Colonel Guentchitch kindly arranged for us to have meals at the Hotel de la Ville, otherwise reserved for Serbian officers. In the evening J. G. and I were invited to dine, as the Colonel's guests, at the officers' mess at Staff Headquarters. About one hundred officers of the Serbian Army were dining, and I shall never forget my feelings as I took my place amongst these brave men. Of their bravery in the field, I and all the world had known, but here, now, was a more difficult bravery, most admirably shown. The hearts of these Serbian officers were brimful of the knowledge that everything which they prized on earth was lost. Their wives and children were in enemies' hands; their homes were desolate; strangers devoured their land; the imperative of a cruel suffering was upon them; yet, if you had sat and thought, for a year, of the demeanour which should be shown, under the circumstances, by officers of a defeated army, met together in exile, at the end of three months of retreat, no finer ideal of quiet dignity and courage could have been conceived. I had seen them in the heyday of success, when, during the spring and summer of 1915, they enjoyed the knowledge that they had been the conquerors of the Austrian Army, whom they had driven from the land. They had then shown no arrogance, no vain-glory, no petty conceit of their wonderful achievement. They were modest, as conquerors, and now they were equally modest in defeat. They had been outnumbered, and attacked simultaneously on three fronts, but they had never lost heart or hope, because, though the men who fought the physical battles might be killed, the ideal for which they fought would never die; the spirit of Serbia was unconquered; the Serbian Army was saved, and in the Serbian Army, whether conquered or defeated, the Serbian spirit lived, immortal. There were no repinings at the non-arrival of the French and English, who might have saved Serbia. There was, the officers still said, probably some good reason why the Allies had not arrived. And even if this sentiment was only expressed to spare our feelings as British subjects, it showed good taste and a refinement worthy of an advanced civilisation.