r
Save and circled over Krupanie, Shabatz and Valievo. The last doubts
were then dispelled; the attack was coming from the east.

And finally, on August 12, 1914, the message flashed over the wires that
the outposts had seen boats in movement, full of soldiers, behind an
island on the Drina, opposite Loznitza. Near that town, and in fact
along the whole lower course of the Drina, the river has frequently
changed its channel, thus cutting out numerous small islands, which
would serve as a screen to the movements of troops contemplating a
crossing. Pontoon bridges could be built on the farther side of almost
any of these islands without being observed from the other shore. This
was exactly what the Austrians were doing.

[Illustration: Serbian Infantrymen on Their Way to the Front.]

Suddenly, on August 12, 1914, there came a burst of rifle fire and the
boom of heavy field guns, and a fleet of barges, under cover of this
fire, emerged from around both ends of one of these islands and made for
the Serbian shore. The two battalions of Third Reserve Serbians,
stationed there as an outpost, trained their old De Bange field guns, of
which they had two batteries, on the oncoming swarms and began firing.
But the Austrian fire became heavier and heavier; a blast of steel
pellets and shells swept through the cornfields and the plum orchards,
tearing through the streets of the village and crumpling up the houses.
The breastworks of the small Serbian detachment were literally the
center of a continuous explosion of shells.

When a full tenth of their number lay dead or disabled, the Serbians
began retiring across the cornfields and up the slopes leading to the
heights behind Losnitza. There, on higher ground, which offered more
effective shelter, they made a determined stand and continued their fire
on the Austrian masses.

Having crossed the river, the Austrians threw up defensive breastworks
and dug elaborate trenches, thus fortifying their crossing. Next they
built a pontoon bridge, and then the main Austrian army poured across; a
whole army corps and two divisions of a second.

Meanwhile, on the same day, August 12, 1914, a similar event was
happening at Shabatz, on the Save, where that river takes a sharp
southward turn and then swings up again before joining the Danube at
Belgrade. Here the country is a level plain, really the southern limit
of the great plain which stretches up to the Danube, past Belgrade and
so into