y trains which run into this region
behind the front--officers and couriers, civilians with military passes,
just before we started a young officer and his orderly saying good-by to
their wives. He was one of those amiable, blue-eyed young Austrians who
seem a sort of cross between German and French, and the orderly was much
such another man, only less neatly made and sensitive, and there were
the same differences in their wives and their good-bys.

The orderly saluted his officer, turned, clicked his heels, and saluted
his officer's lady before he embraced his solid wife. The latter,
rather proud to be in such company, beamed like a stove as the two men
looked down from the car steps, but the girlish wife of the captain bit
her lips, looked nervously from side to side, winked faster and faster
until the tears began to roll down her cheeks. Then the train started,
the orderly waving his hand, but the young officer, leaning quickly
forward, drew his wife toward him and kissed her on one of the wet
eyelids.

We crossed into Hungary, rolled northeastward for five or six hours into
the Vag valley, with its green hills and vineyards and ruined castles,
and finally came to a little place consisting almost entirely of
consonants, in the Tatra foot-hills. Two blond soldiers in blue-gray
saluted, took my luggage, showed me to a carriage, and drove to a
village about a mile away--a little white village with a factory chimney
for the new days, a dingy chateau for the old, and a brook running
diagonally across the square, with geese quacking in it and women
pounding clothes.

It was mid-afternoon, yet lunch had been kept waiting, and the officer
who received me said he was sorry I had bothered to eat on the train. He
told me where lodgings had been made ready, and that an orderly would
take me there and look after my personal needs. They dined at eight,
and at five, if I felt like it, I would probably find some of them in
the coffee-house by the chateau. Meanwhile the first thing to do was to
take one's cholera vaccination--for no one could go to the Galician
front without being geimpft--and just as soon as I could take the
second, a week later, we should start for the Russian front. In this
fashion were strangers welcomed to the "Presse-Quartier," or rather to
that part of it--this little Hungarian village--in which correspondents
lived during the intervals of their trips to the front. The Austrians
have pleasant manners