With Serbs in Serbia

I. Journey to Belgrade

I followed Magavee at the beginning of February, on a small merchant ship that was taking oats for French cavalry horses in Dalmatia. There were a hundred soldiers in our transport, a colonel, his wife and two children, and a baby being carried to its grandmother by a Serb sergeant. There was no accommodation for passengers-we slept five in a cabin that was alive with bugs. The sea was rather rough and the Serbs seasick, but I comforted myself that it was more Odyssean for exiles to be returning to their country in a small craft. And indeed the voyage was cheerful on the whole. In intervals of calm the soldiers cooked themselves bits of food, romped with the baby, sang songs, and asked me politely what the weather was going to do: being English they thought I must be an authority on the sea, and considered it natural that I should not be sick. When at last we saw a splendid procession of ice mountains on the horizon I hoped that they were Greece, because I knew it would be wicked to admire Albania in the company of Serbs. When we approached the Dalmatian coast it looked so inhospitable that we thought Ragusa must be a myth, and indeed it is remarkable how it clings to the bare rocks and cliffs in an island of orange trees, palms and aloes. The little town was crowded when we arrived. There were French troops in charge of it, English and American sailors, Serbs en route for home from all quarters of Europe, Bulgar prisoners working drearily in the harbour, and Dalmatian soldiers still in their greygreen Austrian uniforms. But there was a feeling of life in the town, as though it were proud to be free again.

I was excited by all I saw and peered eagerly at everything: the narrow carts with open woodwork, painted with bright patterns like the toys our one-armed Obrad had made at Ben Negro; the richly ornamented Dalmatian costume which I had seen on the dolls the women had dressed in our Corsican weaving rooms; and everyone slipping about on opankas, the sandals I had thought of as too pretty to be useful, in spite of assurances.

The journey from Ragusa to Belgrade took five days. The first train we were in had carried thousands of Austrian troops throughout the war: the windows and doors were all broken; there was no light or heat; and as we climbed up the bladeless rocks of Herzegovina, away from the tempering breezes of the sea, a fierce wind blew through it. Luckily we stopped at all the stations, and the Serbs, some of whom had been demobilised and docked of their blankets by military red tape at the last moment, got out and danced their kolos. Often a peasant would turn up and play the national bagpipes, unheard in their exile- but it was jaka zima, bogami (string winter, my God). At Brod we changed, and I went out into the town and poked into little shops kept by Turks, and sat round fires the soldiers had made in the snow, while peasants in sheepskins told us of the misery of life under the Austrians. Brod is a railway junction and had been a military centre. They had been forced to sell them all their pigs and cattle and every bit of tin or lead they possessed, and had never dreamed that they would be freed. In the end there had been a glorious rout, and the Austrians had flung away their guns and abandoned their oxen and horses, and the children had plucked the pips from the officers' coats as souvenirs. There was a restaurant in the station where we could get something hot, but the Serbs were outraged by the high prices and blamed their Slav brothers for them, and there were mutterings of "Schwaber" and "Boches" and "Lickspittles of the Habsburgs" which boded ill, I thought, for the new Yugoslavia. For these lands were all joined now with Serbia in a new and glorious freedom and unity, but how were the long-divided brothers, separated for hundreds of years, moulded by different histories and cultures-how were they going to get on together?

In the evening we got into large cattle-trucks to continue our journey. They were terribly cold, but at least one could stretch and walk about. I had brought a whole camping outfit, and I spread out my mattress, and there was straw to add a little heat. The men stole wood from train trucks and made a fire. The smoke was bitter, and we had to open the door, but we had an illusion of warmth, and I made tea and shared out chocolate and sardines. A man who had been a prisoner in Russia sprang in from nowhere and told us his experiences, until a colonel, who was asleep in the corner, woke up and ordered him out. I thought him brutal, but later realised that he was very ill-indeed, this was his last military command: he died soon after his arrival in Belgrade, of pneumonia, caught in the icy train from Ragusa to Brod. We arrived at Semlin in darkness. I thought of Casabianca-ing with the baggage-I had brought an immense amount of stuff with me because of Magavee's accounts of the nakedness of Belgrade. (I hadn't brought a pail, and every now and again during that ten days' journey I reflected that life without a pail would be difficult.) While I was wondering what to do, someone came along and said that the Danube was freezing, and that this night's ferry might be the last for several days. (The bridge had, of course, been destroyed.) I put some Bizerta soldiers in charge of my stuff and wormed my way on to the boat.

Belgrade, buried in snow, loomed up on the farther shore. I did not know where Magavee was, and I asked about hotels. The Serbs were too patriotic to say that none was functioning, but their non-committal answers were discouraging. But at this moment a little gnome of a man with a pointed beard stepped forward. He was thin and wizened with care and underfeeding, but I could see from his civilian dress and his neat appearance that he was a tchinovnik-a civil servant. He told me that his name was Danilo, that he was coming back to his home after four years' exile, that he had a great respect for the English, whose work for Serbs he had seen in Corsica, and that he would like to take me to sleep with his punitza. I did not know what punitza was-it sounded to me rather like the stenitza (vermin) we had had in the ship-but I was cold and tired, hungry and homeless, and I told Danilo I would love to sleep with his punitza. We arrived at the quay and then stumbled along dark, snowy streets. I carried my bag and his, for he had a heavy box with the collections of four years inside it. At last we came to a door-Danilo opened it, and I saw a narrow alley with some tumbledown houses on each side of it. Danilo struck a match and we went up an outside staircase and along a verandah. He said with some pride that these had once been Turkish houses. He tapped at a door, and a voice from inside asked nervously, "who is there?" "A friend," my guide replied firmly. "But what friend-who?" the voice was frightened still. "A friend, don't you know me, Danilo?" "But what-not my Danilo?" The voice ended on a scream: the door opened and a little old woman came out and fell on Danilo's neck. This was the punitza, and she was, I discovered, the mother of Danilo's wife.

She had been in bed when we arrived to save light and wood, but she was fully dressed, and she soon lit a fire for us and cooked a meal- macaroni, fried pork and tea (perhaps Serbia was not starving, I thought hopefully). And all the while she was chattering away, telling her son-in-law about the years of the occupation. "It was all tears," she ended. "And we never thought that they would go-never, never." Then she showed me a photo of an officer with an embroidered towel round it to keep it sacred. "It is my son," she said. "He was the first to enter Belgrade." Then Danilo told her how her daughter had been ailing ever since Albania, but that Zorka, her grandchild, was now a handsome girl of fifteen and could speak French. He had come to Belgrade in advance to prepare the home for his family. The punitza told him that his house was bare-the Schwaber had not left a stick behind and had burnt all his books. He told her manfully not to bother with such details when they had a guest to entertain, and she prepared a couch for me, loading it with warm Pirot rugs, and I lay down on it gratefully and fell asleep.

The next day I wandered about Belgrade until I saw a Serb I had known in Bizerta, and he told me where Magavee was. I found her in a pleasant flat with lots of furniture in it-for everyone had lent her things-and several pails. I went round Belgrade with her next day and watched her, patiently distributing clothes, while ragged mobs howled round her like wild wolves. The dispensing of soup to haggard little gutter-snipes looked peaceful in contrast. Magavee was happy with immense jobs on hand, but I found the poverty of the city discouraging, and was glad to hear that they were short-handed at Nish, the S.R.F. headquarters in Serbia. We had decided before I left Bizerta that Maurice should bring all the workshop equipment to Belgrade when it was time to close down Larnbert, ready to start a Home for the re-education of the disabled there: if not for our men who, we knew, were all longing to get back to their homes, then for others. I wanted to help in this: I felt it was more constructive than dispensing temporary doles, but in the meantime decided to go to Nish, hoping that they would send me out to a village. Magavee had already been pulling strings for the workshops, and had had interviews with ministers of Reconstruction, Agriculture and Education, and I knew she would have everything taped when the materials arrived.

II. Nish

The S.R.F. was running the hospital for civilians in Nish and had a big work on hand. The hospital had two hundred beds, and treated hundreds of out-patients every day. Besides this, they had opened several dispensaries in the outlying villages and had an orphanage in Nish. The main work of the S.R.F. had from the start been medical, and it is amazing how much this voluntary society had been able to accomplish. It had sent five fully equipped hospital units to Serbia during the first year of war. In one of these alone, the British Farmers' Fever Unit, sent out in April, I9I5, to fight typhus, there was a staff of forty-one, of whom five were doctors and thirteen fully trained fever nurses. It is remarkable that doctors and nurses were forthcoming in those days in such numbers, but Serbia had sent out appeals to the world in her overwhelming plight, and it was natural to run to the help of the smallest and bravest of our Allies. France, America and Russia sent medical aid to her too. Most of the stores and equipment were lost when the retreat started in October, I9I5, but the S.R.F. had opened hospitals, mainly for civilians, on the Salonika front, and had worked in Monastir when it was retaken by the Allies throughout the heavy bombardments.

When I arrived at the hospital in Nish on February 25th, I9I9, I found many of the veterans from the first S.R.F. units still working there. My work had mostly been carried out in pleasant and often idyllic conditions, and I was struck by the bleakness and discomfort in which the forty-odd British members of the hospital staff lived. It was clean but there was no common room, and no fire anywhere, although it was still very cold. I thought of the Corsican gendarme's "quelle noblesse, quel sacrifice!" and of Drago's "c'est quelque chose pour moi trop sublime." Everything was given up to the patients-and indeed the staff had little time to think of their own comfort. Nish was the second largest town in Serbia-though it looked like a straggling village-and the centre of a huge district. There had been practically no medical aid during the three years of the occupation. There was a great deal to be done and no lack of what the doctors called "interesting cases." I found Dot Newhall the friendliest and jolliest of the hospital staff. She was their sanitary inspector. She told me that the hospital was a paradise to what it had been when they arrived. It had been used by the Bulgars and the filth was indescribable. I came across her because of the scandal of my bug. I had had three sleepless nights-one with a louse, next with a mouse, which ran over my face, and the third, at the hospital, with a bug. When I found how deeply Dot Newhall took the bug to heart I protested that I had brought it with me-I hadn't realized what an insult and reproach a bug would be to a sanitary inspector in an English hospital.

After Dot had cleansed my room by burning sulphur in it, and going round all the crevices with a blow-pipe, we had tea together, and I asked her what had been the worst moments in her war experiences. She laughed gaily. "That is difficult to say," she said. "I was in the Retreat from Mons first. That wasn't exactly a picnic. Then I joined the S.R.F. and went out with Mrs. Stobart's Hospital Unit to Kraguyevatz. The peasants came from all around and there was a lot of typhus, diphtheria and relapsing fever amongst them. After a bit I caught typhus. It was extremely painful. We were so short-handed that I kept on disinfecting the patients and doing all my ordinary duties when my temperature was I04. When I took to my bed I had horrible nightmares-I remember dogs tearing at my throat and my father looking on and not helping me-and frightful pains in my back and legs. They thought I was going to die, but I knew I wasn't. But I was starving and they wouldn't give me anything to eat, except slops. At last a Serb orderly brought me some beef and fried potatoes, and though I was so weak I could only eat it with my fingers, from that time on I got better. Still I don't think typhus was the worst moment. It was horrible when we got orders to retreat and had to leave our patients behind at Kraguyevatz. The Bulgars had started to bomb us, and Mrs. Stobart sent word to the British authorities but had a reply that it was true the Bulgars were marching into Serbia, but of course on our side!"

"And you were in the Albanian Retreat?" I asked, awed. "You bet I was," she said, "but Albania was only a little bit of it. We were retreating for six weeks. The mountain part of it was grim, but it was very beautiful-better than the Alps; there were gorgeous sunsets and ice-clear torrents in which I bathed and washed my clothes, and we made camp fires at night and sat round them singing carols, and the Serbs sang their songs, and once we caught a salmon and cooked it in a pail. Of course it was very horrible. There were corpses everywhere and we couldn't stop for the dying. We were on pack-horses and they kept slipping, and some of them fell over the precipices, and we had no corn or hay for them. We ate the dead horses and oxen-that's what kept us going-but often one felt sick and it was difficult to keep on, especially for the women who got giddy on heights. And my orderly was ill with typhoid. I had to walk by him and hold him on to his pony-I thought he would die. It was worse for others than for us. We were always hungry, but the soldiers were starving and the prisoners dying as they walked. Still, the mountains weren't the worst part. As far as Petch we had come in cars. It was a very wet autumn and the cars had to go through rivers, over rocks, boulders, broken country and fields. We were always having to pull them out of the mud with ropes and push them along when they got frozen, and if we rode in them we were beaten black and blue with the jolts. And then we were always having to wait for each other. The Bulgars were only a few miles behind us and we did not want to be taken prisoner. If we slept out of doors we were frozen stiff, but indoors was worse-it was always with hundreds of other people, and the vermin and the stench of human filth were unbearable. The monks near Petch allowed us to sleep in their barns, and we took off our clothes and washed them for the first time in eleven days-but the monks were rather pained when we hung them out to dry in their close. I threw away all my luggage before the end. It made it easy with the Customs coming through Italy and France."

"Well," I said, "the Retreat must have been the worst moment really." "Oh no," she said brightly, "it wasn't. The Advance last October and November was much worse. You see, the Serbs went at such terrific speed, and they outran their provisions, and they dashed through rivers without fords or bridges. The Austrians drove up all the cattle because they thought they would get away in time, but they didn't, and everywhere the cattle were dying, and there were thousands and thousands of prisoners and they were dying too." "And did you have to go through the Advance too?" "Yes, I always had to go the first every where with my squad to clean up before the Unit came along. That had been my role all the time on the Salonika front. We had to rake and lime the ground before the tents could be put up, dig pits for the disposal of sewage and water, erect the cleansing station, the disinfector, the latrines and an incinerator. That was for our tented hospitals. We had two, at Sorovitch and at Kremyan. Where buildings had been used we had to get rid of the bugs and the rats. We had ten outposts with soup kitchens and relief centres and two hospitals at Monastir. And I had always to be going round them to see if the orderlies were keeping the sanitation in proper order. But the Advance was for me the most horrible experience because of the state everything was left in by the enemy. When we got to Nish I was told to clean up the High School for our S.R.F. hospital. The centre of the building looked like a sewage pit; after digging for some time in it we came on human heads and limbs and every kind of filth. Beneath this we discovered a beautiful marble hall and staircase. All the sewage tanks, which used to be emptied by the gipsies, had to be cleared by my men and myself, standing up to our armpits, wearing mackintosh trousers and wading boots. After this building was ready, a request came from the Serbian headquarters to let it be used again as a school and go and do the same for the county hospital, the place you're in now. I saw the point. It was filthy too. My squad went on strike, but I talked to them for half an hour, and they went on again. They are wonderful really-the most splendid orderlies in the world, and the Bulgarian prisoners are just as good." "So you haven't got disillusioned like some people, with the Serbs?" I asked. "I? Never. I never forget that they might have given in I9I5-it would have been natural to do so, and quite honourable, but they preferred the torment of Retreat and the dragging years of war on the Salonika front. Yet they are the most peaceable folk in the world-all they want is to be on their little farms with their pigs and their hens and their wives and children, and a bit of merry-making on saints' days and slavas."

III. Gerdalitza

Two Scottish women drove me down in a Fiat. The Scottish women had several hospital units in Serbia and were always very co-operative with the S.R.F. They whirled me through Leskovatz, a straggling town where there was a large Serb hospital which they described as a cemetery, and at last we came to Gerdalitza, a pretty little village in the Morava valley, where the mountains start after a wide plain.

Miss Maw was living in the cottage of Milka, a Bosnian woman whom she described as the soul of kindness. She herself was a slender woman with white hair, vivid smile, and a quaint, gay manner: I felt as though I had met her in some old-fashioned book. She was very run down, probably through living too long on bully beef and tinned foods, for there was nothing to be bought in the village except eggs and bread. She told me that her main job had been to look after transport. Gerdalitza was, pending the repair of the bridges, a railhead. The railway worked already from Salonika to Vranya, but not for the hundred kilometres between Vranya and Gerdalitza. (From us to Nish it worked again.) The transport over this gap was done by our British Army Service Corps lorries. My work would be to stop every lorry coming north and, if it had S.R.F. stores, send them off to Nish by train-also to look after all nurses and relief workers on their way to or from Salonika. She had been extremely busy because she had arranged the transport of the thousands of refugees that got stranded in our bottleneck: had told the A.S.C. men whom to take first. Not that she had been appointed for this job, but in the way that happens in emergency work-people see a confusion which they can put straight and appoint themselves to do it. Now unfortunately a Serb interpreter had come to do the work; people complained that no one could get transport unless they bought his favour.

Soon after my arrival in Gerdalitza I had to go to the funeral of Sister Fraser at Predeyane, the next village to mine. She had been in charge of a dispensary there and had had hundreds of patients, for the S.R.F. sisters in these outlying places played the part of doctors. There was a large camp of Bulgar prisoners nearby. They were starving; many were dying of typhus. She had run a soup kitchen for them and nursed the sickest of them. Then she caught typhus herself. The S.R.F. doctor came from Nish to give her oxygen, but he had little hope for her. To recover from typhus, he said, one must have great stamina and will to live, and she was exhausted. The S.R.F. had lost a number of their staff in I9I5, both doctors and nurses, through typhus on the top of overwork.

The funeral was a simple ceremony. It was a lovely day-full of the first breathing of spring. The peasants came with wreaths of anemones and asphodel, bunches of scylla, violets and grape-hyacinth and twigs of cypress. Four men carried the coffin up the hill and laid it in a hole that had already been dug, and the people threw in their offerings. Some of them threw apples and one a silver coin. Was the coin the fee for the ferryman, I wondered, and the apples so that she should not be hungry when she had crossed the river? The women said they did not know: it was the custom. The men chanted funeral hymns in Old Slavonic, and the women prayed that the earth might cover and lie closely round the foreign sestra, who had been their friend, for Serbs fear that the unburied rise again as vampires and suck the blood of their kinsfolk. This breath from the ancient world, the world of Homer as well as of the Byzantine Church, was somehow consoling. For thousands of years people had lived and died in the Morava valley, and all that time there had been no break in the ritual for the dead.

The graveyard was on the top of a green hill and looked down the narrow cleft which the river makes here in the mountains. People told me that Sister Fraser had no home and no family to grieve for her. It was not an unhappy way to die. We walked most of the way back to Gerdalitza (about eight miles) as our lorry stuck in the mud.

Lorries were sticking in the mud all the time and breaking their axles in the holes. I was sorry for the A.S.C. men who had to drive them. Many of them had not been home for three years, and they were bitter about being kept in the Balkans. They used to pinch the stores, sell the petrol and spare parts of their cars, and take bribes from the refugees whom they transported, but they were sometimes late with their rations, and they felt the relaxation of effort that the peace was to everyone. "These roads are being the ruin of us, Sister," they said to me, the inference being that they should be sent home to save their morals.

My time was mostly taken up with the foreign relief workers that hurtled either up or down Serbia. Nearly all of them got held up in Gerdalitza and wanted to be housed, fed and comforted. I had camp beds and blankets and put them up either in my room or in Milka's kitchen. I found the numbers of different missions rather bewildering. There were our own people, of the S.R.F., either returning home or going up to Nish, the Scottish Women, the American Red Cross, the Y.M.C.A., two other brands of canteen workers, the Salvation Army and several others. There was an immense amount to be done in Serbia, but I could not help wondering if all this effort was being properly coordinated and directed, and if the authorities would not get rather harassed by seeing a new mission of mercy on their doorstep every day. It was not that too much help was sent to Serbia-but that at the beginning there was no one whose duty it was to find out what the problems were and to see that there was co-operation amongst the voluntary societies and no overlapping. Effort was wasted and talent left idle that might have been used. The S.R.F., concentrating mainly on medical work, was fully employed on the most urgent of Serbia's needs, but it had no jurisdiction over other societies.

My village was a microcosm of a larger world. There was great need of canteens in it, as at all railheads, but everyone wanted to rush to Belgrade and the bigger centres. I wrote in a letter home:- It is a funny fugitive population at this railhead. Everyone bears the stamp of war, war without gusto, heavy and sordid, a continuation of what has been here during all the occupation. The difficulty is to throw off the pall, now that the enemy is no longer here. People suffer from nervelessness and lack of spirit. Everywhere you are hampered by the listlessness of ordicials, lack of organisation, half-hearted work. You walk down the road and find forty men driving stakes into the river, taking days where hours might do-yet on those stakes depends all the transport of Serbia. Until the bridges are mended famine prices and scarcity must continue. The refugees are in the worst case. For weeks they live at the station in cattle trucks, waiting for lorries which refuse to take them. There are among them Greeks, Macedonians, Turks, Rumanians, even Bulgars-all of them Serb subjects. Many were transported by the Bulagrs - others fled when their homes became a battlefield. Now they are all wandering back again without any direction or plan. They oughtn't to have been allowed to move till the train was running. No one knows what they live on. Then there are the Serb soldiers, tramping up from Vranya, struggling home after years of absence. They are terribly loaded, not only with their kit, but with the treasures they have acquired abroad and are loth to throw away-soap, tobacco, sugar, cotton bobbins and all sorts. Their rations consist only of bread. They are very cheerful as a rule: they are going kutchi (home), they say. Alas, if I had only been here three months ago! Then I could have had, not only a kitchen for the refugees, but a canteen for these soldiers, and for our own A.S.C. men too. But a canteen needs more organisation and utensils than it is worth recommending, for the time Gerdalitza will continue to be the sort of Devil's Cauldron it is now. They say the bridges will be mended in a fortnight, and then Gerdalitza tumbles again into Arcadian peace-no refugees, no discharged soldiers, no British lorry drivers, no merchants, no caravans of ox waggons, no English sestra, no kaleidoscopic foreign missions hustling through-only the gipsies playing their trumpets and drums still, and the mayors and tchinovniks drinking at the kafana, while their babas (womenfolk) spin at home, and the boys and girls dance kolas on the green.

I see from my diary that I started a kitchen the day after I had written this letter. Macedonians were used to eating out of a cauldron and sharing their spoons, I discovered, so I seized some bags of rice and beans and some fat that were labelled "S.R.F. Hospital, Nish," and an old Greek made a fire and cooked them in a large copper vessel he was taking home. Soon we were feeding a hundred every evening and everybody cheered up. It was just after I had started this that a young Greek officer made himself known to me. He had been sent on a Hellenic mission, he told me, to look after his compatriots. His business was to get them farther on their journey, and for this purpose he had already begun bribing or terrorising Albanians to give up their ox carts. I found it very agreeable to talk to him. I was impressed, not only by his perception and understanding, but by his humanity. He took the plight of the refugees to heart. The Serbs had supped so full of horrors that a little suffering more or less did not worry them-but he was not so hardened although he had been a volunteer in the Venizelos army since I9I5 and had been at the front. He spoke French perfectly and seemed a very European figure in those mediaval surroundings. He came from Smyrna and always kept the key of his house in his pocket: one day, without warning, he would turn up there, he thought. Would his mother recognise him? She had been very beautiful-would her hair be white? When I went through the wrecked shell of Smyrna in I929, I thought of this Greek and hoped that he had got back to his home before it had been burnt by Mustapha Kemal.

After he had come we got things into a much better state-two can often do much more than twice as much as one. By good chance the Serb interpreter was arrested, and I found myself in charge of all the transport, and was able to hurry off the women and children, and those who had been held up longest. I was shocked by people's attempts to bribe me for a place on the lorry, especially with sausage which I did not like. The Turks were the most dignified of the refugees-they never asked for anything: when I gave them food or put them on the lorries, they bowed as though they were pashas. They were good as under-dogs certainly, but they had left their mark on the wretched Macedonians, who fell at my feet and kissed my shoes, for centuries of slavery had robbed them of pride.

Milka told me many stories of the Bulgarian occupation. A soldier was killed in a village brawl and she was imprisoned as hostage. She didn't tell me why they had let her go. Probably because she was a handsome woman and had paid the price. She said the worst thing was hearing an old man shouting outside her window. They had tied him to a stake in the river, and for two days and nights she heard him crying "Gospodine! Gospodine!" On the second night the cry grew fainter, and at last it stopped, and she knew that he was dead. Gospodine means Lord, and also master or sir. Was he crying to God for help, or to the Bulgar who had left him there to die? She told me of many other atrocities, but none of them affected me like the old man shouting "Gospodine!"

All Balkan races are cruel. They were trampled on for five hundred years, and cruelty breeds cruelty. I was glad to think that the Serbs had not been allowed by the Allies to march into Sofia and take their revenge. Serbs of Bizerta had expressed to me their indignation at this. It took away from them their joy in the Armistice. Yet the individual peasants did not feel revengeful. They were full of pity for the Bulgarian prisoners who passed through our village on their way to the Lescovatz hospital. Sometimes these men fell down in front of Milka's cottage. When I ran out and asked the peasants to lend their pots so that we could cook them rice, they did it with enthusiasm. This was the first time in my life I had seen people dying of starvation. Yet Serbia was not a famine area. There was not much to eat but no one needed to die of hunger. We were very near the Bulgarian frontier in the Morava valley. If they had taken away the barbed wire, the prisoners could have got home by themselves in a few hours. Yet they were kept in Serbia to spread typhus and die of hunger. The neglect of them was not intentional-but there was so much to think of in the immediate post-Armistice period, and communications of all kinds were difficult- no posts, no telephone or telegraph, and wireless, of course, not yet in use. I had received no letter since I had left Bizerta, read no newspaper. For me a two-month void seemed very long, but for the Serbs - it had lasted more than three years, so it was nothing to fuss about.

All the time I was at Gerdalitza, peasants came to me to tell me of their ailments. I bound up their sores and gave them some simple remedies, but I was ashamed that I had no medical skill. I had tried to learn some rudiments of nursing beyond the trivial First Aid, but in the hospitals where I had helped in Gravesend at the beginning of the war, I had only been allowed to empty bed-pans, clean tins and make cocoa. The nursing profession is like a mediaval guild-afraid to impart its secrets, except to those who can give up four years to learning them. Some sick women walked for a day and a night over rough mountains because they heard that an English sestra was in Gerdalitza-it was dreadful to send them away.

At last the bridge was mended and I could pack up. I was sorry to leave Gerdalitza. It was the prettiest place I had seen in Serbia. I liked the glinting river and the square, white Serbian cottages with the chimney in the middle, like the houses children draw, and the patches of orchard round them, peaceful as convent courtyards, and the meadows with their white cyclamen and grape-hyacinths, and the hills, and the oxen ploughing and the peasants sowing. There were sheep and lambs too, for the women had somehow kept their farms going and hid away some stock and grain from the enemy. Pigs and chickens ran in and out of the cottages sharing the life of the inhabitants. I used to go to a village on the other side of the river. I heard singing in a house and the soft thud of a shuttle. I went in and found a woman weaving, her mother and three daughters spinning. They were singing the Emperor's Spinning Song. (Magavee found me the words of it when I told her of it later.)

In the evening the girls were spinning. Who has spun the most? Mother's Ruzha has spun the most. The praise of her reached the Emperor, the Emperor sent her a plait of flax. "Here, Ruzha, is a plait of flax for you, spin me tents of it; what is left over, spin with it gifts for yourself. May you wear them out in my palace! May you sleep on my arm!"

Ruzha was cleverer than the Emperor; she sent the Emperor a shuttle. "Here, Emperor, is a shuttle for you; make me a house of it; what is left over make yourself a palace with it. Then I will walk in it and sleep on your arm!"

I was sorry to leave Milka-she had always been kind. The Greek had told me that she was famous in the village for her beauty and easy virtue, and I felt Miss Maw would have been distressed had she known, but we owed her a lot for her hospitality-she wouldn't take any payment, and she had often had to sit in her courtyard when the crowds of our suppliants were very large. She might be a Moll Flanders, but she had been very good to us.

When the time came to go it was difficult to get on to the train. There were people on the buffers and on the roofs and steps of the carriages and in the W.C.'s and in the luggage vans, but the Greek pulled me through a window and at last the train did get to Nish, though it was very slow and we had to stop for two hours to let the down-train pass. It was a single track railway up from Salonika. I could see that it was difficult for the French and English armies to get up to save Serbia when the Bulgars had attacked.

IV. Back to Belgrade

I had nothing to do during two days on the quayside, so I wrote up my diary. This is an extract:-

I am sitting by the Danube at Prahovo. It is a lovely day-the river, the trees and flats, and the distant hills opposite, are so softly tinted that they seem unreal. This is soothing after a night in a smelly cattle truck with snoring refugees and processions of insects, phantom or real-a night which the Greek would have called "un calvaire." But one must pay something, I suppose, for a morning opposite Rumania, and one doesn't pay in cash: in fact I have scarcely used money since I came to Serbia. And this is the Danube. What do I know of the Danube? It flows through emptiness in my mind-just as it does here through empty country. I have a few associations with it-all gloomy: of barbarians on its northern shore in Roman times, Goths crossing it in the Dark Ages, fleeing from Huns, French drowned in it after Blenheim, Napoleon a-straddle of it somewhere near Vienna. Has it its legends as the Rhine has, its pageant of historic circumstance as the Seine or Thames? I have no heritage in the Danube-scarcely a memory. Yet I watch it, fascinated. A river is inscrutable. The water that slides past me now, so smooth and so wide, has washed the quays and wharfs of two European capitals and of the Serbs' little Belgrade. And if it were at Budapest when the revolution broke out fourteen days ago, it shows no sign of it on its unruffled surface. It flows on-secret, incessant and inscrutable.
V. Clothes Distribution and the Zadruga Soon after my arrival in Belgrade, six hundred of our Bizerta disabled turned up. We prepared a lodging for them, and were very happy to see them, but next day they had all vanished-had floated either up or down the Danube. The mayors were going to send ox-carts from their villages to bring them home, so we were told. Bogosav was not with them-the weaker men were being brought later. I was sad not to see him for I was much attached to him.

I got hold of some marquees and two Bulgarian prisoners and some Serbian teachers and started a kindergarten in Kalimegdan for a hundred-odd children. We served cocoa and biscuits each morning, and I planned to open them all over the town but got diverted to other work. This was a legacy from Magavee. She had been doing clothes' distribution on a grand scale in remote parts of Serbia-but she had to return to England rather suddenly so left me to carry on.

These distributions were not like the chaotic affairs they had been at the start, when we had had all the discarded wardrobes of England and America to contend with, as well as hundreds of thousands of exquisite baby garments-in a land where there was scarcely a child under four years old. An immense consignment of governmental material had been diverted from Russia, its original destination, and sent to Serbia. This was standardised material, brown cloth, calico and flannellette. The peasants could adapt it to their needs and make it up to fit in with their national costume. This was an enormous improve ment, but still better would have been to have sent shiploads of raw wool and flax. This could have been rationed out to all and fairly distributed over the whole country, and would have given the women what they most longed for.

Magavee came back much elated from a distribution on the Zlatibor plateau near the Drina. Her interest in old French epic had now been diverted to Serb customs and legends and she had struck gold.

"I asked the headman of each village," she said to me, "to prepare lists of the families who should receive clothing, and to get volunteers to send their ox-waggons to the railhead to transport it to the villages or farmsteads. I had expected large families of ten or twelve members, even after the decimation of war, but in these lists there were eighty and ninety in one family, and some frail old grandmother would turn up with two ox-waggons to receive her dole. Of course I suspected the Zlatibor lists and I asked the headman of the district to let me investigate. He was delighted and told me I would see something unique. He took me along and soon I noticed log cottages with steep wooden roofs peeping out from a shower of plum blossom. This was one of the families of eighty-it was a zadlruga. An old peasant came out of the largest of the cottages and received me with intense interest and pleasure; he was the head of the zadruga with absolute authority over all its members. I asked him how he got his headship. He told us that at the death of his father all the married members of the zadruga had elected him. Each of his brothers on marrying had built himself a tiny log cabin, close to the main house, where he lived with his family and his old mother. But they all had meals together and shared everything in common. He said that every man is trained from childhood for his special duty and keeps it for life; one brother had charge of the orchards, another of the cows, another of the ploughing and so on, so that each becomes an expert. But women's duties change weekly; bread making, weaving, looking after the small children, are too monotonous to be permanent occupations. The women were all under the old mother, who may have been about seventy-five but was full of vigour and with the eye of an eagle.

"A young soldier of this group, who had just been discharged and had been in France, spoke to me in French; it was obvious that he was in some measure of disgrace. He explained that he wanted to break out of the zarduga and be given his share to set up a tailor's shop in the nearest town."

I asked Magavee if she thought that these zadrugas would last, or if they would break up with Western influence. "Well, I suppose," she said, "that they are too conservative. When young men want to adopt new methods and make improvements, it must be quite impossible for them-the zadrugas will never stand up to modern demands. But they have been a great experience in collective effort."

VI. An Orphan Hunt

Buildings were the great difficulty in Serbia, but a camping site was found fifteen miles south of Belgrade, near the hill of Avala, and Dr. MacIlroy decided to bring up the equipment of her tented hospital from Salonika, and make an orthopedic centre for disabled men there. She had had a workshop in Salonika, where Miss Hill, who had been with us in Bizerta, had directed the making of limb supports, and temporary legs and arms. There was a fine stretch of flat grassland where tents could be set up, and a valley near it where there had been a silver mine worked by the Austrians until the time of their retreat. The place was littered with half-destroyed machinery and plant, but luckily there were a number of wooden sheds, and even an unfinished house or two, where we could set up our workshops.

The Government lent the Scottish Women a hundred German prisoners, and they made the roads and set up the camp. Many of our master-craftsmen came back to us. Brankitsa bought a whole farmyard of animals for flannellette and soap. Avala was ready for half the disabled of Serbia, but not many came. People won't always do things for their own good-many of the men had been away from home for seven years: they were too tired to bother about learning new trades or having limb supports. If they were lacking an arm or a foot, they felt they could grow a new one-nothing daunted their optimism. The Scottish Women opened dispensaries for the village folk. They also took in convalescents from a T.B. hospital they had in Belgrade. We decided to take in orphan boys and teach them trades along with the few disabled we had collected.

By the time the camp at Avala was in full swing, my brother had to go home. Before he left he made Brankitsa promise to return to England soon and marry him. Maurice was replaced by Major Howie, who for ten years had been in charge of a farm training centre in Nyasaland. He asked me if I would go orphan-hunting. I was delighted -I had come across hundreds of orphans while I was distributing clothes: every village was full of them. He suggested I might bring a dozen. "Why not fifty?" I asked. "All right, fifty," he agreed. In the end there were eighty.

The first place I went to was Grocka, some miles down the Danube. The Member of Parliament for a nearby village was anxious to accompany me on my search. He was a tall, stout man, who looked rather unnatural in an ill-fitting pepper-and-salt suit and stiff white collar. He would have been more at home in the brown homespun of the peasant, I felt. But he was jovial and exuberant. Unfortunately he missed the boat, but as I had spent a week in Grocka on a clothes' distribution, I knew my way about. Grocka was the head of a srez or small department, and we had called in families from all the villages belonging to it, distributing free to I,600 families, and selling (far below cost) to another 700. As the clothing was standardised, it was easily dealt with. The usual ration per family of six was: one pair of army boots, one blanket, one khaki overcoat, one short red soldier's coat dyed, one and a half yards of woollen cloth (double width), fifteen yards of flannellette, three shirts, three pants, two lbs. of soap, ten candles, one reel of cotton, and tape. The distribution had been orderly. The trouble had come-as with all these distributions-in the aftermath. I had gone some days earlier to Grocka to discuss with the mayor and the headmen of the villages the categories to be put on the lists-widows, orphans, disabled men, and people with less than a certain amount of land or stock. The trouble was that the mayors could never resist the temptation of smuggling on to the lists some of their own friends and political supporters. As everybody needed clothing this favouritism awoke pas sionate rage in all those who got nothing.

The first person I saw in Grocka was the old schoolmarm who had helped me through the clothes' distribution. She jumped out on me, waving the broom with which she was cleaning her cottage. People still believed in witches in Serbia (they had never burned them as in other countries), and I wondered what they thought of her-especially as she was unmarried, a thing almost unknown. I often heard of witches, who did harm to their enemies by working on images they made of them in clay, but I wasn't able to pursue this train of thought for the schoolmarm was kissing me rapturously, and had evidently a great deal to tell me. "We have a new mayor now," she announced triumphantly, "it was we women who did it. The day after you left we took our picks and shovels and brickbats and surrounded his house. We shouted for hours, but he wouldn't come out-we would have torn him to pieces. But he has had to resign. Those radical friends of his- the richest men in the neighbourhood, carrying off all that good cloth which England sent for the poor: and the soap and the candles! Long live the women of Serbia! We put an end to the scandal-he daren't show himself now." She glowed with pleasure. I told her of my quest, and she took me to see the new mayor, the creation of the women of Grocka. He was a gentle blue-eyed peasant, with courteous, easy man ners. He took me round to see the orphans of Grocka. I found four living with their uncle, who was doing what he could for them, but he had five children of his own and no wife, and the orphans looked tattered, underfed and dirty. I chose out the eldest of them, a fair-haired boy of twelve, dressed in something green that had once been a curtain. We found three others in a cottage. The eldest was a boy of fifteen- that meant a man in Serbia. He was working for a neighbour and Supporting his two little sisters-this was a group that couldn't be touched But there were some alone in the world, keeping goats or pigs for their food, learning nothing and belonging to no one: they were eager to come to our Colony, and the mayor promised to send them in an oxcart.

The next day the Member of Parliament turned up. He had been delayed by important business. His home was in a village ten miles away. We drove over to it in a springless cart. Our driver was full of spirit, and we rattled from side to side, over a road full of holes. The Member had put on a white waistcoat, and looked more than usually grand and unnatural. When we got to his village he took me to the kafana for lunch. He told the waiters to do their best for the foreign guest, but all they could manage was the usual Serbian paprikash, stew, rather greasy, and very hot with red pepper. I tried to eat with an appearance of appetite, but I felt that something was wrong: my host was not at his ease. Even the excellent local white wine did not help. I had expected to be taken to his home, knowing Serb hospitality, and I asked him how his wife was. "She's alive and healthy," he said grudgingly, "but she's growing old. What will you ? She's growing old." I said that I wanted to meet her, and after the meal he gave in and took me to his house. A pretty brown-eyed woman came into the courtyard to greet us-it was not that she was growing old: she was still in the thirties, but she had a yellow handkerchief over her head and wore a wide homespun skirt and embroidered apron. She was a peasant.

He introduced me to her shamefacedly. "Une paysanne," he said. "What will you?" she said sadly, catching his drift. I was surprised-I had met lawyers and generals, and heard of voivodas (field-marshals), who were extremely proud of their peasant origin and often put on homespun and opantvs when they went home. In the evening he recovered his spirits. He invited the mayor and two other local officials to meet me, and we had supper under the trees: stewed chicken with rice and salad followed by clotted milk. There were signs of the Austrian occupation about the meal as no one had a knife except me, and that was the Member's pocket knife. My host explained my mission to the local dignitaries and told them to send runners over the whole country side so that the orphans could be collected at the village hall for me to interview-he was an organiser, he said. He spoke to me in French before his compatriots, but every now and then there were asides in Serbian. "You can't judge by her exterior," he whispered; "she looks simple enough, I grant you, but they are not God-knows-who, these Englishwomen. Who knows what luxury she is used to in her own country? Who knows what grand house she lives in or how rich her parents are?" There was a great muttering of "Who knows? Who knows?" and "No, they're not God-knows-who," in reply.

During the meal I noticed a rough-looking youth slouching about in the background. This was another sore point-the son of eighteen, a peasant, fit to dig and nothing else. He was about to marry, his mother told me joyfully. "That shouldn't be," his father said desperately, lapsing into Serbian. "Of course I know it shouldn't be, and yet I am obliged to give in. What can I do? My wife is getting old: she has two other children at home. He is the biggest; he has a hearty appetite and she is tired of cooking and working for him. If he takes a wife now she will do all that for him-make his clothes, knit his socks, wash his linen, keep him fed and his house clean. It's practical, very practical and I can't oppose it. But it's a bad custom, a peasant custom. The French and English are wiser; they do not marry so young. But you are ripe races, while we, we are a green race still. We don't know. Here the peasant marries at fifteen, at sixteen, and has ten or twelve children. What will you? Experience doesn't teach them. If I had been here I would have sent my boy to the Grammar School. But I was away and he was here under the Austrians for four years; all he could do was to dig. I shall send my other boy to school-he will be a doctor, a lawyer, a great monsieur. But for this one it is too late. He is a peasant now and I can't save him. Let him be a peasant. Let him dig. Let him marry. Let him have ten children. I can't prevent it." He mopped his forehead. To fill the gap in the conversation I asked if I could see the bride-to-be. The Member looked surprised at the request and said that she was no particular one. There were several who would do. He and his wife hadn't made the choice yet-the marrying season was after the harvest, in two or three months' time.

It was growing late, the guests went home. The Member of Parlia ment again looked ill at ease. At last he burst out. He had wanted to put me up in his own home-but the Schwaber had taken away the carpets and-he had to confess it-there were fleas in the beds. He had asked a rich neighbour to put me up, did I mind? I told him I didn't, and he took me to a large farmhouse where a couch had been made up for me in the best sitting-room. There were lovely handwoven linen sheets on the bed and striped rugs made by my hostess, a bright-eyed peasant woman. She poured water over my hands out of a copper jug in the proper Serbian manner, and I went to bed.

The next day I found the village hall packed with orphans-all very ragged and with peaked eager faces. The Member and the mayor explained to them the glory of becoming master craftsmen. I wrote down thirty names and ran away quickly to prepare Avala to receive them.

VII. Orphans at Avala and Topchider

Of course they do their own work-sew on their buttons, wash their shirts and pants, set their own meals and rinse out their bowls, and they do a lot for everyone in the camp as well. I was determined that Major Howie's prophecy that I would pamper them should not come true. They have half a day at a trade and half a day at school. The schoolmaster is an enthusiast for their education-few of them can read or write, but they are learning quickly-all except Pero the gipsy boy: he finds letters much too fiddling and pernickety. He makes them as large as his sheet of paper, when he attempts them at all. Brankitsa has to-day bought a cow and a calf, and although we are pleased with the prospect of extra milk for thin orphans, it was tactless of her to make the transaction in the middle of the week, just when I had got the orderly duties fixed up. I change these every Sun day, but after much thought I have put a quaint half-mad boy to look after the cow and its baby. He is blind in one eye and comes from somewhere in the middle of Serbia. He has no one but a sister and an aunt and has wandered up on his own. He agreed with alacrity, but made me promise first not to accuse him of drinking the milk if the cow does not give to my expectations. We have one or two really clever boys, but they are terrible snobs. One we call the Eton boy told me that the peasants when they see lightning think that it is Elijah raining down fire, but that it is really only positive and negative electricity. The schoolmaster is preparing him for the secondary school and taking great pains with him, but I am afraid he will grow up an unconscionable prig. No one seems to sit on conceited boys in Serbia as we do in England-they are taken at their own valuation.

It was interesting living in Serbia-yet I was sometimes sad. An old gipsy woman told my fortune from a pack of cards, but all I remember her saying was, "why are there so many tears, my darling, so many black, black tears?" Once I was crying when the orphans' schoolmaster was giving me a Serbian lesson. I told him I had a cold which made my eyes leaky. "I am so glad you told me," he said joyfully. "I thought that you were weeping. Well, it sometimes happens-it is natural." After the lesson I sat by a pond and suddenly a water-bird rose from the rushes and flew over it, and I thought "there will always be new and exciting things in my life like this bird," and it comforted me.

But there wasn't much time for sitting weeping by ponds, watching water-birds: the boys were a handful. There was one of sixteen whom I caught with a village girl in his tent. The Serbs were scandalised by this incident because the boy boasted that he had paid for his pleasure- prostitution was rare amongst their women. It was usual to leave that to Austrians or Hungarians. I found a job for the boy in Belgrade and sent him away.

Major Howie was very shocked at this. He thought I ought to have kept him and reformed him. Major Howie was a Scotsman and, though reputed to be a stern disciplinarian, he had a romantic heart and would never give up a human being. I liked this generous attitude, but I would not give in because I did not want the younger boys to be corrupted. I also sent away a young tough because he sold our blankets to passing soldiers. Perhaps I was wrong. Theft is inevitable after the long demoralisation of war. A few boys did not like the regularity of life and went back to their pig keeping, but most of them stayed.

Then suddenly we had a cloudburst on Avala-our ravine belched water and tons of mud broke down walls, swept away tents, filled up cisterns and moved bridges. A sick man in the Scottish Women's tents died of shock, and our orphans were temporarily homeless, but we had a sanitary expert on our staff, Miss O'Brien, and she soon put things to rights again. But it made us realise that we must find winter quarters. There was a barracks at Topchider where there were 1,000 German prisoners, due soon for repatriation. The Minister of War said we could have this if we could find him huts for his new recruits. The Minister of Justice flew into a rage and said that it was really his and that he needed it for four hundred convicts. All the relief missions were clamouring for buildings for their pet schemes at the same time, and I felt sorry for the authorities. They were mostly new to their job and many of them had been chosen because their political party or region had to be represented, rather than for efficiency. They were trying to run the whole country from Belgrade; this was undoubtedly a mistake, but they said that it was they who had won the war and they couldn't be sure of Croats and Slovenes, who had been with the enemy. They were distracted by a million calls on their attention, and now there were the benevolent foreigners too. Their tradition made them want to be polite to foreigners who were after all their guests, and guests are sacred to the Slav-so they promised everybody everything and did nothing more about it than that as a rule.

We must have been very persistent because in the end they gave us the palace of Queen Nathalia at Topchider. A palace sounds grand- it was really just a wooden Turkish house, very pleasant and roomy but quite homely. The remove was horrible, but the eighty orphans packed, loaded and unloaded, guarded, cleaned and ran round till they surprised even Major Howie into praise of them. It was October now, and I decided to plant out as many orphans as I could amongst master craftsmen in Belgrade, so that we should have a larger turnover in our Home. As a policy also I thought it good: apprenticeships were the rule in Serbia as in our Middle Ages, and there was need of a new generation of craftsmen. I tramped for days through the dusty cobbled streets of Belgrade, going into every shop I saw. The shops there weren't like ours-they most of them made what they sold.

I wrote this about it: "The first time I took into Belgrade a whole ton of orphans in the one-ton lorry I felt very anxious. But only one of the masters who had promised to take them rejected the goods when brought to his door, and for that boy I found another place after tramping all over the town with him, and into fifteen bootshops."

But the boys often ran back to us. There was Radoye. He wanted to be a tinsmith. I found him what I thought was a lovely place with kind people, but he ran back after three days, pale and shattered. He wouldn't say what was the matter, but when I asked the tinsmith he told me that the boy had refused to eat. Radoye explained to me that the people were Jews and he could not take their food. He shuddered at the thought, and it was clear that he felt it obscene. Although Serbs were not really anti-Semitic, there was something uncanny to them about a different religion, and some of them believed the legend of the baby sacrifice at Passover. Another boy who had chosen to be a tailor felt bored. Many thought this a lovely trade at first superior and clean, but most of them wanted to be locksmiths or work in garages. I fixed up thirty-four of them and got a club going for them in Belgrade. Then two other workers came to Topchider and I decided to return home.

We had a tremendous party with wine for the disabled men and the visitors and lemonade for the children. The gipsies played dances and songs, and there were games and presents for everybody. The schoolmaster, who was usually very solemn, loosened up after his fourth glass and made an impassioned speech. He talked of a country which had sent forth saints and angels as ambassadors to Serbia, but as he called it a peninsula I did not think he could be referring to England and I was not embarrassed.

Being with the Serbs had been an experience unlike any other. For the Serbs were still in the Middle Ages, and it is not often that one can take a leap and live in another period of history. Certainly there was something terrible in it-the violence and belief in vengeance that I had found in Stefanovitch's stories, the fear of witches and vampires I had sensed in all the villages, the squalor, dirt and ignorance. But there had been other things: their golden hospitality for one thing, and their poetry. There was Bogosav and other peasants who had talked to me in vivid phrases. Their history was real to them, and this was of immense importance because it helped them to see themselves as actors in a living drama and not isolated sufferers. Their heroes were demi-gods, alive and present to their imagination. They had music too- their songs were not trivial as ours are. And they had colour and the power of making things with their hands. A good deal of this would go, for it is not possible to remain in the Middle Ages when the world around you is in the twentieth century, but I hoped that they would keep the most precious things-if it were only their pride in their peasant origin, their power to work with one another as long as they remain peasants, their capacity for making a festival out of every occasion, their faith in themselves and their destiny, the spirit in which they keep Kossovo.
VIII. Visit to Hospital in Croatia While working in Serbia I had had letters from my friend the Nador doctor. He had been given charge of a large hospital at X..... a town in the remotest south-west corner of Croatia, shut out from the sea by the mountains of Dalmatia. He told me that the hospital lacked the most primitive necessities-there was no gauze or bandages, no night clothes for the patients: the sheets were all worn out and there was great lack of medicines. Stores had been rushed into Belgrade with out any exact estimate of needs, and I knew that there was a surplus. I got a truckload of stuff together-sheets, towels, dressing gowns, pyjamas, nightgowns, dressings, drugs, some milk, cocoa and sugar, and children's clothes too, as the Doctor had told me that the district was a poor one. The difficulty was the sending of this precious cargo. The railways had a bad name at this time. Whole truckloads were looted. I decided to go myself and see that it did really arrive. This was considered a daring resolve. The truck would go by goods train and be at least a month en route, I was told, and it might be attacked by brigands. As I was not to be put off, the Serb authorities appointed two armed soldiers to travel with me and protect both me and the goods. The truck was dark and draughty, and the rain came in, but I had a camp bed with a straw mattress, and we all three had plenty of blankets and a primus on which we cooked our food.

The first night in Semlin station I was roused by a clanking of chains and a violent push-we had been unhitched and flung down a siding. I ran to the stationmaster. He was distressed. He hadn't known there was an Englishwoman inside it. He had so many living beasts that would die if he didn't hurry them off. "And what about me- won't I die?" I asked. He began telegraphing orders and pulling switches: the truck must be put on again-but somehow it had got lost and in the meantime the train had gone. That was the first twentyfour hours' delay. I got familiar with that sudden clanking sound and violent push and the rush to startled stationmasters, but in the end we got to X.... in five days. One of my soldiers was a Dalmatian, dark and handsome, with liquid gestures-the other was a primitive Serb peasant. The Dalmatian was very protective and courteous. He always divined my needs and saw that the train didn't move while I was satisfying them. In the Zagreb station there was a little place without a door, but he stood in front of it with drawn bayonet, so I was all right. The difficulty was washing, but he brought me a pail of water now and again. The only uncomfortable episode was at Zagreb where we had a long wait. I went to see some friends in the town, and when I came back I found a prostitute in my truck. I told her she couldn't travel with us, but she was saucy and said if I were there she could be too. The Dalmatian smoothed the affair over adroitly-he escorted her, his bayonet drawn, out of the station.

It rained throughout our journey-Yugoslavia had never known so much rain as in I9I9. The Serbs said it was to wash away the blood. It was raining when we arrived in X...., and it rained during the whole nine days I was there. My impression of the place was of a straggling town with hostile mountains behind it. The English largesse made a deep impression on the whole district and put up the stock of the Nador Doctor. It was confidence in him that brought it there, and it was the first and, I think, the only present made by foreign missions to Croatia. The hospital was staffed by nuns and they wept with ecstasy and flapped round me like a covey of birds as bale after bale came into their stores. The patients, who were all in their day shirts when I arrived, looked brilliant in pink and blue pyjamas before I left. We found out the orphans of the district and I gave them clothes. There was a moment of crisis over this. Should the children of men who had fallen fighting for the enemy be included, or only those whose fathers had died for the right by deserting to the Serbian side? When I said that a child was a child the Doctor agreed and threw politics overboard. I also opened a canteen in the school where the poorest children could have cocoa. There was enough to keep it going throughout the winter. The Veliki Zhupan, the Prefect of the Province, gave a dinner in my honour, and there were many healths drunk and speeches made. He was an ebullient, jolly fellow. He said what was most impressive in the whole story was that I hadn't been afraid to travel with two soldiers for five nights and days; no Yugoslav girl could have done this. Actually any Englishwoman would, for to the Serbs we were sacrosanct.

The Doctor was extremely busy-the hospital had eighty beds and he had operations every day, and out-patients as well. But we spent the evenings together. X ..., though it belonged to the westernised Croatia, seemed to me backward, isolated, infinitely remote, like a place that had got lost. I was sure that I would never return there: certain that I would never see the Doctor again. This knowledge gave a special undercurrent to the days I spent with him. The talks we had had a special quality because we knew that they were the last. I was more impressed than ever by his goodness. I wished I could feel that he was happy, but he was still disillusioned-still aware of corruption and dishonesty round him as he had been at Nador. He had imagined his brothers groaning throughout the war, writhing with shame that they were not fighting for Serbia but were on the wrong side, under Austro-Hungary: he found that many had grown rich and had had no desire for the war to end. Doctors had made a good thing out of letting recruits off military service-merchants had made fortunes out of the Government: everyone had profiteered. He was a Serb by race and sympathy and felt lonely amongst these people, though by education he was one of them.

I realised that I had given too much for one hospital, so I put some things back in the truck and went on in it to the chief hospital of the Lika district. This was the only brave thing I did, as I had dismissed my escort and given away my blankets. It was cold and eerie in my van. I spent the night in a siding, too terrified to sleep. In it I wrote a letter to Brankitsa: "I am so glad I saw the Doctor again.... I think his weakness is in refusing to fight melancholy and disillusion. He says if he had had an English education he would have known how to. I think this is a penetrating remark-I do believe we have that fight for Hope if not for Faith more in our traditions. It made me feel I would fight to the end for them myself. But when he's with people he has such a gay manner and is so debonair and charming. With just a little twist he might be a really cheerful person. But he isn't."

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In the margines of chaos, Francesca M. Wilson