aders. Then almost the whole people had set out in flight for
Monastir, near the Greek frontier, where the Bulgarians had not yet
closed in. On its retreat from Kossovo Plain the Serbian army caught
up with the rear of this fleeing throng. Winter had set in unusually
early that year. Even at Saloniki on the shores of the tepid Aegean
and sheltered behind a ring of hills, where snow had not fallen in
November in ten years, a fierce northerly gale, known as the "Vardar
wind," had sprung up on November 26, 1915, and kept the air swirling
with snow-flakes, while up in the near-by hills the snow was already
two feet deep. Up in the Albanian Mountains the paths and trails were
already choked, while chilling blasts of sleet-laden winds howled
through the defiles.

The way from Upper Serbia to Monastir led across great, bleak slopes,
which were now being lashed by these terrible winter storms. Old women
and children fell by the wayside; young mothers, hugging their babies
to their breasts, sought shelter behind rocks and died there of
weakness and starvation. All along the road of retreat was marked by
the abandoned dead and dying. One of the very few descriptions of this
phase of the Serbian flight that has appeared was written by Mr.
William G. Shepherd, special correspondent of the American United
Press:

"The entire world must prepare to shudder," he writes from Monastir,
"when all that is happening on the Albanian refugee trails finally
comes to light. The horrors of the flight of the hapless Serbian
people are growing with the arrival here of each new contingent from
the devastated district.

"They say that nearly the whole route from Prisrend to Monastir,
ninety miles, is lined with human corpses and the carcasses of horses
and mules dead of starvation, while thousands of old men, women, and
children are lying on the rocks and in the thickets beside the trail,
hungry and exhausted, awaiting the end.

"At night the women and children, ill-clad and numbed with cold,
struggle pitifully around meager fires of mountain shrub, to resume in
the morning the weary march toward their supposed goal of
safety--Monastir. But by the time this dispatch is printed Monastir,
too, may be in the hands of the enemy. This will leave them to the
mercy of the inhospitable mountain fastnesses, where for the past two
days a terrific blizzard has been raging, or to the Bulgarians."

The chief of the Serbian General Staff, Field Marshal Putn