The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-03-29
FIFTY THOUSAND MEN DIED
 INFOUR DAYS OF SERBIAN
 RETREAT, ASSERTS SURVIVOR
Henry Haler, Former U. S. Cavarynnan, Prisoner Of Fleeing Army Tells Story of Horror 4 Men and Horses Died in Mudhoes Like Flies in Webs.

Rome, Italy, March 29.-Henry Hal Ter, formerly of the Fifth United States Cavalry, who was one of the few
 Americans in the Serbian retreat, de- c1ares that during the journey to Pod 1 goritza in Montenegro in a four-days snow storm more than fifty thousand men died.
 They died so fast he said, "that they fell every few yards all along the right over their bodies Nobody
 thought of trying to turn out of the way, but there were so many they could not but drive over them. The roads were fuIl1of nudhoIes At one place T saw no less than seventeen
 horses dying in one immense puddle,
 unable to pull themselves out.
 g. sI saw hundreds and thousands of ragged men,, with their feet swollen too mush to wear shoes or to walk on the1fa, crawling along for miles on tEceir hands and knees through the b1inding' snow, finally stopping and dy- ing soon afterwards. They never made
 any appeals for help. It wou1dn't t have been any use. Besides, they were too far gone, to know what they were about, that they were dying. Their last effort to keep going was merely a mechanical operation. Of
 course the great mortality all along
 our route was due to the barren na- ture of the country we were traversing g with no shelter for but a. com parative- 1y few of us. There were even no forests where we might have felled trees and built temporary quarters Our fires for the most part were small with barely enough wood to heat wa ter" dapeSt when the war, beganS enlisted in the Austrian army and was serving as a bugler when, six months later, he was taken prisoner by the Serbs and then finally was marched with 75,0O0 other Austrian soldiers tacross the mountains into Albania and there turned loose on the shores of the Ad- riatic to fight for life against cho1- era, fever and starvation
 ssWe were supposed to have started on that retreat said Ha11er, with a Serb army of over two hundred thou sand men and about seventy-five thou sand Austrian prisoners. Not many more than a hundred and fifty thou. sand of the whole lot got over the mountains It was not because the Al1strians or the Bu1gar1ans pursued us, however, with much activity. We died merely because of disease, hun ger and exhaustion.
 t'The worst part of the journey be- gan at the Albanian frontier. The AL banians have in times past been badly treated by the Serbs, and they. took this chance to square old scores. They shot, killed, robbed, and murdered us at every step of the way. For in stance, at Linn, some Serb officers and company of lstragg1ers on horseback were met in the middle of the road by a few peasants and, ordered to give up their horses and their money. It was plain highway robbery and they refused. The peasants ran away and within a couple of minutes more than a thousand shots were fired out of the bushy hillside, killing most of the Serbs.
 The food problem was terrific even in Albania. A half pound of bread was sold at ten dinars, about two dol lars. As I had a little moHey at Stur- ga I bought five pounds of oka beans Had not been able to get these beans, would to-day be dead man. had just said to myself: T can't go any fur ther,' when persuaded peasant wo- man to sell me the beans. I. ate beans twice day, making a sort of soup out of them, putting in alf1itt1e salt. At fhat was far luckier than the fellows who had to boil harness leath- CT for five or six hours in order to