s. They must be executed without
exception." The Austrians knew very well that the Serbs had not
received their new uniforms, and that at least one-third of their army
was obliged to take the field in ordinary peasant's dress.[83] The
fact that the Austrian invasion of north-western Serbia came to such
an ignominious end before September is no reason why so large a number
of women, children and old men were, as is very well authenticated,
cut to pieces, burned alive, despoiled of their eyes, their noses,
disembowelled, and so forth. One expects a certain amount of licence
from the baser elements of an invading army; but in Serbia--perhaps
because this was a punitive expedition--it seems to have been the
Imperial and Royal officers who egged on their men.... I have tried,
from the Austrian records, to ascertain whether any comparable
outrages can be laid at the door of the Serbs. And there is one
incident which utterly disgraces some of their Montenegrin brothers:
the men of Fo[vc]a in Herzegovina joined the Montenegrin army when it
penetrated to the neighbourhood of Sarajevo. When it was thrown back
the Fo[vc]a comrades--Yugoslavs, of course, and guilty of high treason
against Austria--accompanied them to Montenegro; and later on some
Montenegrin officers denounced the people of Fo[vc]a to the Austrians,
with the result that fourteen of them were hanged.

On August 24, 1914, after twelve terrible days, the Austrians were
dislodged from [vS]abac and flung across to the northern bank of the
Save. More useful to the Serbs than their 6000 prisoners were the 50
cannons and over 30,000 rifles, for the Serbian troops had entered the
War with such scanty equipment that many of the regiments with an
effective strength of over 4000 men possessed only 2500 rifles. The
armed soldiers went into action, while the unarmed waited in reserve,
springing forward as their comrades fell, and taking up the weapons of
the fallen to continue the fight. Here occurred an incident of which
the hero was a boy. He had run away to the army and, to his vast
delight, been made a standard-bearer. When an officer perceived that
he was continuously exposing himself he told him to hide. "No one will
see you," said the officer. "But," answered the boy, "the flag will
see." And he was killed. Many of the dead or wounded Austrians were
Southern Slavs who had not been able to surrender to their brothers;
they were often found with all their cartridges intact,