nk generally instead of water. For beer one paid extra.

The commandant and his staff, including a doctor, and the officer guides
not on excursions at the moment, sat at the head of the long U-shaped
table. Any one who came in or went out after the commandant was seated
was supposed to advance a bit into this "U," catch his eye, bow, and
receive his returning nod. The silver click of spurs, of course,
accompanied this salute when an officer left the room, and the
Austro-Hungarian and German correspondents generally snapped their heels
together in semi-military fashion. All our goings and comings, indeed,
were accompanied by a good deal of manner. People who had seen each
other at breakfast shook hands formally half an hour later in the
village square, and one bowed and was bowed to and heard the singsong...
"'habe die Ehre!" a dozen times a day.

Nagybiesce is in northern Hungary, and the peasants round about were
Slovaks--sturdy, solid, blond people with legs the same size all the way
down. Many of them still reaped with scythes and thrashed on the barn
floor with old-fashioned flails, and one afternoon there was a curious
plaintive singing under my window--a party of harvesters, oldish men and
brown, barefooted peasant girls, who had finished their work on a
neighboring farm, and were crossing our village on their way to their
own.

The Quartier naturally stirred things up a good deal in Nagybiesce.
There was one week when we could not go into the street without being
surrounded by little girls with pencils and cards asking for our
"autogram." The candy shop kept by two girl wives whose husbands were at
the front did a vast business, and the young women had somebody to talk
to all day long. The evening the news came that Warsaw had fallen,
candles were lighted in all the windows on the square, and the band with
the villagers behind it came to serenade us as we were at dinner. The
commandant bowed from the window, but a young Hungarian journalist
leaned out and without a moment's hesitation poured forth a torrent for
fully fifteen minutes with scarce a pause for breath. I told him that
such impromptu oratory seemed marvellous, but he dismissed it as
nothing. "I'm politiker!" he explained, with a wave of his hand.

One day a man came into lunch with the news that he was off on the best
trip he'd had yet--he was going back to Vienna for his skis, to go down
into the Tyrol and work along the glaciers to the b