something vastly
interesting up ahead.

Every one is well and strong, and the least of them lifted up and
glamoured over by the idea that unites them. All the pettinesses and
smallness of every-day existence seem brushed aside, for no one is
working for money or himself, and every man of them may be riding to his
death.

Flippant young city butterflies jump to their feet and gravely salute
when their elders enter, the loutish peasant flings up his chin as if he
would defy the universe. What a strange and magic thing is this
discipline or team-work or whatever you choose to call it, by which some
impudent waiter, for instance, who yesterday would have growled at his
tips, will to-day fling his chin up and his hands to his sides and beam
like a boy, merely because his captain, showing guests through the camp,
deigns to peer into his mess-can and, slapping him affectionately on the
cheek, ask him if the food is all right!

We whizzed into the village of Kamionka, on the upper Bug, across which
the Russians had been driven only a few days before. Their trenches
were just within the woods a scant mile away, and the smoke of their
camp-fires curled up through the trees. Across the much-talked-of Bug,
which resembles here a tide-water river split with swampy flats, were
the trenches they had left. They trailed along the river bank, bent
with it almost at a right angle, and the Austro-Hungarian batteries had
been so placed that a crisscross fire enfiladed each trench. From the
attic observation station into which we climbed, the officers directing
the attack could look down the line of one of the trenches and see their
own shells ripping it to pieces. "It was a sight you could see once in
a lifetime," said one of the young artillery-men, still strung up with
the excitement of the fight--exactly what was said to me at Ari Bumu by
a Turkish officer who had seen the Triumph go down.

That attic was like a scene in some military melodrama, with its
tattered roof, its tripod binoculars peering at the enemy, the
businesslike officers dusty and unshaven, the field-telegraph operator
squatting in one corner, with a receiver strapped to his ear. We walked
across the rafters to an adjoining room, where there were two or three
chairs and an old sofa, had schnapps all round, and then went out to
walk over the position.

In front was the wabbly foot-bridge run across by the pioneers, and on
the swampy flats the little heaps of