It was his "Slava" day, and in celebration of the event, he killed an ox, and gave us some beef, which we cooked almost before it was dead; we were very hungry, and we tried to pretend that it wasn't tough. But in the meantime another column, which was camping near us, also had a "Slava" day, and they celebrated it by killing one of our oxen. Our man, to whom the ox belonged, hadn't a sense of humour, so I had to see the officer in command of the offending column and get compensation. We had been in luck's way here, with plenty of wood, and that, to a Serbian, is almost of as much importance as bread. I think that perhaps one of the reasons why Serbian soldiers disliked Montenegro, was the universal lack of firewood. War brings men back to primitive ideas, or lack of ideas, about things. For those engaged in war, a tree is never an oak, a beech, a willow, a fir, the marvellous result of growth and decay, birth and death, in mysterious process, during hundreds of years--a thing of beauty to be admired--it is firewood. Likewise, man, the evolutionary keystone in a process of marvels which we can only dimly divine, is not a human body, the shrine of an immortal soul: he is a soldier, reared like a pheasant, to be shot. And yet the Churches, which should lead the evolutionary movement of progress, adopt the attitude of the lamb before the shearers, and raise no protest. The human race flatters itself that it is advancing in civilisation: it mistakes the movement of the merry-go-round for progress. CHAPTER XLII We were early on the move on Monday, December 20th, and hoped to reach the military station within an hour or two. The route began with its usual ferocity of mud, and the continuous effort, during hour after hour, of dragging the feet out at every step, was wearisome; leg-pulling that morning became a common form of entertainment, and rain fell in torrents all day. We reached the military station at Ritzik at 11 o'clock a.m. The office was in an old monastery, and we waited for our turn to be served with bread, in an upper room. There our hosts were two Albanian (Franciscan) monks. The ponies and oxen had to wait in the pelting rain. There was, after all, no bread, but mealies were given instead, both for the men and for ourselves. We were disappointed, but made no comment, and, as we were leaving, the officer in charge whispered to me to say nothing about it, but he gave me quietly two large corn loaves of his own, in addition to the mealies, so we gave the extra mealies to the men.