'Ah, nineteen-seven,' cried Radovitch, the hurt look in his face giving way to one of dawning comprehension; 'that was two years before my time in Aldridge. Maybe you're right about that year; but since I've lived there our nine has wiped up the valley with the best --'

The uproar of two or three fresh machine-guns opening in unison drowned his voice at this juncture, and a few moments later a half-dozen rifles were poked over the rim of our refuge, while a gruff-voiced Serb corporal in the tunic of a British Tommy and the baggy breeches of a French Zouave informed us that we were his prisoners.

Radovitch, with a sheepish grin on his face, threw up his hands with the classic cry of 'Kamerad!' and then, shambling over opposite his captors, coolly demanded that they toss down a box of cigarettes for him and his 'Merikansky' friend.

'Smashed mine when I fell,' he explained, sauntering back and offering me a 'Macedonia.' 'You'd reckon we'd had about enough of fighting in Serbia, without these d-d sham fights while d sham fights while we're supposed to be resting up here in Corfu. It may be all right for new recruits; but you'll have to admit that two years of the kind of scrapping we 've been having is n't going to have the effect of putting us on edge for playfighting like this. But never mind, we'll be back to the real thing again in a month or two. Come on along down to the camp and meet my colonel. We were kids together in Prilep. Now he's in command of three thousand men and

I'm only a corporal; but just the same, I could buy him out twenty times over.'

The bare outline of Radovitch's story he told me that evening (after he had officially been 'set free' again), as I trudged beside him across the hills to his camp; but it was not until he obtained an afternoon's leave three or four days later and took me for a stroll through the Serbian Relief Camp, that I learned that he had been one of that immortal band of heroes who, disdaining to take advantage of the open roads to the Adriatic or Macedonia after Belgrade fell, made their way to a mountain fastness in the heart of their own country, and stayed behind to wage such warfare as they could on the hated invader. What sort of a warfare this was indeed, what sort of a warfare it is, for the band still survives, making up in an unquenchable spirit what it has lost in numbers - I then learned for the first time.

The mood to talk did not seize Radovitch until after he had led me to the summit of the hill behind the Relief Camp, from which lofty vantage the eye roved eastward across a purple strait to the snow-capped peaks of Epirus and Albania; westward to where what was once the Kaiser's villa of Achilleon stood out sharply against the sombre green of the backbone ridge of the island; northward to where its twin castles flanked to right and left the white walls and red roofs of Corfu town; and southward to the dim outlines of Leukos and Cephalonia thinning in the violet haze of late afternoon. Below, on three sides, was the sea, with the storied isles of Ulysses bracing themselves against the flood-tide racing into the bay; above, a vault of cloudless sky, and roundabout, a thousand-year-old forest of gnarled olives.

It was the effect of all this, together with the sight of his friend from Serbia suffering from scurvy and an open bay

onet-wound in the little tented hospital of the Relief Camp that we had just come from, which set Radovitch talking of things I had been vainly trying to draw him out upon ever since I met him. While the mood lasted, he seemed to need no other encouragement than the attentive listener so ready to hand; when it had passed, he was back in the mines of Montana again, deaf and blind to my every attempt to make him talk of Serbia and what had befallen him there.

The fragments of experience which I later managed to extract from him in the cafés of Saloniki consisted mostly of such odd bits as a corkscrew would drag from a reluctant cork.

II

'If you thought that poor guy down at the hospital looked bad,' said Radovitch, lounging back on his elbow in the cool shade of a spreading old olive, 'I wonder what you'd thought of me the day I hit the beach at Valona. I was a month further gone with scurvy than he is (so that the teeth were loose in my jaws and my flesh had lost so much of its "spring" that a touch would leave a dent in it), and in addition was just on the edge of lockjaw that came from walking on the point of a hobnail that had worked through the sole of one of my boots. The Italian doctors at Valona saved me from the lockjaw by pumping some kind of dope under my hide that stopped the action of the poison; but the scurvy I've been the last six months getting clear of. Fact is, I'm not all clear of it yet, for I find that I left a tooth behind up there where I bit the turf the other day. But my blood's clean now, and in a month I'll be as good as new; and so will that boy in the hospital after a decent rest. A Serb takes a lot of killing; if he did n't, the nation would have died out a

good many times in the last five hundred years.

'Scurvy was one of our worst troubles, and is yet for that matter; for the Serb was a good deal of a vegetarian in peace-time, while in war, 'specially when you're more or less besieged, or even when your communications are bad, fresh vegetables are the one kind of provender hardest to keep in stock. That's why scurvy keeps cropping up in the new Serb army even to-day. It's being better fed than it ever was, but there is n't yet enough "greens" in the ration. For us in the mountains, pretty well ringed by the Austrians, the lack of vegetables and the scurvy it brought on was about our one worst trouble in our first winter.'

'How did your band get together in the first place?' I interposed; 'and what sort of men was it made up of? Was there some kind of organization before the retreat, or did you simply drift together afterwards?'

'It must have been mostly "drift," replied Radovitch. 'Probably the government and our generals knew we'd have to give way when the Austrians and Bulgars together came at us, but none of the rest of us ever dreamed we could n't wallop the whole bunch. So I don't think there is much truth in the yarn about the band of "blood brothers" that had been formed in advance. We were about evenly made up at the start, of men who would n't leave the country and men who could n't leave the country. The first were mostly mountain men of the region we went to. There were a lot of ex-brigands among them, and most of them had been fighting the Turk, or the Bulgar, or the government, or each other, all their lives. It was to the way these fellows knew the country, and how to live off it and fight in it, that we owed most of our success. The rest of us were all sorts of odds and ends who had fallen out of the

retreat but had still been able to keep out of enemy hands. To take my own case I had stayed behind to try and reach my wife and fetch her out with me, and so lost so much time that the way was closed when I finally gave up hunting for her.'

we had no luck with our least troubles.

food was one of

'We had plenty of rifles from the first. A Serb will drop his clothes before he will his gun, as you will find if you ever see our army in action where a river has to be forded. Many a man

'Never seen her since I left her at Uskub when I went to the front in the first year of the war; but I left her with plenty of money, and not long ago I had a letter smuggled out to me in which she said that a rich Turk in her home town - an old boy who had been a good friend of my father and who loaned me the money I went to America on - had given her shelter in his home, and that she was getting on O.K. She's a dead game little sport, the wife (what do you think of her following me across from the U.S.A. when she knew I was going off to fight as soon as I hit Serbia ?), and she'll come through it all right if any one can. Sure [answering my query] she's a Serb. Knew her when I was a kid, and she came across to Montana to marry me. You ought to see her drive our old Ford down the Aldridge grade.'

I manœuvred Radovitch away from the wife and Aldridge with an adroit question or two, and he resumed his story.

'At first this particular mountain region, which later became our stronghold and is now the only part of Old Serbia in which the enemy has never set foot, was only a refuge, and for a few weeks we were pretty hard put to find enough to live on. It was touch. and go for food all the first winter, and we lived mostly by night raids on straggling Austrian supply-trains. But before long we rounded up enough sheep and goats to keep us going, and in the spring got one of the little mountain valleys under cultivation. Since last summer-except for vegetables, which

but never a one that I ever heard of without his rifle. We were also tolerably well fixed for cartridges, because a man don't use one in raiding or fighting from ambush to a hundred he pots off in the trenches. We always managed to have enough for our own regular army rifles, and after we got well started raiding, Austrian rifles and munition came in faster than we ever had use for them. We could have done with an extra machine-gun or two before we had our stone-rolling defense organized, and before the Austrians had learned that it did n't pay to try and crawl in and pull us out of our holes. But before the winter was over we had enough spare "spit-firers" so that we didn't mind risking the loss of one or two by taking them along on raiding parties.

"The lay of the mountains made the whole mesa just one big natural fort, and I miss my guess if in all the world there's another place of the same kind so easy to defend and so hard to attack. The mountains are steeper and rockier than that main range of Albania you see across there against the sky, and that's going some. I never struck anything half so rough in all the summers I put in prospecting in Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. Only one of the passes had a cart-road up to it, and only three had mule-trails. There were two or three other places where a man could scramble up by using his hands, but everywhere else he would have to have ropes and scaling ladders.

'At every one of the passes- including the one of the cart-road a half

dozen good rock-rollers, with plenty of "ammunition," could put the kibosh on an army, and you may bet we saw to it that there was no shortage of pebbles on hand. For the first week or two my fingers were worn pretty near to the bone from handling rocks. The only way the Austrians could have got the best of us, once we had made ourselves at home, would have been with not less than a dozen regiments of their Kaiser Jägers, mountain batteries and all; but by the time this fact sunk into them the Italians were keeping them so busy that they probably figured they could n't spare any such number of Alpine troops for sideshows. Anyhow, they never even gave us a good run for our money in the way of attacks, though of course some of the raiding parties came in for pretty bad punishings every now and then.

'Dynamite was the one thing we felt the need of more than anything else, and yet, perhaps the one big thing we did would n't have been half so big (and maybe it would have failed complete) if we'd had the powder to go about the job the way we planned to do it in the first place. Did you ever hear what happened to the Austrian force that was camped in the Valley last spring?'

'I remember reading one of their bulletins,' I replied, 'which admitted losing a battalion or two in a flood in that region. But that was due to "natural causes, was n't it? Didn't a broken dam have something to do with it?'

'Natural causes and a busted dam did have something to do with it,' said Radovitch with a grin; 'but nature in this case had some active assistance, and that was where we came in. It wasn't just a battalion that went down stream, either; it was more like two of their big regiments - the whole of the main force they had shivvied together

to bottle us up with. It was the best thing we did by a mile; and, as I told you, it would n't have been half the clean-up it was if we'd had in the first place the powder to do it in the "regular way." If we had had the powder, we'd never have given Providence a chance, and, believe me, it was nothing but Providence that could have worked things round the way they finally came

out.

'You see, it was this way,' went on Radovitch, settling back comfortably and smiling the pleased smile of reminiscence that sits on the face of a man who recalls events in which he has taken keen pride and enjoyment. "The most open approach to our mountain country was by the gorge up which ran the cart-road. There was a good-sized area of watershed draining out this way, so that the little river running through the gorge was a pretty powerful stream, even in low water a good bit bigger than the old Firehole in Yellowstone Park. This river flowed out of the main mass of the mountains into a fine bowl of an uplands valley, and then on out of that, through a rough range of foothills, into another gorge. At the head of this last gorge is a natural site to store water, and there a project of an old government reclamation scheme that had been held up half way for lack of money to go on with a high dam had been built, which backed up a deep, narrow lake four or five miles long.

as

"The Austrians had a small force in the little village in the valley of the lake, and patrolled four or five miles of the cart-road into the mountains; but the main lot of them were camped below the second gorge in an open triangle-shaped valley that ran up from the plain to the foothills. It was a good safe, healthy, well-drained camp, well above the top marks of spring high water. The only threat to it was the

--

lake behind the dam in the valley above, but unluckily for them they did n't know all the facts about that dam. "The truth was that the dam was built to hold up a lake half again as deep as the one then there; but poor engineering and scamp contracting combined to make it too weak to stand the pressure up to the level intended. The English engineer who came to inspect it put a mark about two thirds of the way up, and warned that it would n't be safe ever to let the water rise above that height. As a precaution, it had been the custom every February or March, before the spring thaw came, to drain off the water of the lake during the month or two before the runoff was the greatest, so that there was plenty of margin against the floods shoving up the level above the dangerpoint. The Austrians were good enough engineers to know that it was a bum dam, but they did n't seem to have the sense to start lowering the water level before the spring freshets set in.

'Of course we did n't have to set up nights to figure what a break in the dam-if only it came sudden enough -would do to the main Austrian camp; but the contriving of ways and means to bring about that "sudden break" seemed to have us guessing from the first. The simple and natural thing would have been to try and work down a couple of raiding parties on either side of the lake, rush the guards at the dam with knives (as we did later at the bridge I told you of), plant two or three charges of dynamite, touch off the fuses, and beat it back to the hills. If we'd had enough powder, probably that's the thing we'd have tried, but with what success it's hard to say. The chances against anything like a 'clean job' were anywhere from ten to fifty to

one.

'But the hundred or so sticks of forty-per-cent "giant" we had in stock

were out of the question to tackle the job with, and so no move was made that might have stirred the enemy's suspicions of what we had in pickle for him. So, far from taking any precautions as the flood season approached, he only let the water go on rising in the lake and extended the main camp a hundred yards nearer the river. We talked over a hundred plans in the long winter nights, but it was not till the snow began to turn slushy at noonday, along toward the middle of March, that we hit on one that seemed to promise a chance of success.'

III

'We had been hoping all along that the Austrians might let the water go on piling up behind the dam until it gave way; but it was not till one day when our scouts brought word that the gates had now been opened, with the evident intention of holding the lake at a level which they figured at about ten feet above the danger-point, that it occurred to us that we might do something to help the good work along. Nobody ever recalled afterwards whose idea it was, but a dozen of us officers and men together, in the Serbian fashionsuddenly found ourselves waving our arms and getting red in the face discussing a plan for building a little dam of our own, backing up as big a lakeful of water behind it as we could, and then turning it loose on the big lake below at the crest of the spring floods. If any of us had had any engineering sense we'd have known that, with no tools but a few axes and spades, and no materials but what nature had put there, we could n't build a dam in a year big enough to be of any use, let alone in a month. But having no sense to speak of in things of that kind, we went ahead with the job, and, with the luck of fools, pulled it off.