Personal relations between our officers and soldiers and the Serbians went on improving, and many cordial individual friendships were formed. General Mombelli continued General Petitti’s policy for a _rapprochement_ with the Serbians and intensified it. He was on excellent terms with the Prince Regent and neglected nothing to render himself a _persona grata_ with him and his army. Our Command was very generous in concessions of motor transport to Serbian officers and officials travelling between Salonica, the Serbian front, and Corfu, and they constantly applied to us for this purpose, preferring our service even to that which was subsequently instituted by their own Command. We also co-operated in Serbian propaganda in Macedonia. In the small strip of Serbian territory reoccupied after the capture of Monastir, there was a mixed Serbo-Bulgarian population of somewhat uncertain political sentiments, but predominantly Bulgarian. The Serbian Government did everything to spread the Serbian idea among the inhabitants by means of schools and propaganda. In the villages of Brod and Tepavci, which were in our military area, General Mombelli had some schools built by Italian soldiers for the native children. The Serbian Relief Fund (a British association) and the American Red Cross provided food, clothes, furniture etc. and also some nurses, while the Serbian Government provided the teachers. The inauguration of the school at Brod was a very pleasant festival of Italo-Serb cordiality. The great weakness of the Serbian Army was its deficiency in effectives, and this became more serious day by day. While all the Allies in Macedonia suffered from the same trouble, because the Governments and General Staffs were reluctant to send reinforcements (only our expeditionary force was kept up to strength, at all events until the autumn of 1917), the condition of the Serbs was far more serious, because, save for small groups of volunteers from Europe and America, very often of advanced age and unable to endure hardships, there was no source whence reinforcements could be drawn to make good the constant losses caused by fighting and sickness. “Our reinforcements,” said a field officer attached to the Serbian G.H.Q., “are always the same--the men who come out of hospital more or less cured.” This was a cause of great depression among the Serbians, and in spite of their intense patriotism, there were, as we shall see, moments in which their faith faltered and they contemplated the possibility of concluding a separate peace. This tendency among certain parties was very marked, and resulted in sundry plots and intrigues. CHAPTER VI THE ITALIAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCE