We welcomed mud as an improvement on the slippery ice and snow of previous days. We now realised that if worse weather had befallen, the larger portion of the Army must have perished in the snows. There was truly much cause for thankfulness.
This day the travelling was comparatively easy. At one place where there were two tracks, the road was even being controlled by officers, who, to hasten the escape from the Arnauts, and the pursuing enemies, divided horse from oxen convoys, and sent horses up the higher, and oxen along the lower mountain road. The roads joined a little later, but our convoy was allowed to keep together along the lower road.
Under normal circumstances we should have thought ourselves lucky to see such scenery--of snow, mountains, and pine woods; now we felt our luck lay in leaving it, yard by yard, behind us. But this day we stumbled upon a flowing river of real water! This was indeed lucky; the first drink, except from snow, that we, or our poor animals had enjoyed for three days. We had hoped to reach Roshai and, perhaps, house-shelter that night; but darkness came, and with it a recrudescence of track atrocities, boulders and holes, and mud above our knees. We had no more oil for our hurricane lamps, and it was unprocurable. At seven p.m. I saw that further progress, till daylight, was impossible, and the animals were exhausted. We turned aside, and with no light but the camp fires, we bivouacked in a dryish field above the town.
Every day the numbers of our oxen and of our horses were reduced, and for the last two days the poor beasts had starved on dead beech leaves; but now we were near a town, and we hoped for hay. But Sandford and Merton came back complacently with their dreadful "Nema" (there is none). There is something inexpressibly exasperating about this word "Nema." It doesn't mean, in a polite, apologetic way, "Very sorry, but there is none to be had," or "Very sorry, but I have done the best I could, and failed." It means, "Can't; shan't; won't; couldn't if I would; wouldn't if I could"; it epitomises all the obstructive negatives capable of expression in any language. It is the obverse of "Dobro," which means "All right, I will do what I can." "Nema" means "There was difficulty, and I gave it up." You can't fight against "nema"; it hits you below the belt; it represents inaction, inanity, indolence and indifference; a fourfold disease, for which there is no remedy. And "Nema nishta Bogami" ("There is none, by God"), the Montenegrin form of "Nema," was even worse; it invoked deific corroboration for assertions that you knew to be untrue.