WITH SERBIA into Exile: NEW Edition

By Fortier Jones

I HAVE to thank a man on a Broadway ex-press for the fact that at the close of September, 1915, I found myself in a remote valley of the Bosnian mountains. The preceding June this person, unknown to me, threw a day-old newspaper at my feet, and because it fell right side up, I became aware that men were wanted to do relief work in Serbia. In an hour I had become a part of the expedition, in a week I had been "filled full" of small-pox, typhus, and typhoid vaccines and serums. Three weeks more found me at Gibraltar enduring the searching, and not altogether amicable, examination of a young British officer, and within a month I was happily rowing with hotel-keepers in Saloniki, having just learned in the voyage across the Mediterranean that submarines were at work in that region. With a swiftness that left little time for consideration the next few weeks passed in camp organization at Nish, in praying that our long-delayed automobiles would come, and in getting acquainted with a country about which I had found but little trustworthy information in America.Then because an English woman, Miss Sybil Eden, with the intrepidity and clear-sightedness which I later found characteristic of British women, decided that relief must be carried where, on account of great transportation difficulties, it had never been before, I spent six wonderful weeks among the magnificent mountains of Bosnia at the tiny village of Dobrun.On a certain day near the end of this sojourn my story of the great retreat properly begins. I sat chatting with a Serbian captain of engineers beside a mountain stream six miles behind the Drina River, where for almost a year two hostile armies had sat face to face, watching intently but fighting rarely. It was a beautiful day, typical of the Bosnian autumn. The sunshine was delightfully warm and drowsy; the pines along the rugged slopes above us showed dull green and restful, while the chestnut-grove near which we sat showered hosts of saffron leaves into the clear stream at our feet. Overhead an almost purple sky was flecked with fluffy clouds that sailed lazily by. Peace filled the Dobrun valley, peace rested unnaturally, uncannily over the length and breadth of beautiful Serbia, and our talk had been of the preceding months of quiet, unbroken except for vague, disturbing rumors that were now taking more definite form and causing the captain grave concern.On the other side of the little valley ran the narrow-gage railway which bridged the roadless gap between Vishegrad, on the Drina, and Vardishte, the frontier post between Serbia and Bosnia. It was down-grade all the way from Vardishte to Vishegrad, which was fortunate, for the Austrians had smashed all locomotives before they retreated, and Serbia had been unable to get any more over the mountains to this isolated little railway. As we talked, two large trucks thundered by loaded high with the round, one-kilogram loaves of bread that were baked at Vardishte, and thus sent down daily to the men in the Drina trenches. Ox-teams had laboriously to pull these trucks back again to the bakeries. A truck filled to a wonderful height with new-mown hay for the oxen at Vardishte now stood on a siding to let the bread-train go by. It looked very queer being pulled along the railway track like a farm-wagon by ten teams of huge oxen. From the army blacksmith's shop near by came the pleasant sound of ringing steel as the peasant smiths fashioned shoes for the cavalry horses, and the steady rat--tat--tat of hammers came from down the river where the army engineers with the simplest sort of tools were constructing a permanent bridge to replace the one destroyed by the retreating enemy. Some refugee children, in filthy rags and suffering from scurvy, splashed about in the creek, shouting and laughing as if there were nothing in all the world but sunshine and sparkling water.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1500899860
• ISBN13: 9781500899868
• Release Date: August 2014
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 134 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1"