West said that it was a most marvellous picture.

A little farther on a tyre had burst, and they had been forced to come back on the rims.  They eagerly welcomed Jan’s idea of the Novi Bazar route, feeling sure that if they once got to Mitrovitza it would be long before they got away, and very doubtful if they could get lodging there.

Again we could hear the guns in the night, and news had come in that Krag had been occupied and that the German cavalry were making towards Kralievo.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XVIII

THE FLIGHT OF SERBIA

The men were up before three-thirty to strike the tents, having slept but little.  Breakfast was prepared and waiting at five-thirty in the big hospital bedroom; but the women ate of it alone.

Jo sallied forth to the camp, anxious to know what had happened.  She found a testy little company.  For two hours they had been struggling in the dark with tents and waiting for the carts and for a policeman, as all the riff-raff of the town was gathering to loot our leavings.

At last the carts were run to earth standing outside the hospital in a line—­ten little springless carts in charge of a stupid-looking corporal who had misunderstood his orders.  He moreover refused to move, saying he “had his orders.”

The indefatigable Churchin was found, and sent him off with a flea in his ear.  When he arrived at the camp we found a woman and household luggage in one of the carts.  He said it was his wife, and objected to our putting anything into that cart.  We told him he would have to lump it, and he got sulky; as each extra package was put on a cart he said that it would break to pieces.  Certainly the tents were very heavy, but we had been ordered to take them.  When the carts were loaded up to the last degree they moved slowly through the mud and drew up at the hospital.  We were sadly overladen.  Our party consisted of Mawson, West, Cutting, Rogerson, Willett, Blease, Angelo, Whatmough, Elmer, Owen, and Hilder—­the last four being our friends of the railway journey from Nish.  We were thirteen.  Temporarily with us also were the two little Austro-Serbian boys.  The other four carriages were occupied by a doctor and three members of the Stobart unit, two “Scottish Women,” their orderly and a Russian medical student who had been a political prisoner.

Leaving the town was a slow business, as it was being evacuated.  Our little procession proceeded very slowly.  Most of us walked.  Jo drove with two of the Stobarts, watching from a seat of vantage the packed masses of people who wormed their way in and out between the ox carts.  The road was blocked by some gigantic baking ovens on wheels.  Hundreds of boys, big seventeen-year-old boys with guns, and little limping fellows from thirteen to sixteen, wearing bright rugs rolled over their shoulders, were dragging along in single file.  Their faces were white, and their noses red, sergeants were beating the backward ones along with a ramrod.  One of them said—­