ns, which means that we must
stay in Vincovce for forty-eight hours. And if you had ever seen
Vincovce you would understand that such a prospect is anything but
alluring."

While my fellow-passengers were noisily debating the question I strolled
ahead to take a look at the engine. As I had been led to expect from the
stories I had heard from the courier officers, the tender contained an
ample supply of coal--enough, it seemed to me, to haul the train to
Trieste.

"This is nothing but a hold-up," I told the assembled passengers. "There
is plenty of coal in the tender. I am as anxious to make the connection
as any of you, but I will settle here and raise bananas, or whatever
they do raise in the Banat, before I will submit to this highwayman's
demands."

Seeing that his bluff had been called, the engineer, favoring me with a
murderous glance, sullenly climbed into his cab and the train started,
only to stop again, however, a few miles further on, this time, the
engineer explained, because the engine had broken down. There being no
way of disputing this statement, it became a question of pay or
stay--and we stayed. The engineer did not get his tribute and we did not
get our train at Vincovce, where we spent twenty hot, hungry and
extremely disagreeable hours before the arrival of a local train bound
for Semlin, across the Danube from Belgrade. We completed our journey to
the Jugoslav capital in a fourth-class compartment into which were
already squeezed two Serbian soldiers, eight peasants, a crate of live
poultry and a dog, to say nothing of a multitude of small and undesired
occupants whose presence caused considerable annoyance to every one,
including the dog. We were glad when the train arrived at Semlin.

Late in the summer of 1919, as a result of the reconstruction of the
railway bridges which had been blown up by the Bulgarians early in the
war, through service between Salonika and Belgrade was restored. As the
journey consumed from three to five days, however, the train stopping
for the night at stations where the hotel accommodation was of the most
impossible description, the American and British officials and
relief-workers who were compelled to make the journey (I never heard of
any one making it for pleasure) usually hired a freight car, which they
fitted up with army cots and a small cook-stove, thus traveling in
comparative comfort.

Curiously enough, the only trains running on anything approaching a
s