SERBIA'S TROUBLES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16405, 9 June 1915, Page 8

SERBIA'S TROUBLES

A NEW ZEALANDER'S EXPERT-

ENCES.

TYPHUS RAMPANT. JFboii Ouh Own Correspondent.) LGONDON, April 13. From Nurse E. Peter, o! Chnstchurch, I have received the following interesting account of her early experiences in Serbia, whither she went m February as a member of Lady Paget's Red Cross unit. She lias been, stationed at Skoplje (formerly Uskub). At the time of writing her unit was being taken over by Lady Vv imborne's and Nurse Peter had not cruite decided whether to stay 011 or return home. She writes: "We had one afternoon and a night at Salonika, but did not leave the steamer till next morning, as a high sea was running and the little boats we would have had to land in were tossed about like cockleshells. Next morning we had our breakfast at 6 o'clock, and left the ship by 6.30, walking to the railway station, which we reached about 7. It took us quite_an hour to get our tickets, which the unit had to pay for, as far as the Serbian frontier, and to get our luggage l egistered, else we would never have feen it again. The country for the most part of the way to' Uskub is very like parts of New Zealand. A range of snowy mountains runs all the way, sometimes near at hand, sometimes very far off, interspersed by plains and undulating country, but the flat parts were mostly very wet. There • were numerous droves of sheep, numbering from about 50 to a few hundreds, guarded by peasants, with dogs. All the flo< ; had some black sheep, and others were almost all black with a few white ones. We crossed sevecal rivers of the Waimakiriri type, only tae water was always brown. The bridges over them had been blown up by Bulgarians a few weeks before, and were only temporarily mended; the train passed over very slowly, with most ominous creaking in some places. All along the railway a field telegraph ran beside the ordinary telegraph line, and the whole way the line and bridges were guarded by soldiers. Their shelters looked as if they were dug out of the banks or the sides of a Jiill and thatched over, such miserable looking plaoes. The train seems to stop just as long as it pleases at the station. At one _we stayed nearly an hour, and saw such a weird collection of human beings, and small carts each drawn by two tiny bullocks. We also saw long convoys of the same carts all coming the same way towards Skoplje. Here and there on the hills were scattered flowering shrubs either white or pink, rather like almond and peach blossom, except that they were growing wild, and a small stany flower like stars of Bethlehem, only different shades of mauve or else white. AJR RTVAL AT THE CAPITAL.

" We reached Skoplje about 9 p.m. instead of 6, and got such & kind welcome from Lady Paget, who was on tie station. We have a room divided into fottr cubicles ■with a small portion cut off into which you come first, and in this is a stove which is lit every night about 7 o'clock, so that when we come off duty by 9 o'clock we have a nice warm room to come back to. It is about two minutes' walk from the hospital. The food is good, and well cooked, if somewhat monotonous, and there is plenty of the wine of the country and lemonade for us to drink, as you cannot drink the water. No one but an inveterate 1 grumbler could complain of the way we are cared for. Sister Coleman, who is acting matron, is just thfe right woman. She never spares herself, and is never put out or cross, and she has many difficulties to overcome. There is no typhus so far in this hospital, but we hear that in the Serbian hospital near here the men are dying like flies with, typhus and badly dressed wounds. I heard that thev throw all the dressings and limbs out in the backyard, and that the crows fly about with bits of flesh. Where the Austrian prisoners are kept typhus has also broken out, and of 5000 prisoners they say that 2000 have already died, and more are dying. Two nurses went up to try and settle things a little, and they tell me that there are often two men in one bed, sometimes, one of them dead. They' are also lying in cellars, and they have to separate the dead from the living as they can. Lady Paget has gone up there with Dr Maitland, but everyone says that it is not a vise thing to do until they get a staff able to cope with the fever. " March 22. Lady Paget is ill 'with typhus, and one of the nurses is dowa also, and Dr Knobel, who also went there, is dangerously ill with it. Four nurses have had to ,leave this hospital to look after them, and now one of the nurses has got it and another has had to leave here to look after her, and we expect her to be the next. Then another will have to go. It seems such a pity not to finish off this hospital before trying to start another, asd that with a quite insufficient staff or accommodation. I have 28 patients, mostly suppurating gunshot -wounds. The Serbian doctors at the front mostly do up the wounds in starch bandages, keeping in all discharge, then the patients have from one to four days coming down, and you can imagine the state of their wounds by the time they get here. The Wimborne unit is taking on this hospital after March 31/ and we are told we can either go home or join them. Skoplje lies in a sort of basin, through which the Vasla runs, mountains, some of which are snow-clad; is a picturesque town with a good many minarets. VISIT TO THE CEMETERIES. "The cemetery is a very, weird place, the graves are so close together that you have to walk on them, and they dig up one grave full of bones to put in another personi You see the bones sticking out of the sides. One body dug up like that had fragments of its clothes still sticking to it, and they dumped it back again on the top of the fresh coffin. There is no fence round the cemetery; any animal or person walks over the graves. The Turkish cemetery, further up the hill, is still more queer. It consists of hundreds of flat slabs, some with a name, some with none, just stuck anywhere flat- on the ground like paving stones. Sheep feed through them and carts drive over them just as if they were paving stqnes. There is not a vestige of a fence. The Turkish quarter of Skoplje looks like a collection of hovels stuck down wherever the builder felt inclined to put one. They have very small rooms, into which you walk, often over a high step, and take down whatever you fancy to buy. They always ask double what they want for a thing."