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We searched two cafés meeting again with our old acquaintance the schoolmaster from Nish plunged into all sorts of odd corners, and at last met Colonel Stajitch in a restaurant. He greeted us. "I have a great favour to ask," he said diffidently. "If I might I should like to give to you a little appendix. It is my son. He is seventeen, but is very big for his age.
The Bulgars had occupied the whole of the line south of Nish. The French and English were advancing with extreme difficulty. The Farmers' unit trailed into the town, no conveyance having been arranged for them from the station. The Scottish women were already here, having come in the night; they had to sleep twelve or fifteen in a room. Next day a small contingent of the wounded Allies arrived.
The Bulgarian minister at Nish, the Serbian capital, received his passports on October 8, and on the same day the Bulgarian minister at Paris was handed his passports. On the following day, October 9, Belgrade, the former Serbian capital, was occupied by Austro-German forces and the invasion of Serbia by Austria and Germany from the north and by Bulgaria from the east began in earnest.
The answer of the Serbian Premier, M. Pachitch, to this offer of separate terms was: "Our way is marked out. We will be true to the Entente and die honorably." After the evacuation of Nish the Serbians, under Marshal Stepanovitch, retreated to the west bank of the Morava, blowing up the bridges as soon as they were across.
A glance at the map will show that the main line of railroad, running down from Belgrade to Saloniki by way of Nish, passes within a few miles of the Bulgarian frontier, just opposite Sofia. Indeed, from Klisura on the frontier the distant whistle of the locomotives and the rattle of the trains across stretches of trestle work can be heard plainly on still days.
And there was not a Serbian boy in those ranks who did not realize what a winter's march through that country would mean. From the fall of Nish, in fact, the Serbians had been fighting with their backs to a wall, and grim and bloody were the struggles between Serb and German in the wild tangle of hills that surrounded the Plain of Kossovo.
"Oh, what are you doing with our tents?" said one of the Scottish nurses. This was complicated! We understood the tents were Sir Ralph's. All the men swore they were Sir Ralph's tents, they had seen them at Nish. The "Scottish Woman" said she knew the tents well, and they had cost £50 each.
On April 3, 1915, the leading United States newspapers printed an appeal received from Nish, the war capital of Serbia, which set forth a terrible situation in terms that confirmed a report already made public by Sir Thomas Lipton, who dedicated his famous steam yacht, the Erin, as a hospital ship for use in the Mediterranean, and visited Serbia in February and March.
The great immemorial highway from the north-west to the Balkan peninsula crosses the Danube at Belgrade and follows the valley of the Morava to Nish; thence it branches off eastwards, going through Sofia and again crossing all Bulgaria to reach Constantinople, while the route to Salonika follows the Morava southwards from Nish and crosses the watershed into the valley of the Vardar, which flows into the Aegean.
King Peter himself was present, hoping by his presence to revive the spirits of his soldiers to such a pitch that they would make a hard fight, for by this time they had undoubtedly lost a good deal of their morale. Von Gallwitz had passed through Nish and was now driving back the Serbian advance posts in the Toplitza Valley, while the Austrians, on his right, were pressing on toward Novi Bazar.
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