I were alone in one of
them we could stop where we liked. So we halted where an English battery
was going into action. It had dug itself into the side of a hill and
covered itself with snow and pine branches. Somewhere on one of the
neighboring hills the "spotter" was telephoning the range. The gunners
could not see at what they were firing. They could see only the high
hill of rock and snow, at the base of which they stood shoulder high in
their mud cellars. Ten yards to the rear of them was what looked like a
newly made grave reverently covered with pine boughs. Through these a
rat-faced young man, with the receivers of a telephone clamped to his
ears, pushed his head.

[Illustration: _From a photograph by William G. Shepherd._

John T. McCutcheon. John F. Bass.
Richard Harding Davis. James H. Hare.

American war correspondents at the French front in Serbia.]

"Eight degrees to the left, sir," he barked, "four thousand yards."

The men behind the guns were extremely young, but, like most
artillerymen, alert, sinewy, springing to their appointed tasks with
swift, catlike certainty. The sight of the two strangers seemed to
surprise them as much as the man in the grave had startled us.

There were two boy officers in command, one certainly not yet eighteen,
his superior officer still under twenty.

"I suppose you're all right," said the younger one. "You couldn't have
got this far if you weren't all right."

He tried to scowl upon us, but he was not successful. He was too lonely,
too honestly glad to see any one from beyond the mountains that hemmed
him in. They stretched on either side of him to vast distances, massed
barriers of white against a gray, sombre sky; in front of him, to be
exact, just four thousand yards in front of him, were Bulgarians he had
never seen, but who were always with their shells ordering to "move on,"
and behind him lay a muddy road that led to a rail-head, that led to
transports, that led to France, to the Channel, and England. It was a
long, long way to England. I felt like taking one of the boy officers
under each arm, and smuggling him safely home to his mother.

"You don't seem to have any supports," I ventured.

The child gazed around him. It was growing dark and gloomier, and the
hollows of the white hills were filled with shadows. His men were
listening, so he said bravely, with a vague sweep of the hand at the
encircling darkness, "Oh, they're about--so