But bad and treacherous as the track was, there was never time for hesitation; thousands of animals, and of soldiers, were pushing into you from behind, and if, leading your pony, you fell, you would be trampled on, and your pony would never rise again.
The most imaginative dreamer, after a supper of lobster and port wine, could scarcely dream a more complete nightmare. But our staff came through, as usual, with flying colours, smothered from head to foot with the aggressive red mud, but without loss of an ox or pony.
After some hours of horrors in this wood, we eventually emerged on to a narrow lane which was a sea of gelatinous and slippery mud; two steps forward, and one back. In places it was so deeply sticky that Vooitch had to haul my legs out, one after the other, as if they were things apart from me, whilst I looked on. This was refreshing, as it made us laugh at Vooitch's opportunity of pulling the chief's leg. We must continue till we reached the military station, or some place where hay could be found. Sandford and Merton had been sent on to find hay and bread, and they greeted us with the familiar "Nema." But our captain of last night had also gone ahead, and to our joy, in the evening, when it was dark, and there were symptoms of fatigue amongst the staff, and rain was falling, as it had fallen, in heavy showers all day, he appeared on the road, and said that he had found some kukurus, both for his, and for our animals, and a good camping-place for us near him. In return we gave him some of his favourite rice for supper, and porridge of mealie meal, before we started in the morning.
It was his "Slava" day, and in celebration of the event, he killed an ox, and gave us some beef, which we cooked almost before it was dead; we were very hungry, and we tried to pretend that it wasn't tough. But in the meantime another column, which was camping near us, also had a "Slava" day, and they celebrated it by killing one of our oxen. Our man, to whom the ox belonged, hadn't a sense of humour, so I had to see the officer in command of the offending column and get compensation.
We had been in luck's way here, with plenty of wood, and that, to a Serbian, is almost of as much importance as bread. I think that perhaps one of the reasons why Serbian soldiers disliked Montenegro, was the universal lack of firewood. War brings men back to primitive ideas, or lack of ideas, about things. For those engaged in war, a tree is never an oak, a beech, a willow, a fir, the marvellous result of growth and decay, birth and death, in mysterious process, during hundreds of years--a thing of beauty to be admired--it is firewood. Likewise, man, the evolutionary keystone in a process of marvels which we can only dimly divine, is not a human body, the shrine of an immortal soul: he is a soldier, reared like a pheasant, to be shot. And yet the Churches, which should lead the evolutionary movement of progress, adopt the attitude of the lamb before the shearers, and raise no protest. The human race flatters itself that it is advancing in civilisation: it mistakes the movement of the merry-go-round for progress.