The Luck of Thirteen Part 20

"What, you are not paid?" he said in amazement. "Then the English are wonderful! In Serbia our women would not do that."

Poor little John Willie still left a blank, though he had died long before. His name was not John Willie, but it sounded rather like it, so we just turned it into John Willie. He loved the name, and told his father about it.

They sat all afternoon hand-in-hand, saying at intervals, "Dgonn Oolie,"

and chuckling.

Jan once had brought back from a spring visit to Kragujevatz some horrible sun hats.

They were the cast-off eccentricities of the fas.h.i.+ons of six years ago, and had drifted from the Rue de la Paix to this obscure Serbian shop which was selling them as serious articles of clothing. Jo tried them on, and one of the nurses became so weak with laughter that she tumbled all the way downstairs.

Finding them quite impossible, Jo bequeathed them to the ward, where they were snapped up enthusiastically.

The ugliest was an immense sailor hat, the crown nearly as wide as the brim, but the head hole would have fitted a doll. However, John Willie fancied that hat and was always to be seen, a tiny, round-backed figure, wandering slowly in a long blue dressing-gown, blue woolly boots, and the enormous hat perched on the top of his pathetically drooping head.

One day poor little John Willie became fearfully ill. His parents arrived and sat dumbly gazing at him for two nights, while he panted his poor little life away. His friend the Velika Dete (big child), once a fierce comitaj, was moved away from the "Malo Dete," to make more room, and he sulked, while the Austrian prisoner orderlies ran to and fro with water for his head, milk, all the things that a poor little dying boy might need; and old Number 13 pa.s.sed to and fro shaking his head, for he had been long in hospital and had seen many people die.

A man with knees bent (he said with scroogling them up all winter in the cold) was put in John Willie's place. The Velika Dete came back, but he would not speak to "Bent Knees" for weeks.

By this time the Austrian prisoners were very well trained and made excellent orderlies in the ward. An ex-Carlton waiter was very dexterous in sidling down the ward: on his five fingers a tray perched high, containing dressing-bowls and pots bristling with forceps, scissors, and various other instruments.

His chief talent lay in peppering frostbitten toes with iodoform powder--a reminiscence of the sugar castor.

Our housemaid was a leather tanner, whom Jo's baby magpie mistook for its parent, as he fed it at intervals every morning. A Czech in typhus cloths spent his days down in the disinfecting, operating and bathrooms.

He had been an overseer in a factory and had added to his income by writing love-stories for the papers. A butcher was installed in the kitchens. Once a week he became an artist, killing a sheep according to the best Prague ideals.

All our prisoners, about forty in number, clung to the English hospitals as their only chance of life, for in other places sixty per cent. had died of typhus.

The Serbs, though bearing no animosity, could do little for them. We saw the quarters of some men working on the road. These were show quarters and supposed to be clean. Each room had an outside door. On the floor was room for six men and hay enough to stuff one pillow. They had no rugs, and the Serbs could give them none. The cold in the winter must have been intense.

We had come back to this little world after seven weeks' wandering, and almost immediately Jan had gone off to Kragujevatz with a broken motor.

While he was away Jo got letters from England and Paris, which made her realize that things were rather in a mess, and we should have to go home. We had left England intending to stay in Serbia three months, and had been then nearly nine.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XV

SOME PAGES FROM MR. GORDON'S DIARY

OCTOBER 2ND. Got a wire from Kragujevatz to say that the motor hood is ready and that we must go over to get it fitted. We cleaned and oiled the car, and at two ran it down the hill, but it would not start.

Found two sparking plugs cracked and the magneto very weak. When we had fixed it up it was too late. Four a.m. to-morrow morning.

OCTOBER 3RD. Started in the dark, Mr. Berry, Sister Hammond, Sava, I, and a female relation of some minister or other who wanted to go to Kralievo. The motor working badly, as it is impossible to get the proper spare parts. Three young owls were sitting in the middle of the road scared by our headlights; we hit one, the other two flew away. Sava and I stopped and tinkered at the old machine for about an hour, changed all the sparking plugs again, after which she went better. We reached Kralievo without incident, where we cast loose the female relation. From Kralievo pa.s.sed over the Morava, which was pretty floody and had knocked the road about a bit. The road led right through the Shumadia country, where the first revolts of the Serbian nation against their Turkish oppressors were engendered. We pa.s.sed the old Serbian churchyard. I never pa.s.sed by without going in. These queer old tombstones all painted in days when pure decoration had a religious appeal, these tattered red and white and black banners lend such a gay air to death; these swords and pistols and medals carved into the stone seem almost carrying a bombast to heaven. On one side of each tombstone is the name of its owner, preceded by the legend, "Here lies the slave of G.o.d." Do slaves love their masters?

When we pa.s.sed this road in the winter, black funeral flags hung from almost every hut, and even now the rags still flap in the breeze. A Serbian boy, clad in dirty cottons, shouted to us, making gesticulations. We slowed down and stopped.

"Bombe," he cried. "Aeropla-ane. Pet," he held up five fingers, "y jedan je bili slomile. Vidite shrapnel."

He pointed. We saw a quiet, early autumn landscape, the blue sky slightly flecked with thin horizontal streaks of cloud. Any scene less warlike could not have been imagined.

"Vidite tamo," he cried once more.

Straining our eyes one could just see, between the lowest strata of cloud, a series of small white round clouds floating.

"Shrapnel," said Sava, pointing.

"They hit one," said Mr. Berry.

I let in the clutch, we sped on once more. Bang! a tire burst.

Motor driving in Serbia is not a profession, it is an art. We were on another of these first-cla.s.s Serbian roads. Presently we came to a long downhill.

"That is the place," said Mr. Berry to Sister Hammond, "where we spent the night last winter when the motor stuck in the mud. There, beneath that tree."

We shrugged our way down the hill, and presently came into the gipsy environments of Kragujevatz.

A man stopped us, holding up a hand.

"Bombe," he said.

We got out. In the soft earth at the side of the road was a neat hole, four inches in diameter. Peering down we could see the steel handle of the unburst bomb. We next pa.s.sed a smashed paling, in the garden behind a crowd were searching for relics. An old woman had been killed, they said. We turned into the main street and plunged into a large crowd. The pavement had been torn up, and people were grubbing in the mud; pieces of charred wood were pa.s.sed from hand to hand.

"That's a bit of propeller," said one. "No; it's a bit of the frame,"

said another. A girl proudly held up a large piece of map scorched all round the edges.

"And the men?" we asked.

"Nemachke (Germans)," answered the crowd; "both dead; one here, one over there," pointing to the middle of the road.

We came into the Stobarts' camp, pitched up on the hill behind the Kragujevatz pleasure ground.

"Did you see the aeroplanes?" they cried, running towards us.

"No," we answered; "but we saw the shrapnel."

"One was. .h.i.t--it was wonderful. They were flying just over here, and a shrapnel burst quite close; and then one saw a thin stream of smoke come from the plane; then a little flicker. It seemed to fall so slowly. Then it burst into flames and came down like a great comet."

"D----n!" we said: "if only that machine had been working right yesterday."

We took our car down to the a.r.s.enal, and I left Sava to take it to bits and get it opened out, for there had been a bit of a knock in the crank case. The remains of the smashed aeroplane were piled in the yard, and from the way it had twisted up without breaking one could see from what beautiful metal the machinery was made. Some of the French experts denied that the guns had hit it--giving as their reason that one of its own bombs had exploded. But one of the engineers put his hand into a big hole which was beneath the crank case and drew out a shrapnel ball. I thought that would settle it, but the Frenchmen were not convinced. The sh.e.l.ls were bursting fifty metres too low, they said. Fifteen bombs had fallen about the a.r.s.enal, and one man, a non-commissioned officer, had been killed.

Met Hardinge and Mawson: they both saw the aeroplane fall, and were not fifty yards from the place where it struck.

Walked back to the Stobarts' camp for lunch. A French aeroplane had come over from Belgrade too late; now it rose slowly in the air and sailed off. Saw the two dead aviators; both had evidently been killed at once, for they were charred, not blistered.