ther assistance. To this second appeal no
country responded more nobly than the United States.

Owing to the virulent character of the disease that raged in every
district the mortality was frightful. In many localities the death rate
was over 50 per cent. All during the spring and summer of 1915 the need
of Serbia was extreme. In July there were in the country 420 British
doctors alone, aside from the French, Russian and American medical men,
all working at the highest pressure and doing with very little sleep,
yet unable to cover the ground. Many were the stricken patients who must
be satisfied with floors instead of beds; many more who could not even
be admitted into the hospitals. Nor were the Serbians the only
sufferers; from among the foreigners who had so nobly come to help the
Serbians in their distress there were not a few who succumbed to the
fatal disease.

CHAPTER LX

MONTENEGRO IN THE WAR

The military operations on the Montenegrin front should really be
considered as a part, though a detached part, of the Serbian campaigns.
Up to the first Balkan War Serbia and Montenegro, or Tzernagora, as it
is called by its own people, were separated by the sanjak of Novibazar,
a territory which Turkey was allowed to retain after the Treaty of
Berlin at the instigation of Austria, so that the two countries should
have no opportunity to unite. By blood the two peoples are closely akin,
though the isolation of the Montenegrins has been the cause of their not
adopting so many of the outward tokens of civilization as the Serbians.

Already on July 25, 1913, before Austria had officially declared war
against Serbia, the Montenegrin Government, at the capital, Cettinje,
announced that it would support Serbia should there be an outbreak of
hostilities with their common hereditary enemy, Austria. Montenegro had,
indeed, even more reason than Serbia for hating the great empire to the
northward, for its territory stretched down the coast from Dalmatia, and
literally fenced her in from the Adriatic, whose blue waters are visible
from the Montenegrin towns and villages perched up on the mountains
above the shore. In the Balkan war the army of Montenegro had captured,
at a terrible sacrifice of blood, the town of Scutari from the Turks,
which dominates the only fertile section among the crags of the little
mountain kingdom. It was Austria, at the London Conference, who had
forced her to relinquish this dearly paid for p