over a wooden bridge and began to go up a steep hill.  We came suddenly to a rambling wooden house and our carts dived into a deep ditch.  Jo leapt off just in time to save hers from turning right over.  Crowds of wounded Serbians were standing at the foot of a rickety outside staircase.  Above was a dressing-station, and a dark smelly room with no beds, which was to be the sisters’ home.  We could get no bread and so went out once more into the dark.  We did not know where our carts had gone, but some one said if we went in “that” direction we should find them.  On we went uphill, losing our way in a maize field.  In front of us were hundreds of camp fires.  At the first we asked if they had seen the English.  They shrugged their shoulders in negative.  We asked at the next; same result.  We had the awful thought that we should have to search every camp fire before we found our people, but luckily almost fell over Mawson, who had been fetching water.  We were going in quite the wrong direction and but for this lucky meeting might have wandered for hours.

A good fire was blazing in front of the tents.  An Austrian prisoner cut wood for us in exchange for a meal.  He came from a large encampment whose fires were blazing near by.  Dr. Holmes and a sister emerged through the smoke; they had at last got a cart and horse.  With them was an Austrian subject flying for his life.  He had lived for years in Serbia, his sympathies and ancestry were Serbian, but if the Austrians got him he would be hanged.  We wondered if it was the husband of the frantic woman at Kralievo, but did not ask.

One went early to bed these nights.  The men spread out into two card-houses while Jo was hospitably given a real camp-bedstead in a corner of the Stobarts’ kitchen, on the floor of which slept their men and also West, whose arm was getting worse.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XIX

NOVI BAZAR

We awoke to find where we were.  The little encampment which we had seen to our left on entering the town, was now far on our right.  The flat plain—­where was the large tent with the red cross painted over it—­had been our bed, the tent behind us; to our right was the brown hill topped by the old Turkish blockhouse; and in front a cut maize field with its solid red stubble sloped directly to the river, beyond which lay the village massed on the opposite slope up to a white church.  Immediately below us on the river edge were the roofs of the “Stobarts’” refuge and of the Scottish women’s hospital.  Poplar trees in all the panoply of autumn sprang up from the valley with their tops full of the blackest crows, who cawed discordantly at the dawn.  Our fire had gone out, but the Austrian had left enough wood, another was quickly started; but we found that Angelo in making his curries had melted all the solder from the empty biscuit tins and not one would hold water.  So there was a hurried transference of biscuits from a whole one.