year the Serbians had commemorated the
anniversary of this event by mourning.

Kossovo Plain is a high plateau, forty miles long and ten wide; from
its rolling fields the forbidding crags of Montenegro and Albania are
plainly visible, black in summer and white with snow in winter.

The gray dawn of a November day brought the first mutterings of the
storm that was presently to break in fury up and down the whole front.
The ragged, mud-stained cavalry of Serbia came trotting wearily
through the infantry lines, bearing signs of the many skirmishes they
had taken part in. The outlying posts were exchanging rifle fire with
the advance guards of the enemy and now, through his powerful field
glasses, the Serbian commander could see great masses of the invading
troops deploying against his front.

"You have come to see the death of a nation," he remarked to an
American correspondent who was present.

"It is sad that a stranger's eyes should see us die," said another
officer in high command.

Soon the crackling and sputtering fire of the Mannlicher rifles was
rippling up and down the lines; the whole front from Pristina to
south of Marcovitza blazed flame, and the last big battle of Serbia's
resistance was on. Two lines of men, the one thick and heavily
equipped, the other attenuated and half-starved, were locked together
in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle.

As though to afford a proper setting for the scene, nature herself
broke into a wild fury; overhead the sky darkened, then the black
clouds burst into a howling storm, full of cold sleet and rain. Amidst
the black, stark hills, in a ceaseless downpour, men trampled and
slipped through the clay mud, dripping wet from head to foot,
stabbing, shooting, hurling hand bombs, until this peaceful valley
echoed to the shouts and roar of combating armies.

And as the first day's fighting increased in intensity, the fury of
the elements overhead intensified, and presently it was impossible to
distinguish the roar of the big cannon from the deep crash of thunder;
intermingling with the shouts and cries of men roared the blast of the
gale as it whipped over rocky eminences.

Here again was raised that dreaded battle cry: "Na nosh! Na nosh!"
With such a shout a whole regiment of the fierce Shumadians leaped out
of its trenches and tore across the intervening ground between its
trenches and the rocks of a near-by eminence which a force of Magyars
had made into a position. Hagg