At the table that evening was a middle-aged officer and his aid on their
way to a new detail at the front. They were simple and soldier-like
and, after the flashing bosoms of the sedentary hinterland, it was
pleasant to see these men, who had been on active service since the
beginning, without a single medal. The younger Hungarian was one of
those slumbering daredevils who combine a compact, rugged shape--strong
wrists, hair low on the forehead--with the soft voice and shy manners of
a girl. He spoke a little German and English in the slow, almost
plaintive Hungarian cadence, but all we could get out of him about the
war was that it had made him so tired--so 'mude'. He had gone to school
in Zurich but could not tell our Swiss lieutenant the name of his
teacher--he couldn't remember anything, any more, he said, with his
plaintive smile. He had a little factory in Budapest and had gone back
on furlough to see that things were ship-shape, but it was no use, he
couldn't tell them what to do when he got there. Common enough, our
captain guide observed. He had been in the fighting along the San until
invalided back to the Presse-Quartier, and there were times, then, he
said, when for days it was hard for him to remember his own name.

We climbed up into the mountains in the night and he had us up at
daylight to look down from creaking, six-story timber bridges built by
the Austro-Hungarian engineers to replace the steel railroad bridges
blown up by the Russians. We passed a tunnel or two, a big stockade
full of Russian prisoners milling round in their brown overcoats, and
down from the pass into the village of Skole. Here we were to climb the
near-by heights of Ostry, which the Hungarians of the Corps Hoffmann
stormed in April when the snow was still on the ground, and "orientiren"
ourselves a bit about this Carpathian fighting.

I had looked back at it through the "histories" and the amputated feet
and hands in the hospital at Budapest--now, in the muggy air of a late
August morning we were to tramp over the ground itself. There were, in
this party of rather leisurely reporters, a tall, wise, slow-smiling
young Swede who had gone to sea at twelve and been captain of a
destroyer before leaving the navy to manage a newspaper; a young Polish
count, amiably interested in many sorts of learning and nearly all sorts
of ladies--he had seen some of the Carpathian fighting as an officer in
the Polish Legion; one of the Swiss