ard from pain and starvation, their hair
long and matted, some still in ragged uniforms, but most of them in
the sheepskin coats of peasants, their eyes bloodshot with rage, they
formed not a pleasant picture to the intrenched Huns. The rifle fire
from the eminence leaped to a climax; the Hungarians knew they were
fighting for their lives. In the horde rushing up the steep slope lay
an appalling danger. Up they surged, without firing a shot, the
bayonets gleaming in the lightning flashes. Among the rocks appeared
white faces behind black rifle barrels. And then, with one fierce
yell, the men in the shaggy sheepskin coats were hurling themselves in
among the men in blue-gray uniforms. For a few brief moments there was
a wild melee; then the men in blue-gray broke and ran.

Such scenes were common throughout the three or four days of the
battle.

What made the resistance of the Serbian soldiers so fierce was the
knowledge possessed by each that there was no alternative to victory
but a retreat into those white, bleak wilds behind him. And there was
not a Serbian boy in those ranks who did not realize what a winter's
march through that country would mean.

From the fall of Nish, in fact, the Serbians had been fighting with
their backs to a wall, and grim and bloody were the struggles between
Serb and German in the wild tangle of hills that surrounded the Plain
of Kossovo. Quarter was neither given nor asked, and unlucky was the
too venturesome Austrian regiment that penetrated the Serbian lines
the first few days without sufficient support.

"The 184th Regiment," said one of the soldiers' letters, which were
published in the Austrian papers, "went into a valley and was never
seen again." One Serbian regiment, stationed to hold the mouth to a
small valley, to cover the retirement of another Serbian regiment,
remained at its post for four days, fighting off the greater part of
an Austro-German division, until, of the 1,200 men of the original
detachment, only sixty-three remained on their feet, and most of those
wounded.

To his credit be it said that the aged King of Serbia remained with
his battling men to the end. While the guns were thundering against
Pristina and the thin line of the last resistance was frenziedly
holding back the German and Bulgarian lines, there came to an ancient
church, which was under fire, a mud-stained old man in a field service
uniform. The few foreign correspondents who saw him pass into