Since this was the case, a French trawler, the _Verdun_, commanded by Lieutenant d'Aubarede, brought the sick to Corfu. And, as M. Emile Vedel tells it, this was perhaps one of the most beautiful episodes of our navy's activity, for there are few deaths as hideous as that to which they exposed themselves in taking in their arms poor beings touched with a malady essentially so contagious, and so dirty and covered with vermin that they made everyone shudder. With precaution and care that brothers do not always have for their own brothers, these near-corpses were taken to Corfu, where doctors and nurses from the French Navy saved some of them and made the end more easy for the rest. In twenty-two days everything was almost over. The troops at San Giovanni and Valona and Durazzo had been evacuated, as had the Austrian prisoners. All the money of the Serbian treasury had been transported to Marseilles in the cruiser _Ernest Renan_. It amounted to about eight hundred million francs. However, on the twentieth of January, about two thousand men still remained at San Giovanni di Medua. There were also a certain number of field pieces. After so many men and guns had been saved, were these to be abandoned? No. Everything must be saved. The last man must be saved and the last gun must be saved, whatever may be the risk, the fatigue and the hard work. On the morning of the twentieth of January, Captain Cacqueray, commanding the French naval forces, had two young naval officers of the French fleet come aboard his ship, the _Marceau_, Ensigns Couillaud and Auge, who commanded the little trawlers _Petrel_ and _Marie-Rose_. He ordered them to return once more to San Giovanni and bring back with them all they could. "You must succeed and you will succeed," Captain Cacqueray said simply. Some few minutes later the two trawlers were out in the Adriatic, headed for San Giovanni. Here we must quote Ensign Auge's words. He commanded the _Marie-Rose_, and we must be satisfied with citing from the eloquent brevity of the ship's log: