," said one of them barring our way.
"Why?"
"Ne snam."
The freebooting instinct arose in us; we awaited our opportunity, dodged between two soldiers, and settled ourselves comfortably. Several officials looked in and said nothing; another came and forbade us to stay there, and passed on. An old woman came with a broom and cleaned up. We sat on our feet to get them out of the way, somebody squirted white disinfectant on the floor, and we were left in peace.
The train started at eleven, moved as far as a siding and stayed till four. We found the four Red Cross men had only nine shillings between them. Three had stood all the way from Salonika, as during an unfortunate moment of interest in the view their seats had been appropriated by a fat Serbian officer, his wife and daughter. The fourth, a porter from Folkestone, had settled down on the floor, saying "he wasn't going to concarn himself with no voos."
They had new uniforms, yellow mackintoshes, white kit bags, and beautiful cooking apparatus, which took to pieces and served a thousand purposes.
In the chilly morning we got out at Stalatch, just too late for the Vrntze train. Luckily the station café was open.
The four Englishmen ordered beefsteak, but were given long lean tasteless sausages. They asked for tea and were given black Turkish coffee in tiny cups half full of grounds. We asked about the trains, and were told we should catch the one next day. We argued, and extracted the promise of a luggage train, which would soon pass.
Why is it that in Serbia they always, on principle, say, "You can't," after which under pressure they own, "Somehow you can"? In Montenegro they say, "Certainly you can," after which they occasionally find that "Somehow you can't."
At last the luggage train came. We sat on the step dangling our legs and peering down at the country below us.
We were again held up at Krusevatz and bearded the officials. They promised to put on a special carriage for us when the next luggage-train should come in, some time that evening.
Nothing for it but to lunch and to kill time. We watched the mountain batteries pass on their way to the Bulgarian frontier. One or two big cannon trailed by, drawn by oxen. Many horses looked wretched and half-starved.
The Englishmen built a camp fire by the rail-road. Soon tea was brewing; we drank, and chewed walnuts, stared at by crowds of patient Serbian soldiers.
We travelled with the treasurer of the district, a charming man who revelled in stories of a mischievous boyhood spent in a Jesuit establishment. The fathers had stuck to him nobly until he had mixed red paint with the holy water, and one of the fathers, while administering the service, had suddenly beheld his whole congregation marked on the forehead with damnatory crosses like criminals of old time. That ended his school days. He introduced us to an officer, whose business it was to search for spies, a restless man who was always feeling under the seats with his feet. Perhaps it was only cramp! The four Englishmen, cheered at the thought that their long journey was nearing its end, burst into song. The Serbs stood round listening to the melodies that were so different to their own plaintive wailings, and presently asked us to translate. We don't know if the subtleties of "Didn't want to do it," or "The little grey home in the west," were very clear in the translations, as they seemed puzzled.
Arrived at Vrntze, we found no carriages to meet us. The station-master at Krusevatz had promised to telephone, but as usual had not done it. We had to break the news to our Englishmen, who, their songs over, had naturally fallen into tired depression, and had to tell them that a three-kilometre walk was before us, and one man had better stay to look after the baggage. Carriages were telephoned for, but they would be long in coming.
They were! We arrived at the village—no carriages. We agitated. The spy searcher came out of the café—to which he and the "Bad Boy's Diary" man had driven—and made people run about. They said the carriages had already gone. We denied it, so they woke up the coachman.
We took the three men to the hospital and went back to sit in the café with our new friends and met many old ones. The local chemist cheered and promised us a present of mackintosh cotton to celebrate our return. We had spent Easter morning in his shop eating purple eggs and drinking tea enlivened with brandy, while the choir came in and chanted beautiful Easter songs to us.
An hour rolled by, the café closed, our friends disappeared. We went to meet the carriages from the station; at last they arrived, with Mr. Owen half asleep amidst the kitbags.
It was far into the night when we arrived at our hospital burdened with our two bags and the copper tray.
The night nurse, a kitten, and a round woolly puppy welcomed us.
Hospital work again. How strange we felt. A sad-faced little Serbian lady, widowed through typhus, was interpreting for the out-patients while Jo was away; but she was alone in the world and did not want to go—so Jo, homesick for her beloved out-patients, had to make the best of it and do other work. The Serbian youth who had been put on the staff as secretary, was dangerously ill with typhoid fever, which he had picked up at Kragujevatz. The typhus barrack was a children's hospital, containing little waifs chosen from the out-patients, and a few women.
In the early days when we had first arrived at Vrntze there were several overfilled Serbian and one Greek hospital. They were only cafés and large villas, unsanitary, stuffy, and overworked. The windows were never open, and through the huge sheets of plate glass could be dimly seen in the thick blue tobacco smoke a higgledy-piggledy crowd of beds. Often two men lay in one bed covered with their dirty great coats, while typhus patients and wounded men slept together. One man lay unconscious for several days in the window, his feet in his dinner-plate. At last he died, his feet still in the dinner. Mr. Berry took on a hydropathic establishment which had been completed just before the first Balkan War. This was used as the central hospital, where the staff lodged, and the most serious surgical cases were nursed. In the basement an operating-room was rigged up, there were bathrooms, disinfecting-rooms, a laundry, and an engine-house, where gimcrack German machinery in fits and starts provided us with electric light and hot water. The village school on the hill opposite was annexed and cleaned by a sculptor, a singer, a painter, and a judge of the Royal Horse Show. This was run as a convalescent home, and was the cause of many a muddy sit down, as it lay on the top of a greasy hill.
Other large buildings were gradually added, sulphured, and cleaned until we had six hospitals, one of which was run for some time in connection with the Red Cross unit.
Typhus had not stricken the village badly, but the old barracks were full of cases which developed several days after each batch of wounded came.
The Red Cross unit took on the typhus barracks. Mr. Berry, seeing that surgery was for the moment a secondary thing, and having received a batch of Austrian prisoners riddled with typhus, built some barracks not far from the school. Glass was unobtainable, so thin muslin was used for the windows.
The first precaution against bad air that Mr. Berry took in preparing his chief surgical ward was to smash all top panes of the windows with a broom, thus earning the name of the Window Breaker. Whenever the wind blew through the draughty corridors and glass rattled down from the sashes, word went round that "Mr. Berry has been at it again."
Our unit and the Red Cross ran a quarantine hospital together. It was originally the state café and lay in the park of the watering-place. Near by were the sulphur baths. We ripped out the stuffy little wooden dressing-rooms, to the joy of the bath attendant, who possessed the facsimile of Tolstoi's face, and with the débris we built a large shed outside for the reception of the wounded.
In the early days they came in large batches from other hospitals, pathetic septic cases, their lives ruined for want of proper care. We put their clothes in bags for future disinfecting, and the men, mildly perplexed, were bathed, shaved, and sent to the "clearing-house," as it was called. Those who developed typhus went to the barracks, and the rest were drafted to the various hospitals in the village.
The clothes were first sulphurized to kill the lice, and then, until Dr. Boyle's disinfector appeared, boiled. This was important, as typhus is propagated by infected lice. Even forty-eight hours of sulphur did not destroy the nits. One day the sulphur-room was opened after twenty-four hours. Live lice were discovered congregated round the tops of the bags. Jan put some in a bottle. They immediately fought each other, tooth and nail, rolling and scrambling in a mass just like a rugby-football scrum, and continued the fight for twelve hours at least, thus proving that the scientific writer who says that the louse is a delicate creature and only lives a few hours off the body can know little of the Serbian breed.
The town, when we arrived, was a bouquet of assorted and nasty smells, of which the authorities seemed proud. We cleaned up the streets by running a little artificial river down the gutter. Mr. Berry had the chief of the police sacked and instituted a sort of sanitary vigilance committee. We took over the local but very primitive sewage works—a field into which all the filth of the town was drained.
The slaughter-house was discovered. It was an old wooden shed built over the lower end of the stream which washed the village from end to end, draining successively the typhus barracks, the baths, and all the hospitals. The shed itself was old and worm-eaten. The walls were caked with the blood of years, yet the meat was always hung against them after having been well soused in the filthy water. Mr. Berry decided to build a new one: some of the money was subscribed through Mr. Blease by the Liverpool Liberal Club; the rest Mr. Berry paid himself. At once the state began to quarrel with the commune as to the ownership of the proposed treasure. So the smells disappeared and the town engineer was furious, saying he would "Put all right" when we left.
Luckily one of the chief men in the town had lived in America and knew the value of cleanliness. Mr. Berry was offered an honorary Colonelcy; but he refused, saying he would prefer to be made sanitary officer for the town.
The spring came, bringing with it no fighting. A great offensive was expected, had been ordered, in fact, but we heard later that the army refused to advance. The work was very much lighter. Very few men were entirely helpless. The hospitals, which were still emptying themselves and whose men were coming to us, sent the survival of the fittest. Most of the beds were carried out under the trees after the morning dressings were done, and the men lay gossiping and smoking when they could get tobacco. Outside visitors were rare. The Serbian ladies do not go round the hospitals with cigarettes and sweets, and to find a Serbian woman nursing is an anomaly.
Report says that many flung themselves into it with energy during the first Balkan War, but that four years of it, ending with typhus, had dulled their enthusiasm. It is not fair to blame them. To nurse from morning till night in a putrid Serbian hospital with all windows closed requires more than devotion and complete indifference to life. Three Serbian ladies came to sew pillow cases and sheets every afternoon, and one of them gave up still more time to teach the patients reading and writing.
But the town was full, in the summer, of smartly dressed women, and the village priest never once visited our hospitals. Hearing of the English missions and their work, peasants began to come from the mountains around, and the out-patient department became, under Dr. Helen Boyle, a matter for strenuous mornings.
Many of these poor things had never seen a doctor in their lives. Serbia even in peace-time had not produced many medical men, and those who existed had no time to attend the poor gratis.
The percentage of consumptives was enormous. Every family shuts its windows and doors for the winter and proceeds industriously to spit, and so the disease spreads.
Diphtheria patients rode and walked often for ten hours and waited in the courtyard, and people far gone with typhus staggered along in the blazing spring sun.
One jolly old ragatops with typhus arrived in the afternoon with a violent temperature, and Jo settled him comfortably in the courtyard with his head on a sink until Mrs. Berry should come in to see about taking him into the barracks. He seemed quite happy about himself, but very worried about his blind beggar brother and his two half-blind children, whose sight had been ruined by smallpox.
For the latter nothing could be done.
Another time she kept two boys waiting to see if Mrs. Berry could take them into her typhus barracks. One had scarlet fever, and the other was a young starving clerk in a galloping consumption, thirty-six hours from his home.
Afraid to raise their hopes, and not knowing if there would be room for them, Jo told them that they were to have some very strong medicine that could only be administered two hours after a dose of hot milk and biscuit (the medicine was only bovril). By this time Mrs. Berry arrived and managed to squeeze the boys in.
However, we were told to clear the hospitals, for the wounded were expected.
"What could be done with the scarlet fever boy?" At last an idea came: "The Mortuary," built by the Horse Show Judge with such joy. The mortuary that we had all gone to admire as a work of art.
But the scarlet fever boy did not seem to see it that way, for in the night he escaped, and we have never seen him since.
Diphtheria was so prevalent that the Red Cross on receiving a patient, gathered in the whole family for a few days, inoculated, washed, and gargled it. They also toured the villages around, digging out typhus and other infectious cases, thus stopping the spread of infection. They had a most energetic matron, Miss Caldwell, who had already nursed in Cettinje during the Balkan Wars, and we have already told how she managed the Montenegrins.
Often the patients came in ox-carts. Too ill to be lifted out, they had to be examined and treated in the carts. Dr. Boyle acquired a special nimbleness in jumping in and out of these contrivances armed with stethescope, spoons, bowls, and dressings. We accumulated a congregation of "regulars," who came to be dressed every day—gathered feet, suppurating glands, eczema, etc.
One old mother with a bad leg was bandaged up with boracic ointment and told to come back in two days. She came. Jo undid the bandage. All the old lady's fleas had swarmed to the boracic till it looked like a fly-paper. After which we used Vermigeli.
All wore brightly woven belts, sometimes two or three, each a yard and a half long, tightly wound round their bodies, thus making their waists wider than their hips. One girl was black and blue with the pattern showing on her skin, and many men were suffering from the evils of tight lacing.
The village priest received belts as fees from the peasants when he married them. He sent us a message to say he had some for sale, so we went in a body to his house, were received by his daughter, who looked like a cow-girl, turned over a basketful of belts, and bought largely. After which he put up the price.
Jo went on night duty for the first time.
A queer experience this, starting the day's work at half-past seven in the evening and finishing at seven in the morning—breakfasting when other people are dining; hearing their contented laughter as they go off to bed; and then a queer loneliness and the ugly ticking of a clock. One creeps round the big ward. What a noisy thing breathing is. Some one groans, "Sestra, I cannot sleep." This man has not been ordered morphia. Silence once more broken only by the sound of the breathing, distant howling of dogs from the darkness or the hoot of an owl. The old frostbite man coughs; he coughs again insistently. Both say "Yes" to hot milk. So down to the big kitchen, some mice scatter by, the puppy wakes up and thinks it is time for a game. A woman's voice calls loudly, "Sestra." Taking the milk off, Sestra hurries across the courtyard and along the corridor to the little rooms with the puppy tugging at her skirt. The woman wants water; she has wakened the other women—they want water. When silence again comes back into the ward, one notes instinctively the vivid colouring of the two big blue windows at the far end, the long lines of beds disappearing into the darkness, the dim light of the lantern on the table showing up the cheap clock and a few flowers. The intensity of light upon this clock is only equalled by the intensity of one's thoughts upon the clock. The minute-hand drags on as though it were weary with the day's work. A groan ticks off the quarters and cries for water or milk the half-hours. At last one o'clock. Time for a midnight meal. Eggs and cocoa hurriedly eaten without appetite in the kitchen, but breaking the monotony. Back to the ward again, one of the patients very restless, in great pain. Poor fellow, he has had a long and hard time of it, fifteen months in bed and all due to early neglect.
"Sestra," he says, "sestra," and holds out a handkerchief heavy with coin. "Tell the doctor to take me down to the operating-room and cure me or not let me wake up."
Between four and five there is more movement in the ward. Groans give way to yawns. In the windows the blue is paling to grey. Cocks are crowing now quite close, now faintly, like an echo. Suddenly the world is filled with work, "washings, brushings, combings, cleanings, temperatures, breakfasts, medicines, some beds to make, reports, all fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, until at last the day-sisters come and relieve, and yawning at the daylight one eats warmed-up dinner while the others are having breakfast."
After a seven weeks' absence one was bound to miss many old friends in the ward. Some had gone home, others were back in the army. Old Number 13, the king of the ward, was still there. He had a dark brown face and white hair, and was furious if any dared to call him a gipsy.
"I am a respectable farmer," he said, "and I own seventeen pigs, a horse, and five sheep, a wife, and two children."
He loved to tell of his wedding. It was done in the correct old Serbian style. He went with his mother and a gun to the chosen one's house, where she was waiting alone, her parents tactfully keeping out of the way. They abducted the lady, who was treated with great honour as a visitor in her future father-in-law's house.
"Father" turned up next morning. Rakia was served, and father divulged ceremoniously how many pigs he could spare to them for keeping his daughter.
Number 13 wanted to know everything: how old was Jo, how much she was paid?
"What, you are not paid?" he said in amazement. "Then the English are wonderful! In Serbia our women would not do that."
Poor little John Willie still left a blank, though he had died long before. His name was not John Willie, but it sounded rather like it, so we just turned it into John Willie. He loved the name, and told his father about it.
They sat all afternoon hand-in-hand, saying at intervals, "Dgonn Oolie," and chuckling.
Jan once had brought back from a spring visit to Kragujevatz some horrible sun hats.
They were the cast-off eccentricities of the fashions of six years ago, and had drifted from the Rue de la Paix to this obscure Serbian shop which was selling them as serious articles of clothing. Jo tried them on, and one of the nurses became so weak with laughter that she tumbled all the way downstairs.
Finding them quite impossible, Jo bequeathed them to the ward, where they were snapped up enthusiastically.
The ugliest was an immense sailor hat, the crown nearly as wide as the brim, but the head hole would have fitted a doll. However, John Willie fancied that hat and was always to be seen, a tiny, round-backed figure, wandering slowly in a long blue dressing-gown, blue woolly boots, and the enormous hat perched on the top of his pathetically drooping head.
One day poor little John Willie became fearfully ill. His parents arrived and sat dumbly gazing at him for two nights, while he panted his poor little life away. His friend the Velika Dete (big child), once a fierce comitaj, was moved away from the "Malo Dete," to make more room, and he sulked, while the Austrian prisoner orderlies ran to and fro with water for his head, milk, all the things that a poor little dying boy might need; and old Number 13 passed to and fro shaking his head, for he had been long in hospital and had seen many people die.
A man with knees bent (he said with scroogling them up all winter in the cold) was put in John Willie's place. The Velika Dete came back, but he would not speak to "Bent Knees" for weeks.
By this time the Austrian prisoners were very well trained and made excellent orderlies in the ward. An ex-Carlton waiter was very dexterous in sidling down the ward: on his five fingers a tray perched high, containing dressing-bowls and pots bristling with forceps, scissors, and various other instruments.
His chief talent lay in peppering frostbitten toes with iodoform powder—a reminiscence of the sugar castor.
Our housemaid was a leather tanner, whom Jo's baby magpie mistook for its parent, as he fed it at intervals every morning. A Czech in typhus cloths spent his days down in the disinfecting, operating and bathrooms. He had been an overseer in a factory and had added to his income by writing love-stories for the papers. A butcher was installed in the kitchens. Once a week he became an artist, killing a sheep according to the best Prague ideals.
All our prisoners, about forty in number, clung to the English hospitals as their only chance of life, for in other places sixty per cent. had died of typhus.
The Serbs, though bearing no animosity, could do little for them. We saw the quarters of some men working on the road. These were show quarters and supposed to be clean. Each room had an outside door. On the floor was room for six men and hay enough to stuff one pillow. They had no rugs, and the Serbs could give them none. The cold in the winter must have been intense.
We had come back to this little world after seven weeks' wandering, and almost immediately Jan had gone off to Kragujevatz with a broken motor.
While he was away Jo got letters from England and Paris, which made her realize that things were rather in a mess, and we should have to go home. We had left England intending to stay in Serbia three months, and had been then nearly nine.
October 2nd. Got a wire from Kragujevatz to say that the motor hood is ready and that we must go over to get it fitted. We cleaned and oiled the car, and at two ran it down the hill, but it would not start. Found two sparking plugs cracked and the magneto very weak. When we had fixed it up it was too late. Four a.m. to-morrow morning.
October 3rd. Started in the dark, Mr. Berry, Sister Hammond, Sava, I, and a female relation of some minister or other who wanted to go to Kralievo. The motor working badly, as it is impossible to get the proper spare parts. Three young owls were sitting in the middle of the road scared by our headlights; we hit one, the other two flew away. Sava and I stopped and tinkered at the old machine for about an hour, changed all the sparking plugs again, after which she went better. We reached Kralievo without incident, where we cast loose the female relation. From Kralievo passed over the Morava, which was pretty floody and had knocked the road about a bit. The road led right through the Shumadia country, where the first revolts of the Serbian nation against their Turkish oppressors were engendered. We passed the old Serbian churchyard. I never passed by without going in. These queer old tombstones all painted in days when pure decoration had a religious appeal, these tattered red and white and black banners lend such a gay air to death; these swords and pistols and medals carved into the stone seem almost carrying a bombast to heaven. On one side of each tombstone is the name of its owner, preceded by the legend, "Here lies the slave of God." Do slaves love their masters?
When we passed this road in the winter, black funeral flags hung from almost every hut, and even now the rags still flap in the breeze. A Serbian boy, clad in dirty cottons, shouted to us, making gesticulations. We slowed down and stopped.
"Bombe," he cried. "Aeropla-ane. Pet," he held up five fingers, "y jedan je bili slomile. Vidite shrapnel."
He pointed. We saw a quiet, early autumn landscape, the blue sky slightly flecked with thin horizontal streaks of cloud. Any scene less warlike could not have been imagined.
"Vidite tamo," he cried once more.
Straining our eyes one could just see, between the lowest strata of cloud, a series of small white round clouds floating.
"Shrapnel," said Sava, pointing.
"They hit one," said Mr. Berry.
I let in the clutch, we sped on once more. Bang! a tire burst.
Motor driving in Serbia is not a profession, it is an art. We were on another of these first-class Serbian roads. Presently we came to a long downhill.
"That is the place," said Mr. Berry to Sister Hammond, "where we spent the night last winter when the motor stuck in the mud. There, beneath that tree."
We shrugged our way down the hill, and presently came into the gipsy environments of Kragujevatz.
A man stopped us, holding up a hand.
"Bombe," he said.
We got out. In the soft earth at the side of the road was a neat hole, four inches in diameter. Peering down we could see the steel handle of the unburst bomb. We next passed a smashed paling, in the garden behind a crowd were searching for relics. An old woman had been killed, they said. We turned into the main street and plunged into a large crowd. The pavement had been torn up, and people were grubbing in the mud; pieces of charred wood were passed from hand to hand.
"That's a bit of propeller," said one. "No; it's a bit of the frame," said another. A girl proudly held up a large piece of map scorched all round the edges.
"And the men?" we asked.
"Nemachke (Germans)," answered the crowd; "both dead; one here, one over there," pointing to the middle of the road.
We came into the Stobarts' camp, pitched up on the hill behind the Kragujevatz pleasure ground.
"Did you see the aeroplanes?" they cried, running towards us.
"No," we answered; "but we saw the shrapnel."
"One was hit—it was wonderful. They were flying just over here, and a shrapnel burst quite close; and then one saw a thin stream of smoke come from the plane; then a little flicker. It seemed to fall so slowly. Then it burst into flames and came down like a great comet."
"D——n!" we said: "if only that machine had been working right yesterday."
We took our car down to the arsenal, and I left Sava to take it to bits and get it opened out, for there had been a bit of a knock in the crank case. The remains of the smashed aeroplane were piled in the yard, and from the way it had twisted up without breaking one could see from what beautiful metal the machinery was made. Some of the French experts denied that the guns had hit it—giving as their reason that one of its own bombs had exploded. But one of the engineers put his hand into a big hole which was beneath the crank case and drew out a shrapnel ball. I thought that would settle it, but the Frenchmen were not convinced. The shells were bursting fifty metres too low, they said. Fifteen bombs had fallen about the arsenal, and one man, a non-commissioned officer, had been killed.
Met Hardinge and Mawson: they both saw the aeroplane fall, and were not fifty yards from the place where it struck.
Walked back to the Stobarts' camp for lunch. A French aeroplane had come over from Belgrade too late; now it rose slowly in the air and sailed off. Saw the two dead aviators; both had evidently been killed at once, for they were charred, not blistered.
Colonel Phillips, ex-Governor of Scutari, and English military attaché, came up with the Italian attaché. A bomb had fallen just before the colonel's house and missed his servant by a hair's-breadth. The Italian was in a room opposite the Crown Prince's palace; he thought that the falling machine was going to crash through the roof, but it fell in the street not ten yards away. The camp itself was packing hard, for Mrs. Stobart had just decided to form a "flying field ambulance."
Mr. Berry and I had a tent assigned to us.
October 4th. Awoke to sounds like some one hitting a board with a mallet. Ran outside. One found the aeroplane from the little clouds of shrapnel, for it was flying very high, and was like a speck. Clouds of smoke were rolling from one quarter of the town, and we thought that a big fire was beginning, but it was extinguished. Another aeroplane came later. The guns began long before it could be seen. It dropped two bombs over the powder factory, and two in the town. Mrs. Stobart ordered everybody from the camp; but nobody left except the patients, who were driven a mile out and dumped in a wood. A long procession of townsfolk filed continuously by, running from the danger. The aeroplane dropped two more bombs in the town, and came back flying right over the camp. It was a queer feeling, staring right up at the plane, and wondering if another bomb were not falling silently towards one.
I went down to the arsenal to see about the car; and Mr. Berry and Miss Hammond went off to see the anti-aircraft guns. Mrs. Stobart had asked me to go out on the Rudnik road to see a car which had broken down, and had promised to send a motor to fetch me. Before we could leave, news was brought that another aeroplane had been telephoned. Presently we could hear the guns beginning. Hardinge turned up, and we looked out for the machine. We saw the aeroplane coming straight towards us; everybody rushed for the cellars, but I wanted to stay outside for the last moment. Hardinge was with me. Suddenly I lost sight of the plane. I ran farther out to look for it, and suddenly there was a report, and a great column of smoke just outside the arsenal. There was another behind the rifle shops, and another behind the boiler sheds. Now the aeroplane was overhead. I heard a noise like tearing silk, and lay flat upon the ground shouting to Hardinge—
"Lie flat, d——n you!"
It seemed ages before it burst. Dust and bits flew everywhere; the windows all sprang out into the yard. I looked for Hardinge, but he was unharmed. I had expected to be terrified, but I was feeling so bothered about Hardinge that I had no time to think about myself.
We heard a shrill crying, "Oh—h! oh—h!"
I ran forward, crying to Hardinge, "A man's hurt!" He answered, "Is he?" The dust was so thick I could not see at first, but as it cleared I found a workman lying on back and elbows, his knees drawn up as though he were trussed; his head waved from side to side, and he was uttering spasmodic cries. I said to him, "Where? where?" and he placed a hand to his stomach.
The man had been struck just below the ribs by a large piece of bomb, blood was welling from the wound, so I pushed his shirt into it, and ran back to the office. Mrs. Stobart's car had been brought by a lady and a youth named Boon, who had both taken cover in the cellar; so I dug up the girl, whose name I have forgotten, as I hoped she knew "first aid." Together we ran to the man, leaving Boon to bring the ambulance. "Bandages," we demanded. "Haven't any," answered the few Serbs who had gathered round; "the first aid house has been blown to pieces." We crammed our handkerchiefs into the place, and a cotton-wool arm pad which was brought, and we then took off the man's own puttees and tied him up with them. As we were doing this somebody cried—
"Aeroplanes returning."
Immediately every Serb and Austrian fled. The girl, Hardinge, and I were left alone. It was a false alarm. With the returning crowd came a large man, who was weeping.