Our road led across the battlefield. On every side were traces of the struggle, corpses of men, dead and dying horses. Near the railway we found a Turkish gun team of which five of the horses had been killed or wounded by a shell, the sixth horse, a big solemn-looking grey, was standing uninjured by his fallen comrades, an image of dumb distress. A Servian soldier, charged with the collection of loose horses, appeared upon the scene, and, after putting the wounded animals out of their pain, turned to the grey, which had been standing quietly watching the man at work. Obviously, the next step was departure, but here a difficulty arose. The solitary survivor of the gun team was loth to leave, and the look in his honest, wistful eyes was infinitely pathetic. A colloquy ensued between the representative of the Russian Empire and the Servian peasant. Both were Slavs, and, in consequence, horse lovers; both agreed that this horse deserved and desired death; there and then an act of extravagance, almost impossible in any other army, was perpetrated, and the gun team was reunited in some equine Nirvana known only to Slavs and Arabs. “Another victim of the war,” I remarked to my companion, as we continued on our road. He evidently considered this observation as typical of my British lack of imagination, and proceeded to recite a poem describing the fall of snowflakes. Russians can witness human suffering with indifference, but are curiously sentimental in regard to nature, animals and flowers; nearly all Slavs possess a dangerous charm, the charm of men with generous impulses uncontrolled by guiding principles; their speech is splendid and inspiring, their actions uncertain, since they are ever at the mercy of lurking passions and events. Just before darkness fell a number of birds, coming from all directions, settled upon the battlefield, they were black in colour; round Kumanovo spread another “Field of Blackbirds.” But these were not blackbirds in the ordinary sense; they were carrion crows brought by some instinct from their lonely haunts to batten on man’s handiwork littering that death-strewn plain. A raucous cawing made the evening hideous; sometimes a cry, more harsh and guttural than the rest, seemed to propound a question, an answering clamour followed, approving, quarrelling; it might have been a parliament of birds, summoned fortuitously, already passing laws to regulate this unexpected intercourse. Gloating, but not yet satisfied, the stronger birds had made themselves lawgivers, and meant to impose respect for property upon their weaker brethren.