SERBIAN CHIVALRY.

Clutha Leader, Volume XLII, Issue 89, 16 May 1916, Page 1

SERBIAN CHIVALRY.

The abject horrors of the flight of tho Serbians have just been graphically described by Henry Haller, formerly of the Fifth United States Cavalry, who was one of the few Americans In that pitiable episode, and he declares that during the journey to Podgorit/.a. in Montenegro, in a four days' snowstorm, more than 00,000 men died.

"They died so fast," he nx'.d (writes a London correspondent), "that they fell every few yards all along the road. The waggons and the carts went right over their bodies. Nobodv thought of trying to turn out of the way, and there were so many they could not but drive over them.

"The food problem was terrific, evui in Albania. A half-pound of bread was sold at 10 dinars (about eight shillings). As I had a little money at Sturza I bought five pounds of oka beans. Had I not been able to get the beans 1 would to-day be a dead man. I had just said to myself, T can't go any further,' when I persuaded the peasant woman to sell me the beans. I ate beans twice a day, making a sort of soup out of them, puttting in a little salt. At that I was lucky, much more so that the fellows who had to boil harness leather for five or six hours in older to make the hot water taste like soup. I saw men eat like savages, eating pieces of brown paper.

' "There wore perhaps more than 2(HM) women among the retreating horde with us, and it is a fact worth recording that they were kindly treated and given whatever comforts were available by soldiers who were otherwise dead to evtry other feeling. I have seen such men, gaunt, staggering along, half-naked, with a few pieces of cloth for shoes, unable to speak, with barely strength left to stop noar a dying horse and cut a stringy steak from its flank, straighten up for a moment near one of the women's carts and smilingly tender their last mouthful of food to some of the women.

"I have seen, time and time again, some freezing soldier take off his overcoat and force it upon some one of these women, and seemed almost ashamed to look upon her quivering body as he made the offer. Then he would search along the road until he was able to strip some dead man of his clothes to replace that which ho had so freely given."