The reconstruction of South-Eastern Europe

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF

who regarded them as the real protectors of their lives and their only guarantee of any success against the enemy. The whole army train was arranged to be carried on horseback and made as light as possible. Everything that was not strictly necessary was thrown away or destroyed. Only an army possessing superhuman endurance and unconquerable spirit could perform such things and not cease to exist altogether. But the time-honoured ideal of a free and united country was living in those martyr soldiers, and it gave them strength to pass through the Albanian hell to new life and activity, which they are manifesting splendidly in the recent fighting on the Macedonian front. For all those who took part in the retreat through Albania, the memory of those days will be as an evil dream, that will haunt them to the end of their lives, an evil dream of human misery and pitiful helplessness against a merciless fate. Those who are more interested in it will find a better and fuller description in the stirring pages of some Britons who retreated with the Serbs, and tried to give a picture of their hardships, their endurance, their pitiless death from hunger, cold and exhaustion; of the roads, made practicable over countless corpses of oxen and horses sunk in the treacherous swamps along the sea-coasts; of the human corpses half buried in snow, their legs protruding gruesomely, with their calves cut off whilst they 144