ready, and probably in all Servia there were not two
hundred Turks. But she ambitiously desired to have the name of as well
as the actuality of being independent; the Russians helped her with
arms, officers, and volunteer soldiers; and when I reached Belgrade, in
May of the year named, there had already been fighting, in which the
Servians had by no means got the worst. No word of the Servian tongue
had I, and it was the reverse of pleasant for a war correspondent in
such plight to learn that outside of Belgrade nobody, or at least hardly
anybody, knew a word of any other language than the native Servian. As I
ate, I was being attended by a very assiduous waiter, whose alertness
and anxiety to please were very conspicuous. He was smart with quite
un-Oriental smartness; he whisked about the tables with deftness; he
spoke to me in German, to the Russian officers over against me in what I
assumed was Russian, to the Servians dining behind me in what I took to
be Servian. I liked the look of the man; there was intelligence in his
aspect. One could not call him handsome, but there was character in the
keen black eye, the high features and the pronounced chin, fringed on
either side by bushy black whiskers.

[Illustration: "ANDREAS AS A FORAGER."]

I had brought no servant with me; the average British servant is worse
than useless in a foreign country, and the dubiously-polyglot courier is
a snare and a deception on campaign. I had my eye on Andreas for a
couple of days, during which he was of immense service to me. He seemed
to know and stand well with everyone in Belgrade; it was he, indeed, who
presented me in the restaurant to the Prime Minister and the Minister
for War, who got together for me my field necessaries, who helped me to
buy my horses, and who narrated to me the progress of the campaign so
far as it had gone. On the third day I had him in my room and asked
whether he would like to come with me into the field as my servant. He
accepted the offer with effusion; we struck hands on the compact; he
tendered me credentials which I ascertained to be extremely
satisfactory; and then he gave me a little sketch of himself. It was
somewhat mixed, as indeed was his origin. Primarily he was a Servian,
but his maternal grandmother had been a Bosniak, an earlier ancestress
had been in a Turkish harem, there was a strain in his blood of the
Hungarian zinganee--the gipsy of Eastern Europe, and one could not look
at his profil