Some time after the soldiers had withdrawn, and the dome was desolate again, a few peasants ventured to the top. They found the bodies of twenty-four Servians, battered and disfigured, and completely stripped; the Turks had taken away their own dead. Not so much of value as an old shoe remained on the battlefield. The next day the strong outfits of the insurgents, which had come from Belgrade, were sold by the soldiers on the market place at Koumanova. The peasants of Pschtinia rolled the bodies in coarse striped buffalo blankets, carried them down to the village, and buried them in the cemetery, the village priest performing the burial service. A rough wooden cross was raised over each grave. The villagers said the soldiers came back to Pschtinia and tore the crosses down; but they reared them again when the Turks were gone. ‘Are you Servians?’ we asked the peasants. ‘Bulgarians, effendi.’ ‘Then this band was an enemy to your party?’ ‘But they were Christians.’ On descending to the village we found our Turk already harnessing his team. He had been fed, and so had his horses, and they were all in a more tractable mood. The villagers, hale and halt, gathered around our carriage as we prepared to start, and poured forth their blessings on our Christian heads. Several small boys brought us dirty little fried fish, about two inches long, as a parting gift. We took the fish, rewarding the young villagers, and, as we crossed the stream, deposited the smoky carcases whence they had been drawn wriggling an hour before. Our driver took us home by a different route, more direct, he said, with a great ‘something’ to see. He had noted that the Englishman gave backsheesh, and was wont to put us in his countrymen’s way. He himself belonged to the world-fraternity of cab-men, whose instincts vary nowhere, East or West; but his cousin, to whom he took us, was a Turkish peasant, a man who, when the spirit of war is without his soul, is as true a gentleman as Occident or Orient produces. In crossing a trackless moor to the road that led where our Turk would take us, we lost the road, and for an hour wandered aimlessly till we met an armed man with a woman who covered her face at sight of us. The armed man asked the usual questions of our Turk, and gave him directions.