The situation was growing more and more serious. We had retreated forty miles in the last two days, evidently not without reason, as the Germans had entered Jagodina, at noon, on the day we had passed through at 2.30 a.m. and, as there were other columns behind us, that did not leave a large margin of safety. I was always aware that delay caused by mistake in taking the wrong road, or by dalliance with accidents, would be fatal; but neither in our column, nor in any column that I saw during three months of retreat, was there ever anything but calmness and apparent unconcern. Had there at any time been panic, the narrow defiles would have been catacombed with dead, in addition to the thousands who perished from other causes. But remarkable indeed was the dignity and orderliness with which, from start to finish, the retreat of the Serbian Army was conducted. And the silence! Hour after hour, day and night after day and night, week after week, thousands upon thousands of soldiers, trudging wearily beside their slow-paced oxen, or with their regiments of infantry, or driving their gun-carriages, or, as cavalry, riding their horses--in silence. No laughter, no singing, no talking; the silence of a funeral procession, which indeed it was; a silence only broken by the cries of the drivers to their oxen: "Svetko! Belia! Napred! Desno! Levo!" ("Svetko! Belia! Forward! To the right! To the left!") and the ceaseless rumbling of wagon wheels, which sounded like the breaking of an angry sea on a distant pebble beach. I have, since my return, re-read accounts of the retreat of Napoleon's army from Moscow, and though we were spared some of the horrors they endured, there were two features in our Serbian retreat, which were happily absent in the other. For the retreat in which we took part was the retreat, not only of the Serbian Army, but of the Serbian nation. This meant that thousands of women, children, and old men, driven from their homes by the advancing enemy, were, in ever-increasing numbers, as we progressed southwards, adding to the difficulties of the safe retreat of the Army, by mixing with the columns of artillery, cavalry, infantry, engineers, field hospitals, and swelling the procession. Wagons filled with household treasures, beds, blankets, chairs, frying-pans, even geese, slung head downwards at the back of the cart, or balancing themselves with curious dignity, upon the uneven surfaces of indiscriminate luggage; a look of pained astonishment on their faces, at their rude removal from their own comfortable pastures.