The life of the members of the field hospital during the retreat was indeed a strange one, for ever on the march, stopping for a few hours to pitch a camp and attend to the wounded brought to them from the battlefields close at hand, evacuating them by motor ambulance to the nearest railway or hospital, and then marching on again. Throughout the retreat Mrs. Stobart rode at the head of her column night and day, selecting every inch of their road, struggling for a place for them in the endless procession of the straggling host that beset the mud-soddened roads and slippery mountain paths, obtaining food for them and their horses with infinite difficulty in the deserted villages through which the column passed. Forced to snatch odd hours of sleep when and where they could, always fully dressed, and prepared for the orders to march at any moment, they often narrowly escaped capture. The sound of the enemy guns was ever in their ears, the invading armies always at their heels. Mrs. Stobart truly proved herself a leader in fact as well as in name, for no trained commander of troops could have shown a higher courage or faced emergencies with a more decided energy than this Englishwoman. It was a cruel day for the hospital column when, at the end of a terrible forced march, during which Mrs. Stobart was eighty-one hours in the saddle, the motor ambulance and the hospital equipment had at last to be destroyed and abandoned at the foot of the Montenegrin mountains, through which Mrs. Stobart then led her skeleton column on foot. The horrors of the retreat increased every day, but the only way to safety had to be faced, though it lay over trackless mountains 8000 feet high, through snow, ice, unbroken forests, and bridgeless rivers. It was then mid-winter. Men and animals died by the roadside in hundreds from starvation and exposure. Writing of the retreat afterwards, Mrs. Stobart said: “Continued cold, exhaustion from forced marches, and increasing lack of food made the track a shambles ... men by the hundred lay dead, dead from cold and hunger, by the roadside, and no one could stop to bury them. But worse still, men lay dying by the roadside, dying from cold and hunger, and no one could stay to tend them. The whole scene was a combination of mental and physical misery, difficult to describe in words. No one knows, nor ever will know accurately, how many people perished, but it is believed that not less than 10,000 human beings lie sepulchred in those mountains.” At last, on December 20, Mrs. Stobart had the triumph of leading her weary but courageous column into Scutari in Albania, without the loss of a single one of its members--the only commander who succeeded in bringing a column intact through the retreat.