WAR-SCARRED SERBIA.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 144826, 2 November 1915, Page 5

WAR-SCARRED SERBIA.

VISIT TO MEMORABLE'BATTLEFIELDS. . SCENES. BY THE V'AT. KRAGUIEVATZ. September. I have just returned from a trip by motor-car to Shabatz; by motor-car punctuated with interludes when humble bullock teams pulled the motov-car out of the mud. The trip of some 2go miles in all, which, on the map, should be’ comfortably made in three days, occupied six; and, but for the oxen of the country, the motor-car would doubtless still be embedded somewhere on those amazing roads, which have only bren repaired In.spots for the immediate necessities of military transport since ther were twice desperately fought over, mile by mile and yard by yard, last winter.

It is a region already famous in Serbian history, for. about'one-third of the way from here to Shabatz., only a mile or two to one side of the main road, lies the little village of Tnkovo, with its modest church, the birthplace of Serbian liberty.from the Turk. Now and henceforward it is doubly sanctified as the scene of the rout of the Austrian armies in November and December last. Eight months have passed since then. Spring and summer have done their best to hide the scars of war under a veil of green. Yet everything is almost as it was when the tide of battle left it. Serbia has had little time for tidying np.; and anyone who searches off the highroad may still pick up shell cases and shrapnel halls where he will, and is likely to stumble in the grass on other and grislier relics of the Austrian overthrow.

THE AFTERMATH OF BATTLE. By Valieva something more l than halfway on 'the road—l wandered one hot noon among the ragged lines of trench and rifle pit and gnn position, where the Austrians, falling haek. made their .last futile effort to check the advancing Serbians. Behind and among the trenches are tumbled areps where there are'no crosses or anything but th§ uneven surface of the ground to tell that they are graveyards. But in certain places the hooded rise in companies at the approach of an intruder ; you can hear the buzzing of innumerable flies, and it is almost impossible to walk where the wind blows over the fetid ground towards you. The dead in battle—men or horses or oxen—cannot he carefully or deeply buried, and under the action of rain and sun the loosely-shovelled earth will crumble away. On every side also are signs that war is still at hand. Endless trains of bullock carta cumber the roads, and troops of marching men. At dusk the woods on the southern and eastern faces of the hills glow with camp fires, for up there along the ridges, faring to the west and north, are the Serbian lines of defence waiting for the Austrian if he should see fit to try this hitter road again. PROSPECT OF ANOTHER INVASION. Throe or four weeks ago there were indications that lie intended to do so. It was primarily ‘ the total lack of ammunition which compelled the long Serbian withdrawal before the advancing Austrians, and it was the arrival of supplies at the eritienl moment whiph enabled them, on that fateful 3rd of December (November 20, 0.5.), to turn and, catching the enemy, tangled up among those hills and struggling with the mud on a front which, in his over-confidence, he had allowed to become extended almost to dislocation, to drive him, in twelve days of delirious whirlwind fighting, out of the countrv, his armies fewer by 100.000 men than'when bo had come in. and almost everything that he had_ of guns and stores and supply trains left behind him in the mud of the Ljig and Kolubara valleys. The Austrians invaded them with five army, corps. Almost immediately after leaving Kraguievatz yon enter a magnificently wild country of steep valleys and wooded hills. Here, on this road, on a line just beyond Gorni Milanovatz. 25 miles out, was the very centre and crucial point of the operations when the Serbians began their offensive. Six or seven miles ahead you pass through the now famous milage of Vrntsani. Fifteen miles to the left lies Suvobor, and immediately to the right is the mountain wilderness of Rndnik. The whole country is one splendid panorama of tossing hills, and here it was, with Vrntsani as a centre, that the Serbian First Army, driving and shattering the Austrian centre front, covered itself with glory. BATTLE OF THE KOLUBARA. The Serbians know the operations as tho Battle of the Kolubara, which will presumably bo their name in history; and it was, in deed, the mud of the Ljig and Kolubara, with the difficulties of the rivers themselves, which proved the deciding factor in the completeness of the Austrian rout. How fierce the fighting was may be illustrated by the statement of an officer, who told me that his battalion went into one minor affair on the Ljig over 900 strong, and after two days’ fighting there wore 76 survivors with whom he was the only officer untouched. On the left of the First Army, the Serbian Fourth Army (or the Army of Ujitze) was keeping pace and hammering the enemy westward along the left hank of the Morava, and through the hill country which stretches from Pranjani to Maljen. When once their centre had been fairly broken on the Kolubara the Austrians" thought of nothing but their own safety. Beyond the Kolubara is one final "belt of hills, Serbia’s first breastwork against an attack from the north-west, beyond which, on a lino along the Tamnava from Ub to Kotselievo, the ground falls away to the wide valley of the Save,, which reaches to Shabatz. In this region there is no peasant hero who did not see the Austrians go by in triumph in November and come hack ragged and beaten in December. Rarely has an army suffered more than did the Austrian Army in its retreat. ...

But it is hard to pity them; for in Shabatz and in all this district they committed, before their- overthrow, every brutality and excess of which an army could ha guilty. There ia no village, hardly a farm or cottage, which did not thon experience not only the inevitable miseries of civilised war but the greater horrors of individual-cruelty-and passion.