sumably
through force of habit--prior to the breaking up of all these
touring-cars and lorries. Some were saturated with petrol and set on
fire, others were exploded with hand grenades, but the most
imaginative method was to drive the car up to that place, two or three
miles from Pe['c], where the road to Andrievica turned into a
horse-trail on the side of the precipice. Here the chauffeur would
jump out, after having let in the clutch and pushed down the
accelerator--and the car would leap into space, three or four hundred
feet over a mountain torrent. From this point the _via dolorosa_
stretched away precariously, at first a winding path of ice and then a
track across the snowdrifts of the barren uplands. The Serbian
Government had offered to construct this very necessary road to
Andrievica; the engineer, one Smodlaka, undertook to build it in three
months, but Nikita's Minister replied that the Austrian prisoners,
whom it was proposed to use, were mostly in the grip of spotted fever.
This was not the case, and one of the results of there being no road
was that nearly all the supplies from Russia for the Montenegrins were
abandoned at Pe['c]. Cold, starvation and exposure took a fearful toll
among the straggling wanderers--between 1000 and 1500 were cut off and
murdered by savage Albanians (whose considerate treatment of the Serbs
is highly praised by their champion, Miss Edith Durham. Reviewing in
the _Daily Herald_ a book of Serbian tales that have precious little
to do with Albania, she goes out of her way to laud, in those days of
the terrible retreat, the kindliness of her proteges.) As we have
mentioned, of the 36,000 boys who accompanied the army in order to
escape the Austrians, only some 16,000 reached the Adriatic, where it
was said that there was nothing human left of them except their eyes.
They had lived on roots and bark of trees, they drank the water into
which decomposed corpses had been thrown. Of the 50,000 Austrian
prisoners--many of them Yugoslavs--about 44,000 died in the course of
their eight weeks' retreat; none of them were heard to complain or
seen committing any brutal act. Very many Englishwomen were included
in this long procession; old King Peter walked a good deal of the way,
the Archbishop of Belgrade brought the relics of Stephen the
First-Crowned and was followed by priests with lighted tapers, and
Marshal Putnik, whom exposure would have killed, was carried all the
way inside a primit