untain
trails, abandoned by their comrades. Others lay mangled, their forms
beaten out of all recognition. Scattered over all, wherever road or
trail passed, lay guns and cartridges, sometimes in heaps, where they
had been dumped out of the fleeing wagons. And further on lay the wagons
themselves, some thrown over on their sides, where the drivers had cut
the traces and continued their flight on the backs of their horses.

Later in the day, December 8, 1914, the scenes along the highways took
on a different character. The main columns of the pursuing Serbians had
passed on, but straggling files of those too tired or too weak to be in
the fore of the chase still continued onward. More slowly followed a
steady stream of returning refugees, their oxen, in various stages of
life and death, yoked up to every conceivable manner of springless
vehicle, piled high with odds and ends of furniture and bedding which
had been snatched up in the mad hurry of flight. On top of the bundles
lay sick and starving children, wan with want and exposure. Beside the
wagon walked weary women or old men, urging their animals on with weird
cries and curses, returning to the devastated remains of what had once
been their homes.

Later still, from opposite directions, came processions of Austrian
prisoners, sometimes thousands of them, guarded by a handful of Third
Ban Serbian soldiers, still wearing their peasant costumes. Among the
prisoners were smooth-faced youths and old men, some in the uniforms of
soldiers, or of Landwehr, or Landsturm. All types of that hodge-podge of
nationalities and races which the flag of Austria-Hungary represents
were there; Germans, Magyars, Croats, Czechs, Moravians, Slovaks,
Rumanians, Lithuanians, and Bosnian Musselmans.

In between the convoys straggled men of the Serbian army who had fallen
out of the chase by the way, most of them Third Ban men, too advanced in
years to keep up the pace set by the younger men. Nowhere moved anything
but suffering, bleeding humanity.

On this scene the sun, a glowing disc of copper, finally set, and the
struggling figures merged into the deepening dusk, and presently only
black, halting shadows were creeping along the dark trails and roads.

CHAPTER LVII

THE FATE OF BELGRADE

During all this time a separate drama was being enacted in and around
Belgrade, the Serbian capital. Unfortified and not especially adapted
for defense, except for the breadth of the Danub