It took us, at first, a long time to pack the ponies, but we were away by dawn (Monday, December 6th), climbing up the mountain, through the fir trees, over slippery ice, and rocks which were half hidden in snow. There was no longer a defined way; the whole earth was now an untrodden track, from or to perdition. Whichever way you looked, oxen, horses, and human beings were struggling, and rolling, and stumbling, all day long, in ice and snow. Soon after we started, I saw a long column ascending a steep hillside; near the top, a horse slipped, and knocked down the man who was leading it; they both fell, and as they rolled down the slope, they knocked down all the other men and horses in the line, and these all fell like ninepins, one after the other, all the way down the mountain side.
As the physical difficulties of the route increased, the difficulty, for all the columns, of securing bread for men, and hay for oxen, and for horses, increased also, with the result that the track became more and more thickly lined, with the dead bodies of oxen, and of horses, and worse still--of men. Men by the hundred lay dead: dead from cold and hunger by the roadside, their eyes staring at the irresponsive sky; and no one could stop to bury them. But, worse still, men lay dying by the roadside, dying from cold and hunger, and no one could stay to tend them. The whole scene was a combination of mental and physical misery, difficult to describe in words. No one knows, or will ever know accurately, how many people perished, but it is believed that not less than 10,000 human beings lie sepulchred in those mountains. The route of escape, which led through Monastir to Durazzo, was even more disastrous. From amongst the army reserve of 30,000, composed of boys below, and of men above military age, 10,000 only reached Durazzo.
Many of the fugitive women, when they saw the mountains, and were faced with death from cold, fatigue, and starvation for themselves and children, went back to their Germanised villages in Serbia. Poor souls! They were between the devil and the deep sea, and they chose--the devil! The wife and two children--two boys--of one of our drivers, who had trekked with us, in one of our wagons, since Palanka, also turned back when we came to the mountains, and for their sakes I was thankful.