With the Serbs in Macedonia

INTO THE BREACH ONCE MORE 109
title of ''
Magnificent "— but magnificence is not
tact. He has not the British gift for dealing
with other peoples. With the best of intentions
he rubbed the Serbs the wrong way. His
methods were both a little too arbitrary and a
little too commercial. He was not their friend
so much as their master and their merchant.
And the result was that, though for many
things they admired him and were grateful to
him, they did not, as a whole, love him.
All this, however, is merely by way of introduction
to what is not very correctly known as
the Battle of Ostrovo, the first engagement in
which the reconstituted Serbian Armies took
part.
On May 4th the French had occupied Fiorina,
one hundred and thirty kilometres from
Salonica and thirty kilometres south of Monastir,
a picturesque Macedonian town situated at the
foot of one of the grimmest tangles of mountains
to be found in this part of the Balkans. There
was a pass of sorts through this range — Pisoderi—
whose character is best indicated by the
fact that it was regularly travelled by a long
caravan of camels strung together and led by
a donkey. Later, by a veritable engineering
triumph, this track was made into a road
possible for motor-lorries, which passed on into
Albania and the coast by way of Koritsa, a road