FOR a time, during these preparations, Kosta and his staff, including myself and my party of three, lived in a village called Maslovare in the hills to the west of the Bosna. By this time the formations in this area had gone over to the attack. Kotor Varosh was taken from the Germans, and the main German stronghold of Banya Luka besieged. Teslitch was attacked. Trains were blown up. Things were becoming "normal" again.

In Maslovare that September there was peace. The sun rose at six in the morning and shone all day in a sky that was necked with white cloud, and the low green hills of the Bosna Valley were soft and lambent in the sunlight. The evergreen forests were patched with deciduous foliage, lime-green and apple-green and the green of oaks and elms in full leaf. The narrow white road to Teslitch lay beneath a coating of thick dust; and the air as you strolled along was laden, too, with the bitter scent of this summer dust mingled with the stench of cattle and the smell of ancient, unwashed timber such as comes from long-inhabited timber houses. And the whole mixture of smells made an impression of desolation and dismay, as if Bosnia was entirely detached from the world.

Beyond the elbow of the road, towards the north-east, were the fringes of the Borja Planina, a great forest of pines and deciduous saplings that led across the mountain to the approaches of Teslitch;

and in Teslitch the Germans and the Ustashe maintained a strong garrison. But everyone, including the garrison, knew that they would never venture through the Borja again, they had been ambushed too often; and back in Maslovare, at least for the time being (and perhaps the war would end in October) they considered it was peace. The old women sat in the dust and insulted their daughters-in-law; and their daughters-in-law rasped back at them in stirring Bosnian terms, a language rich with ingenious obscenities, or else let well alone and went on with their work, or joked with the men of our escort company who lounged about on the grass beside the well, picking lice from their shirts and cleaning their rifles and inventing yet one more way of describing the battles they had fought.

The presence of Englishmen in the village, too, could be reckoned on to provide a few hours' gossip every day, although they seemed disappointingly like everyone else in their habits and appearance. The villagers of Maslovare had certainly never seen an Englishman before; and in normal times the advent of one, let alone three, would have been sufficiently remarkable, but nowadays Maslovare had become a well-used thoroughfare for everyone who marched to the defence or attack of Teslitch, and there was no saying any longer what strange nationality might not turn up along that white and winding road. They had seen Germans and Italians, Frenchmen and Poles and Russians who had been impressed into the German armies, Kazbeks and Kirghiz and men from Turkestan, Serbs and Croats and Slovenes and Dalmatians, and several more; it was a little much to expect them to be excited about a couple of Englishmen. But one or two of them had friends or cousins in Philadelphia or Detroit and gave the Englishmen, who as far as Maslovare was concerned were in no way different from Americans, the credit for that. There was also some^vague theory, promoted and discussed at interminable length, that the English might know how long the war was going to last, some arguing that they had won the last war and were therefore qualified to prophesy, others pointing out that from time immemorial only Mother Russia amongst the great peoples had cared for miserable Bosnia. But on the whole opinion had it that the English were poor devils just like everyone else, and knew no better what the answer to such questions might be.

In the evening they would come out of their stinking houses to listen to the men of our escort company singing. Towards seven o'clock, when the sun was beginning to set below the slanting hills of Kraina, and the cattle brought in and the guards posted, our .chaps would stoke up the kitchen fire so that the sparks flew out into the village street and sizzled in the dust, and would settle themselves and their rags and rifles into comfortable ways of leaning against each other; and then someone would start singing. This would be at first an individual effort; then, after the supper canfulls had gone round, the Italian they had adopted for the sake of his concertina would jerk out wheezing music to them, and everyone who was there would sing. You could stroll down the road with the moon coming up in a clear sky, the pale September night stirred only with a light breeze, and stars above you wherever you looked, and from across the way would come the notes of that wheezing con­certina, now jaunty with "Bandiera Rossa," now labouring with the songs of Bosnia, and the accompaniment of men singing and humming and chanting to themselves. During those evenings our world stood still, and alike the horrors of the past and the shadows of the

future seemed far-off and unreal.

It was still summer when we moved towards the Bosna river. Maslovare slept in the green valley as we climbed eastwards into the green shade of the Borja. The road wound away behind us across the green meadows and the sycamores of Maslovare until, beyond the bakery in its clump of limes, it was lost to sight behind the hill. The dusty grit of the road was in our mouths as we sweated upwards into the forest.