e road to keep the many motor-trucks from skidding over a
precipice, or against the cold making shelters of it, or washing it out
of their uniforms and off their persons.

Shivering from ears to heels and with teeth rattling, for they had come
from the Dardanelles, they stood stripped to the waist scrubbing their
sun-tanned chests and shoulders with ice-water. It was a spectacle that
inspired confidence. When a man is so keen after water to wash in that
he will kick the top off a frozen lake to get it, a little thing like a
barb-wire entanglement will not halt him.

The cold of those hills was like no cold I had ever felt. Officers who
had hunted in northern Russia, in the Himalayas, in Alaska, assured us
that never had they so suffered. The men we passed, who were in the
ambulances, were down either with pneumonia or frost-bite. Many had lost
toes and fingers. And it was not because they were not warmly clad.[B]

[Footnote B: It has been charged that the British troops in the Balkans
wore the same tropic uniforms they wore in the Dardanelles. This was
necessarily true, when first they landed, but almost at once the winter
uniform was issued to all of them. I saw no British or French soldier
who was not properly and warmly clad, with overcoat, muffler, extra
waistcoat, and gloves. And while all, both officers and men, cursed the
cold, none complained that he had not been appropriately clothed to meet
it. R. H. D.]

Last winter in France had taught the war office how to dress the part;
but nothing had prepared them for the cold of the Balkans. And to add
to their distress, for it was all of that, there was no fire-wood. The
hills were bare of trees, and such cold as they endured could not be
fought with green twigs.

It was not the brisk, invigorating cold that invites you out of doors.
It had no cheery, healthful appeal to skates, toboggans, and the
jangling bells of a cutter. It was the damp, clammy, penetrating cold
of a dungeon, of an unventilated ice-chest, of a morgue. Your clothes
did not warm you, the heat of your body had to warm your clothes. And
warm, also, all of the surrounding hills.

Between the road and the margin of the lake were bamboo reeds as tall
as lances, and at the edge of these were gathered myriads of ducks. The
fishermen were engaged in bombarding the ducks with rocks. They went
about this in a methodical fashion. All around the lake, concealed in
the reeds and lifted a few feet above the