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 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. It was only the unexpected coming across a newly arrived comrade (suffering--and it looked to me, dying--from an open bayonet wound and an advanced and hitherto neglected attack of scurvy), that turned Radovitch from wistful reminiscence of Aldridge, Montana, and set him talking of the grim realities of the life he had been leading in Serbia, a subject on which I had found him strangely reticent up to that moment. The things he spoke of that afternoon covered only an incident or two of his life with a body of men who, steadily depleted and yet as steadily recruited from Heaven knows where, have furnished an example of bravery and devotion to an all but lost cause almost without a parallel even in a war in which bravery and devotion form the regular grist of the day’s work. Because this band in question, although its exploits are even now being sung of by the Serbs along with those of the half-legendary heroes of their early history, is still a “force in being,” exercising in its sphere an influence of its own on the course of the war, it is necessary that the names of the villages and towns and mountains and valleys and rivers to which Radovitch so constantly referred in his narrative should be entirely suppressed. I may say, however, that later inquiry which I made at Serbian Headquarters at Salonika revealed ample evidence that the things he told me of--as well as others scarcely less remarkable of which the time has not yet come to write--occurred beyond the shadow of a doubt.