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This place he took on November 20, 1915, and with it a small arsenal, in which were fifty large mortars and eight guns, which even the German reports described as of "somewhat ancient pattern." To the eastward the Austrians had taken possession of Sienitza and Novi Varosh, up toward the Montenegrin frontier. Being expelled from Zhochanitza, the Serbians retired to Mitrovitza.

The conference of London has determined on a division of the Monarchy, and no separate peace on our part would avail to alter that. The Roumanians, Serbians and Italians are to receive enormous compensation, we are to lose Trieste, and the remainder is to be broken up into separate states Czechish, Polish, Hungarian and German.

The Serbians allowed them to almost reach their trenches: then, emptying the magazines of their rifles at them, they piled themselves over their breastworks and into them with bayonets and hand bombs. This was too much for the Austrians; they fled in wild disorder. Least encouraging was the experience of the Serbian Third Army, which was defending the territory south of the Iverak Mountains.

On this date the Serbians announced that since September 14, 1916, when the offensive began, they had taken 6,000 prisoners, 72 cannon, and 53 machine guns. Again the Sofia dispatch admitted that the Serbians had succeeded in "making a salient before our positions northeast of Polog."

Among the Serbians the need-fire is sometimes kindled by a boy and girl between eleven and fourteen years of age, who work stark naked in a dark room; sometimes it is made by an old man and an old woman also in the dark. In Bulgaria, too, the makers of need-fire strip themselves of their clothes; in Caithness they divested themselves of all kinds of metal.

Soon after the Serbians and Roumanians appeared in the prison camps of Germany we made reports on the condition and treatment of these prisoners, as well as reports concerning the British. I was able to converse with some Serbians, in the first days of the war, in their native tongue, which, curiously enough, was Spanish.

Fortunately general headquarters was able to come to the rescue with reenforcements. This lessened the danger from Kik. Whereupon the advance along Iverak was continued. By the middle of the afternoon, when the Austrians were driven out of Reingrob, the Serbians controlled the situation. The defeat of the Austrians was complete.

Prokuplie did not fall into the hands of the Bulgarians until November 16, 1915. Northwest of Leskovatz, where the pressure was not quite so extreme, the Serbians under Stepanovitch made a determined stand on November 11-12, 1915. Charging the Bulgarian center suddenly, they broke through their lines and threw them back in great confusion and took some guns and a number of prisoners.

Austria refused on the ground that the dispute was not of a justiciable nature; and the meagre five days' grace having expired on the 28th, Austrian troops crossed the Save and occupied Belgrade, the Serbians withdrawing without resistance. Meanwhile feverish activity agitated the chancelleries of Europe.

In older days they had been part of the great Serbian empire of Stephan Dushan, who early in the fourteenth century had defended western Europe against the invasions of the Turks and whose capital of Uskub had been a centre of civilisation one hundred and fifty years before Columbus discovered the new lands of the west. The Serbians remembered their ancient glory as who would not?