“Not that you will like the food,” she said, “for it’s all tinned, and I have only twenty-five shillings a week to buy milk, bread, and fresh meat.”

We wondered why, in such a fertile country, a party of hard-working people should be condemned to eat tinned mackerel and vegetables brought all the way from England?

However, the dinner was excellent—­all “disguised,” she said, for she had during the few weeks she had been there concentrated on the art of disguising bully beef and worse problems, and had sternly put Dr. Clemow on omelets and beefsteaks, as his digestion had caved in under six months’ unadulterated tinned food.

We met old friends, fellow travellers on the way out.  In those days they were a wistful little party, wondering how they were going to reach Montenegro, the Adriatic being impossible.  At last one of the passes was hurriedly improved for them by a thousand prisoners, and they rode through in the snow.  Since then typhus had raged, two of their number had been very ill, and one had died.  Their energy had been tremendous, and everywhere in the country they were spoken of as the wonderful English hospital, and even from Chainitza, where there was a Russian hospital, soldiers walked a long day’s march in order to be treated by the English.

Dr. Roger’s rival was there, the perpetrator of ninety hernia operations a week—­or was it more?

All this on tinned food!

Our hotel room proved large and comfortable with a talkative willing Turk in attendance.  We slept immensely and were wakened by yet another horrible cock crowing.  All Balkan cocks seem to have bronchitis.

Plevlie is a red-tiled nucleus with a fringe of wood-roofed Serb houses planted round it.  There are ten mosques, while the only Greek church stands forlorn on the other side of the great hollow two miles away.

The town is not really Montenegrin.  It has the cosmopolitan character of all the Sanjak, Turks, Austro-Turks and Serbs—­a mixture like that at Marseilles or Port Said.

The shops are Turkish, though their turbaned owners, sitting cross-legged on the floor-counters, can speak only Serb—­a thing which puzzled us at the time.

We saw veiled women and semi-veiled children everywhere, thickly latticed windows with curious eyes peeping through, and yards with high wooden palings above to prevent the possible young men on the houses opposite from catching a glimpse of the fair ladies in the gardens.

Plenty of long-legged Montenegrin officers—­with flat caps bearing the King’s initials, and five rings representing the dynasties of the ruling house—­filled the streets, and also the inevitable ragged soldiers with gorgeous bags on their backs.

Some of the women, too, were wearing these caps, but theirs were yet smaller and tipped over their noses, like the pork pie hat of our grandmothers.  One closely veiled woman showed the silhouette sticking up through her veil just like a blacking tin.