July 25, 2025 • 16 mins
Dive into the extraordinary life of Flora Sandes, the only British woman to officially enlist as a soldier in World War I. Starting her journey as a St. John Ambulance volunteer, she found herself in the heart of Serbia where she joined the ranks of the Serbian army amidst the chaos of war. Following a period of recovery in England, Sandes penned her incredible memoirs, offering us a unique glimpse into her experiences.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter seven of an English Woman Sergeant in the Serbian
Army by Flora Sands. This LibriVox recording is in the
public domain. Recording by Mirianne Chapter seven, Albasan. We push
on towards the coast. Next day we had a whole
blessed day's rest, and the men lay about and rested,
(00:22):
and everybody washed their shirts and generally polished themselves up
to the best of their ability. Our camp was in
a bare and very muddy field about two miles outside Albasan.
In the afternoon, Lieutenant Yeovitch got leave and took me
with him to Albasan to see the sights and show
me what an Albanian town is like. It was a
(00:42):
filthy little town, the streets paved with big cobblestones and
running with rivers of mud. The inhabitants were as hostile
as they dared to be, and used to refuse to
sell us anything. They put the price of bread up
to sixteen francs a loaf, and everything else in proportion,
and would not sell us an hay for our horses,
although they had plenty. Although the men were not allowed
(01:04):
into the town then for fear of trouble, they would
never forget it, and promised themselves to get some of
their own back whenever they came back that way again.
Many of the inhabitants were wearing Austrian overcoats, which they
had got in exchange for a small piece of bread
from the starving Austrian prisoners who passed through there. Some
of our men had been given new boots, and while
(01:26):
refusing to sell us anything, the Albanians would try to
tempt them by offering a small loaf in exchange for them,
and naturally, under the circumstances they sometimes succeeded. There was
absolutely nothing to see in the town, and so we
sat for a time in the only kafana or hotel
in the place, a dark, dirty little den, with some
of the officers whom we met and drank coffee, and
(01:48):
later in the afternoon galloped back as hard as we
could to camp through the drenching rain. We found our
low lying field afloat, and the soldiers had moved to
a bit of slightly rising ground where it was not
quite so bad. It was raining so hard and everything
was so wet that, on discovering a sort of loft
or small room up a ladder fourteen officers and myself
(02:09):
piled in there. Here. Three of us who had camp
beds put them up, and the rest slept on the floor.
Of course, as a rule, camp beds were no use
to us, as you cannot get a camp bed into
a booviac tent. We thought we were going to stay
there all night and would have plenty of time to sleep,
and sat about and talked, and some of them played
cards all night, and so we got a nasty jar
(02:32):
when at daylight the order came that we were to
all move to another camp. We didn't want any trouble
with the natives, but the officers had the men well
in hand, and they marched steadily through the town. I
rode at the head of our company, while the company
commander dropped back alongside and kept his eye on the men,
and we all went through without trouble, marching well. We
(02:53):
camped in an olive grove beside the river, and most
of us went to sleep. It still poured all that
day and all night, and all the next night, and
all the next day. I rode into Albasan again and
paid a visit to Commandant Militch and his staff, who
had taken up quarters in the town. They had arrived
that morning and the rains had been so heavy since
(03:14):
we passed that the river had risen and they had
had to ford it up to their waists. We turned
out before dawn next morning, and it was horribly cold
and damp. We had been sleeping on the wet ground,
there being no hay for the horses to eat and
much less for us to sleep on. We had to
cross a beautiful old bridge over the wide Shkumba River,
(03:36):
and there was a good deal of delay in waiting about.
The river had risen and the bridge did not reach
quite far enough, so the men had to cross a
plank at the other end, and it took ages for
the whole regiment to get across. Those who were on
horseback forded the river, which was not very deep, though
very wide, with a very rapid current. The fields at
(03:58):
the other side were a swamp, and the men were
up to their knees in mud and water. My company
was told off to take up a position by itself
on a range of hills, and we went up there
in the afternoon by a very bad steep track through
bushes with very big prickly thorns. The hills were covered
with bracken, which we cut down to make beds of
(04:19):
and pitched our tents in a little hollow. We were
all by ourselves up there and had a very quiet
four days, as we seemed at last to have shaken
off the pursuing Bulgarians, and it seemed sometimes as if
everyone had forgotten about us. We were the only company
up there, and were a very funny looking camp, with
the men sitting about, resting and repairing their clothes and
(04:41):
washing hanging out on all the bushes. In fact, we
set ourselves that we looked more like a traveling gypsy's
encampment than the smartest company in the regiment. Christmas Eve
was bright and sunny, and in the afternoon we visited
an Albanian village. I was an object of great curiosity
to the inhabitants, especially the women, and they always asked
(05:03):
Lieutenant Yovitch whether I was a woman or a soldier,
and seemed very much puzzled when he said I was
an English woman, but a Serbian soldier. We were sitting
outside one cottage talking to a very old man and
his wife, Poor old thing. She patted me all over,
examining everything I had on with the deepest interest, and
finally disappeared into the cottage and came out again with
(05:25):
a bowl of sour milk and some awful looking bread,
of which I ate as much as I could not
to hurt her feelings. We had given the old man
some money, and I searched my pockets to see if
I could find anything the old woman would like, and, finally,
feeling rather like Alice in Wonderland, when she begged the
acceptance of this elegant thimble, I presented her with a
(05:45):
small pocket mirror. I do not think she had ever
seen such a thing before, and gazed into it with
the greatest delight, though she looked about a hundred and
was ugly enough to frighten the devil. The Serbian Christmas
is not till thirteen days layater than ours, but we
celebrated my English Christmas Eve over the camp fire that night.
A plate of beans and dry bread had to take
(06:07):
the place of roast beef and plum pudding, but we
drank Christmas health in a small flask of cognac, after
which I played God Save the King on the violin,
and we all stood up and sang it. This violin
went into my long narrow kit bag, which was carried
on a pack horse and had managed to survive its travels,
though the damp had not improved its tone. In the
(06:29):
middle of this performance, a soldier walked up from the
town with the news that the Allies were advancing and
that Scopla had been retaken by the French, and we
were all fearfully bucked. The men came crowding up to
hear the news and immediately began making great plans of
turning round and marching straight back into Serbia the way
we had come, and we sat round the fire until late,
(06:50):
playing and singing to celebrate the victory. This news afterwards
proved to be incorrect, but we quite believed it at
the time. We hardly ever did get any news of
the outside world, and the doings of one's own particular regiment,
and more especially from varying fortunes of one's own particular company,
seemed to be the most important things in the whole
(07:11):
war to us, and what may have been passing during
that time on other and more important fronts. I did
not hear from any reliable source until we got to Derazo,
and not very much then. The greater part of the
Serbian army who went by the northern route through Montenegro
to Scutari. I heard afterwards had an infinitely worse time
than we did, But we did not hear the tale
(07:33):
of their sufferings until later, and much has already been
written about them. The next day was Christmas Day, and
a Serbian journalist who had spent a great many years
in America walked some miles over from his own company
to wish me a merry Christmas, so that I should
hear the old greeting from someone in English. We had
quite settled down to our gypsy life, but the food
(07:55):
question had become a serious problem. By now bread was
at famine prices. The men had finished all their corn
cobs and had practically nothing to eat for two days.
I asked the company commander if it would be possible
to buy anything for them, and we sent down to
the town and bought a sort of corn meal for
two hundred francs and had it baked into flat loaves
(08:16):
there in the town. And next day, when we turned
out for a fresh start, we gave each man in
the company half of one of my corn meal loaves
and a couple of cigarettes, telling them it was England's
Christmas box to them, which they ate as they went along,
Otherwise they would have had to march all that day
on nothing. As the other companies who had not been
(08:36):
so fortunate, saw our men go past, munching the last
of their corn bread, they called well done forth company
after us, and wanted to join us for the first
time since we had left Balbuona. We had shaken off
the Bulgarians and were no longer within sound of the guns,
but we had to press on or the men would starve.
We had lost hundreds of horses from exhaustion and starvation.
(09:00):
Once they fell, they were too weak to rise again,
and their corpses lined the road or rather track. Sick
or well, the men had to keep on. No one
could be carried, and you had got to keep on
or die by the roadside. The next four or five
days we continued steadily on our way towards Durazzo, starting
about four a m. And generally turning into camp between
(09:22):
six and seven, long after the short winter afternoons had
closed in so that we had to find our way
round our new camping ground in the dark. The weather
had got considerably warmer, although the nights were still bitterly cold,
and quite a scorching sun used to come out for
a few hours in the middle of the day, and
this took it out of the tired men a good deal. Before,
(09:43):
when I had been working in the hospitals and I
used to ask the men where it hurt them, I'd
often been rather puzzled at the general reply of the
new arrivals zvimi BOLLI, everything hurts me. It seemed such
a vague description and such a curious mallege. But in
these days I learned to understand perfectly what they meant
(10:04):
by it when you seemed to be nothing but one
pain from the crown of your aching head to the
soles of your blistered feet. And I thought it was
a very good thing that the next time I was
working in a military hospital, I should be able to
enter into my patient's feelings and realized that all he
felt he wanted was to be left alone to sleep
for about a week and only rouse up for his meals.
(10:28):
We went slowly and halted every few hours, sometimes just
for a quarter of an hour, sometimes for a good
deal longer, and the moment the halt was called, everyone
used to just drop down on the ground and fall
asleep till our company commander would call now, then men
get up, and we would all pull ourselves together, everyone
rising immediately without the slightest delay. In the long midday halt,
(10:52):
we used to join up with the others, and the
whole regiment would rest together and exchange any scraps of news.
Going In the evenings, the men used to sit round
the fires and gossip, and everything that everybody did or
sad was discussed all through the regiment. News always travels
like this among Serbians, and I have often been astonished,
(11:13):
after I had been away from camp, to be told
the following day exactly where I had been, whom I
had been with, and what I had done. I remember
once in Craigieyeviot's when there were some English officers up
in Belgrade who fondly imagined that both their presence and
their doings there were a dead secret. In the same
curious way, we in the center of Serbia knew all
(11:34):
about them. Our riding horses were, some of them so
starved and exhausted that we could hardly keep the poor
brutes on their feet. And I used sometimes to walk
to give mine arrest. But at the same time, I
should have felt more sympathy with it if it had
not had a most irritating habit of refusing to stand
still for a moment, but kept wheeling round and round
in circles. It was a rough mountain pony belonging to
(11:57):
my company commander, who, when I joined his company, of course,
produced a reserve pony for me. The poor little brute
died two days after we got to Drazzo. One night,
we halted on rather funny camping ground on the side
of a hill covered with holly bushes, and had to
find our way through them in the dark. We slept
round the fires as there was not room to put
(12:19):
up tents among the prickly bushes. Our company commander, telling
his ordinance that they were all too slow for a funeral,
lit our fire himself in two minutes under the shelter
of a huge holly bush, and we were half way
through supper, very comfortably sitting round a roaring blaze, while
other people were still looking for a good spot for
their fire and were asleep at opposite sides of ours.
(12:41):
Before half the others were alight. At last we were
nearing our journey's end. It was the last day's march,
and an unusually long one too. We passed a company
of Italian soldiers, and some of the officers came up
early in the morning and visited our camp. Derazzo was
being bombarded from the sea, and we could hear the
(13:01):
boom of the big naval guns in the distance, but
it was all over before we arrived. We marched that
day from five a m. Which meant, of course, being
up at least an hour before, to eight p m.
With only very short and infrequent halts. About dusk, we
reached Caveya and all the inhabitants turned out and lined
(13:21):
the streets to watch us go past. There again, they
put up everything to famine prices, a tiny flask of cognac,
which we bought costing six francs, in addition to which
they would only give us three Italian francs for our
Serbian ten franc Note. I never saw anything like the
mud in Cavella. In the town it was a liquid
(13:42):
black mass through which the men waded far above their knees,
and on the long road between Cavea and our camping ground,
it was like treacle that came right above the tops
of my top boots, and one could hardly drag one's
feet out of it. The road was full of rocks
and pits, and every two or three yard guards there
were dead and dying horses which had floundered down to
(14:03):
rise no more. And it was pitch dark and very cold.
Though not very many miles, it took us nearly three
hours to do this bit from Cavilla to our camp,
there being a block in the road in front of us,
and we were absolutely exhausted when at last we saw
the camp fires of the first company twinkling on the hillside.
We kept pushing on and on, and it seemed to
(14:25):
be never getting any nearer to them. Owing to the
darkness and the constant blocks caused by the narrow approach
to our camp, the rogue got frightfully congested. I did
the latter part of the way on foot, too, and
began to wonder if those really were camp fires ahead
of us or a sort of willow the wisps getting
farther away. At last we turned on to the hillside
(14:48):
by the sea, which was to be our resting place
for the next month. I was lying on the grass
talking to a soldier while my orderly put up my tent.
He said he was very tired, and I said we
all were, but he would soon be able to turn in. Yes,
he said, thoughtfully, not complaining at all, but merely stating
a fact. But you have ridden most of the way,
(15:09):
and I have walked, and presently you will have something
to eat, and I shan'n't. There was no supper waiting
for the tired man. In the Austrian army. I hear
the officers live in luxury while their men starve, but
that could most certainly not be said of our officers.
Beans and bread, and not too much of either, and
(15:30):
we had bought the bread ourselves. He was stoking up
the fire a little later on, and I called him
over and gave him a piece of bread. He shook
his head and refused to take it at first, saying no,
you'll need that yourself, and not till I had quite
convinced him that I had enough without it would he
take it. We all turned in dead to the world
(15:51):
that night, but very glad to have at last reached
the coast, and I completely forgot that it was New
Year's Eve, though certainly, even had I remain remembered, I
should not have sat up to see the new year
in end of chapter seven
Chapter seven of an English Woman Sergeant in the Serbian
Army by Flora Sands. This LibriVox recording is in the
public domain. Recording by Mirianne Chapter seven, Albasan. We push
on towards the coast. Next day we had a whole
blessed day's rest, and the men lay about and rested,
(00:22):
and everybody washed their shirts and generally polished themselves up
to the best of their ability. Our camp was in
a bare and very muddy field about two miles outside Albasan.
In the afternoon, Lieutenant Yeovitch got leave and took me
with him to Albasan to see the sights and show
me what an Albanian town is like. It was a
(00:42):
filthy little town, the streets paved with big cobblestones and
running with rivers of mud. The inhabitants were as hostile
as they dared to be, and used to refuse to
sell us anything. They put the price of bread up
to sixteen francs a loaf, and everything else in proportion,
and would not sell us an hay for our horses,
although they had plenty. Although the men were not allowed
(01:04):
into the town then for fear of trouble, they would
never forget it, and promised themselves to get some of
their own back whenever they came back that way again.
Many of the inhabitants were wearing Austrian overcoats, which they
had got in exchange for a small piece of bread
from the starving Austrian prisoners who passed through there. Some
of our men had been given new boots, and while
(01:26):
refusing to sell us anything, the Albanians would try to
tempt them by offering a small loaf in exchange for them,
and naturally, under the circumstances they sometimes succeeded. There was
absolutely nothing to see in the town, and so we
sat for a time in the only kafana or hotel
in the place, a dark, dirty little den, with some
of the officers whom we met and drank coffee, and
(01:48):
later in the afternoon galloped back as hard as we
could to camp through the drenching rain. We found our
low lying field afloat, and the soldiers had moved to
a bit of slightly rising ground where it was not
quite so bad. It was raining so hard and everything
was so wet that, on discovering a sort of loft
or small room up a ladder fourteen officers and myself
(02:09):
piled in there. Here. Three of us who had camp
beds put them up, and the rest slept on the floor.
Of course, as a rule, camp beds were no use
to us, as you cannot get a camp bed into
a booviac tent. We thought we were going to stay
there all night and would have plenty of time to sleep,
and sat about and talked, and some of them played
cards all night, and so we got a nasty jar
(02:32):
when at daylight the order came that we were to
all move to another camp. We didn't want any trouble
with the natives, but the officers had the men well
in hand, and they marched steadily through the town. I
rode at the head of our company, while the company
commander dropped back alongside and kept his eye on the men,
and we all went through without trouble, marching well. We
(02:53):
camped in an olive grove beside the river, and most
of us went to sleep. It still poured all that
day and all night, and all the next night, and
all the next day. I rode into Albasan again and
paid a visit to Commandant Militch and his staff, who
had taken up quarters in the town. They had arrived
that morning and the rains had been so heavy since
(03:14):
we passed that the river had risen and they had
had to ford it up to their waists. We turned
out before dawn next morning, and it was horribly cold
and damp. We had been sleeping on the wet ground,
there being no hay for the horses to eat and
much less for us to sleep on. We had to
cross a beautiful old bridge over the wide Shkumba River,
(03:36):
and there was a good deal of delay in waiting about.
The river had risen and the bridge did not reach
quite far enough, so the men had to cross a
plank at the other end, and it took ages for
the whole regiment to get across. Those who were on
horseback forded the river, which was not very deep, though
very wide, with a very rapid current. The fields at
(03:58):
the other side were a swamp, and the men were
up to their knees in mud and water. My company
was told off to take up a position by itself
on a range of hills, and we went up there
in the afternoon by a very bad steep track through
bushes with very big prickly thorns. The hills were covered
with bracken, which we cut down to make beds of
(04:19):
and pitched our tents in a little hollow. We were
all by ourselves up there and had a very quiet
four days, as we seemed at last to have shaken
off the pursuing Bulgarians, and it seemed sometimes as if
everyone had forgotten about us. We were the only company
up there, and were a very funny looking camp, with
the men sitting about, resting and repairing their clothes and
(04:41):
washing hanging out on all the bushes. In fact, we
set ourselves that we looked more like a traveling gypsy's
encampment than the smartest company in the regiment. Christmas Eve
was bright and sunny, and in the afternoon we visited
an Albanian village. I was an object of great curiosity
to the inhabitants, especially the women, and they always asked
(05:03):
Lieutenant Yovitch whether I was a woman or a soldier,
and seemed very much puzzled when he said I was
an English woman, but a Serbian soldier. We were sitting
outside one cottage talking to a very old man and
his wife, Poor old thing. She patted me all over,
examining everything I had on with the deepest interest, and
finally disappeared into the cottage and came out again with
(05:25):
a bowl of sour milk and some awful looking bread,
of which I ate as much as I could not
to hurt her feelings. We had given the old man
some money, and I searched my pockets to see if
I could find anything the old woman would like, and, finally,
feeling rather like Alice in Wonderland, when she begged the
acceptance of this elegant thimble, I presented her with a
(05:45):
small pocket mirror. I do not think she had ever
seen such a thing before, and gazed into it with
the greatest delight, though she looked about a hundred and
was ugly enough to frighten the devil. The Serbian Christmas
is not till thirteen days layater than ours, but we
celebrated my English Christmas Eve over the camp fire that night.
A plate of beans and dry bread had to take
(06:07):
the place of roast beef and plum pudding, but we
drank Christmas health in a small flask of cognac, after
which I played God Save the King on the violin,
and we all stood up and sang it. This violin
went into my long narrow kit bag, which was carried
on a pack horse and had managed to survive its travels,
though the damp had not improved its tone. In the
(06:29):
middle of this performance, a soldier walked up from the
town with the news that the Allies were advancing and
that Scopla had been retaken by the French, and we
were all fearfully bucked. The men came crowding up to
hear the news and immediately began making great plans of
turning round and marching straight back into Serbia the way
we had come, and we sat round the fire until late,
(06:50):
playing and singing to celebrate the victory. This news afterwards
proved to be incorrect, but we quite believed it at
the time. We hardly ever did get any news of
the outside world, and the doings of one's own particular regiment,
and more especially from varying fortunes of one's own particular company,
seemed to be the most important things in the whole
(07:11):
war to us, and what may have been passing during
that time on other and more important fronts. I did
not hear from any reliable source until we got to Derazo,
and not very much then. The greater part of the
Serbian army who went by the northern route through Montenegro
to Scutari. I heard afterwards had an infinitely worse time
than we did, But we did not hear the tale
(07:33):
of their sufferings until later, and much has already been
written about them. The next day was Christmas Day, and
a Serbian journalist who had spent a great many years
in America walked some miles over from his own company
to wish me a merry Christmas, so that I should
hear the old greeting from someone in English. We had
quite settled down to our gypsy life, but the food
(07:55):
question had become a serious problem. By now bread was
at famine prices. The men had finished all their corn
cobs and had practically nothing to eat for two days.
I asked the company commander if it would be possible
to buy anything for them, and we sent down to
the town and bought a sort of corn meal for
two hundred francs and had it baked into flat loaves
(08:16):
there in the town. And next day, when we turned
out for a fresh start, we gave each man in
the company half of one of my corn meal loaves
and a couple of cigarettes, telling them it was England's
Christmas box to them, which they ate as they went along,
Otherwise they would have had to march all that day
on nothing. As the other companies who had not been
(08:36):
so fortunate, saw our men go past, munching the last
of their corn bread, they called well done forth company
after us, and wanted to join us for the first
time since we had left Balbuona. We had shaken off
the Bulgarians and were no longer within sound of the guns,
but we had to press on or the men would starve.
We had lost hundreds of horses from exhaustion and starvation.
(09:00):
Once they fell, they were too weak to rise again,
and their corpses lined the road or rather track. Sick
or well, the men had to keep on. No one
could be carried, and you had got to keep on
or die by the roadside. The next four or five
days we continued steadily on our way towards Durazzo, starting
about four a m. And generally turning into camp between
(09:22):
six and seven, long after the short winter afternoons had
closed in so that we had to find our way
round our new camping ground in the dark. The weather
had got considerably warmer, although the nights were still bitterly cold,
and quite a scorching sun used to come out for
a few hours in the middle of the day, and
this took it out of the tired men a good deal. Before,
(09:43):
when I had been working in the hospitals and I
used to ask the men where it hurt them, I'd
often been rather puzzled at the general reply of the
new arrivals zvimi BOLLI, everything hurts me. It seemed such
a vague description and such a curious mallege. But in
these days I learned to understand perfectly what they meant
(10:04):
by it when you seemed to be nothing but one
pain from the crown of your aching head to the
soles of your blistered feet. And I thought it was
a very good thing that the next time I was
working in a military hospital, I should be able to
enter into my patient's feelings and realized that all he
felt he wanted was to be left alone to sleep
for about a week and only rouse up for his meals.
(10:28):
We went slowly and halted every few hours, sometimes just
for a quarter of an hour, sometimes for a good
deal longer, and the moment the halt was called, everyone
used to just drop down on the ground and fall
asleep till our company commander would call now, then men
get up, and we would all pull ourselves together, everyone
rising immediately without the slightest delay. In the long midday halt,
(10:52):
we used to join up with the others, and the
whole regiment would rest together and exchange any scraps of news.
Going In the evenings, the men used to sit round
the fires and gossip, and everything that everybody did or
sad was discussed all through the regiment. News always travels
like this among Serbians, and I have often been astonished,
(11:13):
after I had been away from camp, to be told
the following day exactly where I had been, whom I
had been with, and what I had done. I remember
once in Craigieyeviot's when there were some English officers up
in Belgrade who fondly imagined that both their presence and
their doings there were a dead secret. In the same
curious way, we in the center of Serbia knew all
(11:34):
about them. Our riding horses were, some of them so
starved and exhausted that we could hardly keep the poor
brutes on their feet. And I used sometimes to walk
to give mine arrest. But at the same time, I
should have felt more sympathy with it if it had
not had a most irritating habit of refusing to stand
still for a moment, but kept wheeling round and round
in circles. It was a rough mountain pony belonging to
(11:57):
my company commander, who, when I joined his company, of course,
produced a reserve pony for me. The poor little brute
died two days after we got to Drazzo. One night,
we halted on rather funny camping ground on the side
of a hill covered with holly bushes, and had to
find our way through them in the dark. We slept
round the fires as there was not room to put
(12:19):
up tents among the prickly bushes. Our company commander, telling
his ordinance that they were all too slow for a funeral,
lit our fire himself in two minutes under the shelter
of a huge holly bush, and we were half way
through supper, very comfortably sitting round a roaring blaze, while
other people were still looking for a good spot for
their fire and were asleep at opposite sides of ours.
(12:41):
Before half the others were alight. At last we were
nearing our journey's end. It was the last day's march,
and an unusually long one too. We passed a company
of Italian soldiers, and some of the officers came up
early in the morning and visited our camp. Derazzo was
being bombarded from the sea, and we could hear the
(13:01):
boom of the big naval guns in the distance, but
it was all over before we arrived. We marched that
day from five a m. Which meant, of course, being
up at least an hour before, to eight p m.
With only very short and infrequent halts. About dusk, we
reached Caveya and all the inhabitants turned out and lined
(13:21):
the streets to watch us go past. There again, they
put up everything to famine prices, a tiny flask of cognac,
which we bought costing six francs, in addition to which
they would only give us three Italian francs for our
Serbian ten franc Note. I never saw anything like the
mud in Cavella. In the town it was a liquid
(13:42):
black mass through which the men waded far above their knees,
and on the long road between Cavea and our camping ground,
it was like treacle that came right above the tops
of my top boots, and one could hardly drag one's
feet out of it. The road was full of rocks
and pits, and every two or three yard guards there
were dead and dying horses which had floundered down to
(14:03):
rise no more. And it was pitch dark and very cold.
Though not very many miles, it took us nearly three
hours to do this bit from Cavilla to our camp,
there being a block in the road in front of us,
and we were absolutely exhausted when at last we saw
the camp fires of the first company twinkling on the hillside.
We kept pushing on and on, and it seemed to
(14:25):
be never getting any nearer to them. Owing to the
darkness and the constant blocks caused by the narrow approach
to our camp, the rogue got frightfully congested. I did
the latter part of the way on foot, too, and
began to wonder if those really were camp fires ahead
of us or a sort of willow the wisps getting
farther away. At last we turned on to the hillside
(14:48):
by the sea, which was to be our resting place
for the next month. I was lying on the grass
talking to a soldier while my orderly put up my tent.
He said he was very tired, and I said we
all were, but he would soon be able to turn in. Yes,
he said, thoughtfully, not complaining at all, but merely stating
a fact. But you have ridden most of the way,
(15:09):
and I have walked, and presently you will have something
to eat, and I shan'n't. There was no supper waiting
for the tired man. In the Austrian army. I hear
the officers live in luxury while their men starve, but
that could most certainly not be said of our officers.
Beans and bread, and not too much of either, and
(15:30):
we had bought the bread ourselves. He was stoking up
the fire a little later on, and I called him
over and gave him a piece of bread. He shook
his head and refused to take it at first, saying no,
you'll need that yourself, and not till I had quite
convinced him that I had enough without it would he
take it. We all turned in dead to the world
(15:51):
that night, but very glad to have at last reached
the coast, and I completely forgot that it was New
Year's Eve, though certainly, even had I remain remembered, I
should not have sat up to see the new year
in end of chapter seven
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