In one wood there were many dead men. In a patch of grass near one poor fellow, who was lying, where he had fallen, in the snow, green buds of young snowdrops were bravely peeping through the dead leaves, as though to adorn his grave. Beside him was his tin mug, from which he had been drinking his last drink of melted snow. For him no roll of honour; for his family no news of "killed in action." But when the war is over, and other men return, his place in the home, and the places of thousands of his comrades, will be empty. We picked bunches of snowdrops in that wood whilst waiting, during moments of a congestion of oxen, men and horses, which was now worse than ever. In another wood a long halt had to be made, whilst convoys ahead of us, took precedence at the narrow exit. One convoy which said it had been waiting there for two days, had with it hundreds of oxen, and was on the point of pushing past us, but, at the critical moment, a friendly officer came to the rescue, claiming that our horses should have precedence of oxen, and he shouted and insisted and bluffed and pushed, both our column and his own, which was even smaller now than ours, into the line. He came with us, and we bivouacked together for the night, in a tiny walled paddock, a couple of miles (over rocks and mud) above the end of the Lake of Scutari, and outside the hut of an Albanian. The latter, as usual, at first refused us the hospitality even of his field, but he eventually yielded to the money bribe. The captain and his lieutenant supped with us. We gave them hashed and warmed tinned Serbian meats, of which we still had a few, with white beans, and a second course of boiled rice, which was one of our mainstays. We were a quaint-looking group as we sat round the fire, all smothered to the waists in thick red mud. We were obliged to let it dry upon us, as there was no water to wash it off. We had no change of clothes; we had left the last relics of such superfluities behind, when the carts were burned. We could see, from the convergence of columns from all directions, that we should have trouble to-morrow in getting into the line of the narrow track along which we must travel. So we were up at 4.30 on Sunday, December 19th, and as the result of combined tactics, our two columns eventually pushed into the narrow track of mud and rock. Some distance below us, was the north end of the Lake of Scutari, and it was cheering to see the beginning of the lake upon which stood--at the other end--Scutari, our goal. We hoped that our route would be beside the lake, as that would at least mean certainty of water, but we never touched it at any point.