With the Serbs in Macedonia

THE SIMPLE LIFE 213
just as those young women were game to go in
and bring out the sick and wounded.
Shells daily fell faster and faster. Monastir
became a city of cellar-dwellers. Gas-shells,
tear-shells, incendiary shells and shrapnel were
all poured in at any odd hour of the day or
night, culminating in a grand effort on the day
of the Salonica conflagration, when over four
hundred houses were set on fire.
Before leaving Monastir it may be well to
refer to a visit paid to the city in June, 1918.
in Macedonia in war-time is of
Transport
necessity a rather happy-go-lucky business for
passengers. The ordinary traveller has to chance
his or her arm on getting a lift on something
desired. That was how it came
going the way
about that we were asked to take with us an
English girl who wanted to get back to the
Serbian Relief Hospital.
Arrived at the once beautiful and now shame-
fully dilapidated Queen of Macedonian cities,
our passenger hospitably invited us to tea. We
accepted, and so came to something that we
shall never forget.
Tea was in a cellar— most of these Balkan
houses have big cellars for coolness and for the
storage of wine and the winter supply of maize
— of a big building badly damaged by shell-fire.
Half a dozen women sat down to it— bread and