At 9.30 that evening, Monday, November 15th, the order came to go on to Podyevo, some distance beyond Kurshumlya. We were away by 10 p.m. The night was fine, but very cold. Kurshumlya, as we passed through, was in darkness, and deserted except for the usual groups of refugees, huddled round camp fires, in the streets. One of the cars broke down in the town, and we had to leave the car with a Serbian soldier-chauffeur who had turned up and had offered his services. He was to repair it, or find oxen, and bring it on as soon as possible. If the Germans overtook him before he had done his work, he must destroy the car and follow us. But we never saw the car again. The man mended it, and was on his way to join us, when, on a steep and narrow road, it stuck, and some officers, who were following, blew it up with gunpowder and set fire to it, to prevent it from falling into the enemy's hands. Our way lay through a narrow gorge, and the road was atrocious, and, in the dark, dangerous; and as the chauffeurs were exhausted, with the constant strain, and lack of sleep, we decided at 3 a.m. to call a halt till dawn at 5.30. After that came a steep hill up to Prepolatz, the old Turkish frontier. At the base of this hill lay Banya, and a long stretch of flat muddy road, which was blocked, from end to end, with a solid phalanx of wagons, all motionless, as if they were carved in stone. Round the far corner the hill began, and what was happening there, no one could see. I was waiting on my weary horse for our turn to move, when a young captain of a commissariat column came up, and in excellent English, invited me to come and drink a glass of tea with him in his camp by the side of the road. He recognised me because he had visited our Kragujevatz hospital in the old days. He was encamped with his large column in a sea of mud, and we sat round his fire on little stools which sank deep into the slush; but I enjoyed the tea, which helped to keep me awake during a weary halt. It was sometimes a little difficult to discriminate between times when it was right that we should be shunted out of the line by a more important column, and times when we must hold our own. For artillery columns, of course, we always gave way, but sometimes extra officious under-officers, in control of columns, would try and bounce us out of the line illegitimately, and that required the fierce-eye business. Serbian officers were invariably courteous, and though I refused to take undue advantage of sex, they often smuggled us into the line when we might otherwise have had long to wait.