citizen officers--one can hear him
now whacking his heels together whenever he was presented, and fairly
hissing "Oberleutnant W---, aw Schweiz!" and a young Bulgarian
professor, who spoke German and a little French, but, unlike so many of
the Bulgarians of the older generation who were educated at Robert
College, no English. The Bulgarians are intensely patriotic and there
was nothing under sun, moon, or stars which this young man did not
compare with what they had in Sofia. German tactics, Russian novels,
sky-scrapers, music, steamships--no matter what--in a moment would come
his "Bei uns in Sofia"--(With us in Sofia) and his characteristic
febrile gesture, thumb and forefinger joined, other fingers extended,
pumping emphatically before his face.

Then there was our captain guide from the regular army, a volunteer
automobile officer, a soldier servant for each man--for the Austrians do
such things in style--and even, on a separate flat car, our own motor.
The Carpathians here are in the neighborhood of three thousand five
hundred feet high--a tangle of pine-covered slopes as steep as a roof
sometimes, and reminding one a bit of our Oregon Cascades on a
much-reduced scale. You must imagine snow waist-deep, the heights
furrowed with trenches, the frosty balsam stillness split with screaming
shells and shrapnel and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns; imagine
yourself floundering upward with winter overcoat, blanket, pack, rifle,
and cartridge-belt--any one who has snow-shoed in mountains in midwinter
can fancy what fighting meant in a place like this. Men's feet and
hands were frozen on sentry duty or merely while asleep--for the
soldiers slept as a rule in the open, merely huddled in their blankets
before a fire--the severely wounded simply dropped in the snow, and for
most of them, no doubt, that was the end of it.

Puffing and steaming in our rain-coats, we climbed the fifteen hundred
feet or so to the top of the mountain, up which the Russians had built a
sort of cork-screw series of trenches, twisting one behind the other.
We reached one sky-line only to find another looking down at us.
Barbed-wire entanglements and "Spanish riders" crossed the slopes in
front of them--it was the sort of place that looks to a civilian as if
it could hold out forever.

The difficulty in country like this is, of course, to escape flanking
fire. You fortify yourself against attack from one direction only to be
enfiladed by artiller