ly
quite content. Our Warsaw Pole talked with one of them, who seemed to
mourn only the fact that he didn't have quite so big a ration of bread
as he had had as a soldier. He had come from Siberia, where he had left
a wife and three children--four, maybe, by this time, he said; some
rascally Austrian might have made another one.

Beyond Skole we left the mountains--looking back at that imposing wall
on the horizon, one could fancy the Russians coming down from the north
and thinking, "There we shall stand!"--and rode northward through a
pleasant, shallow, valley country, past Ruthenian settlements with their
three-domed churches and houses steep-roofed with heavy thatch. Some of
these Ruthenians, following the Little Russians of the south, Gogol's
country, were not enthusiastic when the Russians came through. Among
others, the Russian Government had made great propaganda, given money
for churches and so on, so that the apparently guileless peasants
occasionally revealed artillery positions, the Austrians said, by
driving their cattle past them or by smoke signals from cottage
chimneys. We stopped for dinner at Strij, another of those drab, dusty,
half-Jewish towns filled now with German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers,
officers, proclamations, and all the machinery of a staff headquarters,
and the next morning rolled into Lemberg. The Russians captured it in
the first week of the war, held it through the winter, and then, after
the Czar had, from a balcony in the town, formally annexed it to the
empire forever and a day, in April, the Austro-Hungarians retook it
again in June.

There were smashed windows in the railroad station, but otherwise, to a
stranger coming in for the first time, Lemberg seemed swinging along, a
big modern city of some-two hundred thousand people, almost as if nothing
had happened.

With an officer from General Bom-Ermolh's staff, and maps, we drove out
to the outlying fortifications, where the real fighting had taken place.
The concrete gun positions, the permanent infantry protections with
loopholes in concrete, and all the trenches and barbed wire, looked
certainly as if the Russians had intended to stay in Lemberg. The full
explanation of why they did not must be left for the present. What
happened at one fortified position, a few miles southwest of Lemberg,
was plain enough.

Here, in pleasant open farming country was a concrete and earth fort,
protected by elaborate trenches and ent