In these three principal groups were forty-one field pieces, the
glorious remainder of the Serbian artillery.
Add to that twenty-two thousand Austrian prisoners whom the Serbs
carried along with them in their exodus towards the coast and also the
pitiable troop of refugees, sick men, old men, women, children who,
desiring at any cost to escape slavery and servitude, followed the
retreating army.
The evacuation of this indomitable people was made at San Giovanni di
Medua. The soldiers were sent to Corfu. The civilians were sent to
Algiers and Tunis, the Austrian prisoners to Sardinia. But where were
the typhoid and the cholera patients to be transported? No one wanted
them; and in this stampede of a people, cholera and typhus had made
their appearance and spread with alarming rapidity. A certain number
of cholera patients had been taken to Brindisi; and everyone,
naturally, refused to take them in.
Since this was the case, a French trawler, the _Verdun_, commanded by
Lieutenant d'Aubarede, brought the sick to Corfu. And, as M. Emile
Vedel tells it, this was perhaps one of the most beautiful episodes of
our navy's activity, for there are few deaths as hideous as that to
which they exposed themselves in taking in their arms poor beings
touched with a malady essentially so contagious, and so dirty and
covered with vermin that they made everyone shudder.
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