now, and for fifty miles, even with glasses, no other sign of life.
Nothing but hills, rocks, bushes, and snow. When the "seventy-fives"
spoke with their smart, sharp crack that always seems to say, "Take
that!" and to add, with aristocratic insolence, "and be damned to you!"
one could not guess what they were firing at. In Champagne, where the
Germans were as near as from a hundred to forty yards; in Artois, where
they were a mile distant, but where their trench was as clearly in sight
as the butts of a rifle-range, you could understand. You knew that "that
dark line over there" was the enemy.

A year before at Soissons you had seen the smoke of the German guns in a
line fifteen miles long. In other little wars you had watched the shells
destroy a blockhouse, a village, or burst upon a column of men. But from
hill 516 you could see no enemy; only mountains draped in snow, silent,
empty, inscrutable. It seemed ridiculous to be attacking fifty miles of
landscape with tiny pills of steel. But although we could not see the
Bulgars, they could see the flashes on hill 516, and from somewhere out
of the inscrutable mountains shells burst and fell. They fell very
close, within forty feet of us, and, like children being sent to bed
just at dessert time, our hosts hurried us out of the trenches and
drove us away.

While on "516" we had been in Bulgaria; now we returned to Serbia, and
were halted at the village of Valandova. There had been a ceremony that
afternoon. A general, whose name we may not mention, had received the
_medaille militaire_. One of the French correspondents asked him in
recognition of which of his victories it had been bestowed. The general
possessed a snappy temper.

"The medal was given me," he said, "because I was the only general
without it, and I was becoming conspicuous."

It had long been dark when we reached Strumnitza station, where we were
to spend the night in a hospital tent. The tent was as big as a barn,
with a stove, a cot for each, and fresh linen sheets. All these good
things belong to the men we had left on hill 516 awake in the mud and
snow. I felt like a burglar, who, while the owner is away, sleeps in
his bed. There was another tent with a passageway filled with medical
supplies connecting it with ours. It was in darkness, and we thought it
empty until some one exploring found it crowded with wounded and men
with frozen legs and hands. For half an hour they had been watching us
throug