114 EIGHTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE 



I 



could not sleep because there never was five minutes of time through 

 the eight months that we were down there that we did not hear the 

 "boom, boom"^ and the shaking of the air with the explosion of shells 

 and cannon. Never by day or by night any rest. We got so used to 

 it that after I came back for about a month I was actually lonesome, 

 it felt so dead, after we had been through this great excitement of 

 shelling and bombardment. 



Now, this was horticulture under spectacular circumstances, but 

 still more spectacular was bee-keeping under those conditions. I found 

 one of the most interesting bee-keepers right in the city of Monastir. 

 Now, you can't imagine how Monastir looks. It is a town of 70,000 

 inhabitants. It was all built of stone and brick, modern buildings, with 

 beautiful rooms, and fixed up just something like any other beautiful 

 modern city in France or anywhere else; artistic, in fact, with beautiful 

 churches, mosques, and beautiful boulevards, and hotels and everything 

 else. 



Now, it was under fire for four years. The Bulgarian trenches 

 were right up on the hill, two miles behind Monastir, so you know 

 it was completely at their mercy. They demolished the town, and for 

 this reason the French and the English and the Serbs never entered 

 Monastir. Their supphes and their armies and their cannon always 

 went around Monastir, because the moment that the Bulgarians saw 

 one wagon or one automobile with men in uniforms, or any soldiers 

 or officers entering the town itself, at once they opened their fire on 

 the city. So the only way really to keep the whole town from being 

 completely destroyed and innocent people being killed was to avoid 

 the town, and the allied armies passed around it. because inside of the 

 town still remained 10,000 women and children; very few men. These 

 are the women and children who could not get away; women and 

 children who had no wagon, no horse, no means of conveyance,, no 

 place to go to. They were absolutely compelled by necessity to remain 

 there. 



Now the city is practically ruined. The first year of the war ruined 

 it. You see the battle and the war went over the town itself twice; 

 the Austrians had it once, then the Serbs, and then the Austrians had it 

 again, in addition to the Turkish war before. Perhaps there is one- 

 half of a house left standing and the other in ruins; sometimes the roof 

 knocked off, sometimes a corner knocked off. But not a single house 

 in the city had any windows; they were all smashed. There is nothing 

 but brick and stone and ruin ever3'^where. And just to strike the fear 

 of German frightfulness into those innocent people — Germany always 

 works with fear, they try to make you scared, bring fear home to you, 

 this is their only way to convince you — as a rule they dropped every 

 day an average of twenty-five shells on the city for the last four years, 

 just to put the fear of the Lord in those people in the city. Every time 

 they shot, of course they killed some people, not as many as one would 

 think, but one Sunday when I was thete a shell fell in front of a little 

 girl about ten or twelve years old, where she was walking down the 

 stjeet, right in front of her. and smashed her into pieces; there was 

 nothing left but blood marks on both sides of the street. A couple of 

 days before that, twelve women were washing down by a creek, went 



