Dusk came, bringing depression; the travellers on the curly road looked like mere shades.  Coat collars went up and hands were pocketed.  Little camp fires began to twinkle here and there on the hillsides.  We came to a large open space where many fires blazed, respectfully encircling a French aeroplane section.  Opposite was a high peak topped by a Turkish castle.  There we wished to halt, but the corporal said we must push on, as he wished to get food for the horses.  After we had passed the castle the dusk grew rapidly darker and the road narrower and more muddy.  Although camp fires twinkled from every level space, the never ending stream of fugitives seemed to grow no less.  Darkness only added to the tragic mystery of the flight.  The bullock carts poured along, the soldiers crowded by.

A horse went down, the owner stripped the saddle off, flung it into a cart and cursing stumbled on into the darkness.  The carts following took no notice of the poor horse but drove over it, the wheel lifting as they rolled across its body.  We shouted to the owner; but he was gone, so we turned one or two of the carts off, and made them go round.  But we could not stay there all night.  The horse was too done, and too much injured by the cruel passage to move, so Jan reluctantly pulled out his “automatic” and, standing clear of its hoofs, put two bullets through its brain.  It shuddered, lifted two hoofs and beat the air and sank into a heap.

On we went progressing for mile after mile in the mire, but never a house did we see, nor a spot to camp on.  At last the corporal gave up the quest for hay, and we were faced with the problem of spending the night on a narrow road bounded on one side by cliffs beneath which ran the Ebar, and on the other by an almost perpendicular bank.  The night was black, the mud a foot deep, and a stream ran across the road.  The carriages drew up in single file and we discussed the sleeping problem, while Cutting cooked bovril on an ill-behaved Primus stove.  Our drivers had to sleep on the carts.  The women also had carts to sleep in; and the Scottish women offered Jo a place in their already well-filled carriage.  The men were fitted somehow into the rest of the carts, while Jo, Jan, and Blease found a ledge below the road, and though it was very squelchy, they spread a mackintosh sheet and rolled up on it in their rugs.

No sooner were they really settled and sleeping than a voice said, “You’ll have to get up:  an officer says the carriages must move on—­the King is coming.”  It was West.  We sat up.  Between us and the dim lights of the carts the black shadows of the crowds passed without end.

“I’ll go and talk to them,” said Jo; and unrolled herself, struggled and fumbled with her boots and floundered into the blackness, where a mounted officer was delivering orders.  Shouts could be heard, lights waved, horses whinnied, splashing their feet in the puddles as they were being violently pulled here and there, and our poor little carts were moving ahead into obscurity.  Jo told him they were a Red Cross party—­that the carts were small, and couldn’t they stay where they were?  The officer inspected the poor little carts, made his best bow, and said, “Yes, they can stay.”