d had never set eyes upon the man before.

Georgevitch rescued us. Georgevitch was fat, tall, young and genial, and
was military storekeeper at Vrntze. He was an ideal storekeeper and
looked the part, but he had been a comitaj. He had roamed the country
with belts full of bombs and holsters full of pistols, he and 189
others, with two loaves of bread per man and then "Ever Forwards." Of
the 189 others only 22 were left, and one was a patient at our hospital
where we called him the "Velika Dete" or "big child," because of his
sensibility. With Georgevitch was a dark woman with keen sparkling eyes.
Alone, this woman had run the typhus barracks in Vrntze until the
arrival of the English missions. She was a Montenegrin; no Serbian woman
could be found courageous enough to undertake the task. After struggling
all the winter, she was taken ill about a fortnight after the arrival of
the English. The Red Cross Mission took care of her and she recovered.

We left our bore still talking about his wife and the dog, and fled to
their table, where we chatted till our train arrived. We found a
coupe--a carriage with only one long seat--the exigencies of which
compelled Jan to be all night with Jo's boots on his face, and we so
slept as well as we were able.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER II

NISH AND SALONIKA

To our dismay a rare thing happened--our train was punctual, and we
arrived in Nish at four o'clock. It was cold and misty. The station was
desolate and the town asleep. Around us in the courtyard ragged soldiers
were lying with their heads pillowed on brightly striped bags. A nice
old woman who had asked Jo how old she was, what relation Jan was to
her, whether they had children, and where she had learnt Serbian,
suddenly lost all her interest in us and hurried off with voluble
friends whose enormous plaits around their flat red caps betokened the
respectable middle-class women.

Piccadilly weepers vanished and a depressed little quartet was left on
the platform--our two selves, a lean schoolmaster, and an egg-shaped man
who never spoke a word. We found a clerk sitting in an office. He said
we could not leave our bags in his room, but as we made him own that we
could not put them anywhere else he looked the other way while we
dropped them in the corner.

In the faint mist of the early morning the great overgrown village of
one-storied houses seemed like a real town buried up to its attics in
fog. We found a cafe wh