At nine o'clock, Major Paget took me to see the British Consul, Mr. F. W. Monaghan, who was also very kind. And all day long, the scene at the door of our little ground-floor-back was like a scene in the last act of a play, in which every sort of unlikely person unexpectedly turns up. We had just indexed Major Paget, and Mr. Monaghan, when the kindly countenance of Sir Charles Des Graz, British Minister, whom I had met at Nish, appeared in the doorway. He asked me to have tea with him, in the afternoon, upstairs; he also was living in the house! After that, we were not surprised when Colonel Phillips, British Military Attaché, also arrived. He had often dined with us at Kragujevatz, and he and I had never agreed upon the subject of Balkan politics. CHAPTER XLIII But my main business was to report myself to Colonel Guentchitch, the head of the Army Medical Service, and at eleven o'clock I went to Headquarters. There, to my great pleasure, I found, not only Colonel Guentchitch, and our P.M.O. (Major Popovitch), and Colonel Michaelovitch, and various other old friends, whom it was a joy to see again, but also our beloved Divisional Commandant, Colonel Terzitch. He had, this morning, been promoted to be Minister of War, and I was proud to be amongst the first to congratulate him on an appointment which gave everybody great satisfaction. I am not a military expert, but I cannot help believing that the retreat of our Division, as well as that of the whole Army, had been, from beginning to end, marvellously handled. To retreat, during nearly three months, fighting rearguard actions all the time, under circumstances which could scarcely have been more difficult, and to have saved the Army and its morale, was a great performance. The new War Minister was, as he always had been, very kind to me, and he said things about the work which we had done which made me very happy. He, and our P.M.O. and Colonel Guentchitch all seemed especially pleased with us, because ours was, they said, the only column which had come in intact, without deserters, after a trek which, from first to last, had totalled a distance of about eight hundred miles. They did not, I was humbly thankful to find, regret the experiment of having given to a woman, the command of a Field Hospital Column with the active Army. I felt happy to think that we had, in an infinitesimal way, been able to give proof of British sympathy with the brave Serbian people, in the cause of freedom and idealism; and I was also glad to think that we had perhaps shown that women need not be excluded from taking a recognised share in national defence, on account of supposed inability to suffer hardships incidental to campaigns.