The captain’s fire was the rendezvous of the village.  Amiable and picturesque people came in and talked about the unhealthiness of the place, the relative bravery of nations with a special reference to the courage of Montenegrins, and about the submarine raid and of how the Austrian captain had repeatedly fired his revolver at the sailors of the boat he had sunk while they were swimming in the water.  Their eyes were streaming, not with emotion, but because in Montenegro one has no chimneys.

At dusk the rest of us arrived.  The port captain said “To-morrow,” so we climbed up to the inn, examined the stores, a few tins of tunny, mackerel, and milk, and the thirteen made the best of the bar-room floor for the night, booted and ready in case a transport for the Benedetto should arrive.

In the morning the captain said we could have the boat that night, and in the evening he said we could have it in the morning.  His excuse was that the Borra was blowing its hardest, and no sailor could be found to venture out; but Fabiano said that this was not true.

The real reason was the sleek Austrian torpedo lying on the beach, for the Dulcinos are famed on the Adriatic coast because of their timidity.

Time passed drearily.  The only amusement we had was to go and annoy the captain of the port by asking when we could have a boat.  The wind was too cold for constitutionals, and we piled on all our clothes and sat on our knapsacks in the bar-room—­for there was no fire—­and talked wistfully of sausages, Yorkshire Relish and underdone beefsteaks.

We had much time for meditation, and pondered over the downfall of Serbia.  Why had the Serbian Government so resolutely refused to make any territorial concessions to Bulgaria, when it was obvious that the entry of Bulgaria into the conflict meant the ruin of Serbia?  Why had they permitted the Austrians to build their big gun emplacements on the Danube without interruption?  Why had they not withdrawn to the hills and then built proper defences with barbed wire entanglements and labyrinths? for properly entrenched they might have defied the Austro-German forces for months.  Some day, perhaps, these questions may have to be answered.

One day a party came in.  They had passed through Vrntze much later than we, and we heard that Dr. Berry and an assistant had been seen hurriedly nailing boards on to the slaughter-house roof.  They, too, had come by the Novi Bazar route.  They said that the other routes were deep in snow and that the sufferings of the army were terrible.  That a great portion had been hemmed in at Prizren, and that the Bulgars had shelled the passes so that they could not escape.  They themselves had escaped the advancing Austrians by the skin of their teeth owing to good horses.

[Illustration:  UNLOADING THE “BENEDETTO,” SAN GIOVANNI DI MEDUA.]