“Not a light of any kind in house or shop was to be seen.  No lamps were lit in the streets and the city was plunged into absolute darkness.  Not a soul remained in the streets.  To the darkness there was added profound silence.  It was as though this amazing city had been suddenly blotted out.”

The Wounded Serb

[From The London Times, Oct. 18, 1914.]

VALIEVO, Sept. 25.

Valievo lies at the terminus of a narrow-gauge railway which joins the Belgrade-Salonika line at Mladinovatz.  Along this single track of iron road the entire transport of the Servian Army is being effected.  Westward come trains packed with food, fodder, munitions, and troops; eastward go long convoys crowded with maimed humanity.  At Mladinovatz all this mass of commissariat and suffering must needs be transferred from or to the broad-gauge line.  In this situation lies not the least of the problems which beset the Servians in their struggle with the Austrian invaders.

Valievo itself is a picturesque little town which in peace time is famous as the centre of the Servian prune trade.  Its cobbled streets are, in the main, spacious and well planned.  There still remain a few relics of the Turkish occupation—­overhanging eaves, trellised windows, and the like—­but these one must needs seek in the by-ways.  I picture Valievo under normal conditions as one of the most attractive of Balkan townships.

Nor has the tableau lost anything in the framing, for it is encircled by a molding of verdant hills which run off into a sweep of seeming endless woods.  The vista from my hotel window is almost aggravatingly English.  Across the red-tiled roofs of intervening cottages rises the hillside—­a checkerboard of grassy slopes and patches of woodland intersected by a brown road which runs upward until the summit, surmounted by a whitewashed shrine, amid a cluster of walnut trees, touches the gray sky.

But Valievo is not now to be seen under normal conditions.  From the street below rises the sound of clatter and creak as the rude oxen wagons bump over the cobblestones.  Morning, noon, and night they rumble along unceasingly, and whenever I look down I see martial figures clad in tattered, muddy, and blood-stained uniforms, with rudely bandaged body or head or foot.  Every now and then a woman breaks from the crowd of waiting loiterers and rushes up to a maimed acquaintance.  They exchange but a few sentences, and then she turns, buries her head in her apron, and stumbles along the street wailing a bitter lament for some husband, brother, or son who shall return no more.  A friend supports and leads her home; but the onlooking soldiers regard the scene with indifference and snap out a rude advice “not to make a fuss.”  They brook no wailing for Serbs who have died for Servia.

The town itself has been transformed into one huge camp of wounded.  All adaptable buildings—­halls, cafes, school-rooms—­have been rapidly commandeered for hospitals.  Sometimes there are beds, more often rudely made straw mattresses, for little Servia, worn out by two hard wars, is ill-equipped to resist the onslaught of a great power.  For 16 days a fierce battle has been raging near the frontier, and wounded have been pouring in much more rapidly than accommodation can be found for them.