sod thrown up by the first line as
they pushed across--wading up to their necks part of the way--under
fire.

On the near bank the Austro-Hungarian trenches had run between the tombs
of an old Jewish burying-ground, and from the earth walls, here and
there, projected a bone or a crumbling skull. The Russian trenches on
the other bank wound through a farmyard in the same impersonal way--
pig-pens, orchard, chicken-coops, all thought of merely as shelter. It
was just to the left of a pig-pen that a Russian officer had held his
machine gun until the last minute, pouring in a flank fire. "He did his
work!" was the young officer's comment.

We lunched with a corps commander and dined with a genial old colonel
and his staff, and between times motored through level farming country
to a position to the northward on the Rata, a tributary of the Bug.
Both sides were watching each other here from their sausage-shaped
captive balloons, and a few aeroplanes were snooping about but at the
moment all was quiet. The Austro-Hungarians had been waiting here for
over a fortnight, and the artillery-men had polished up their battery
positions as artillery-men like to do when they have time. Two were in
a pasture, so neatly roofed over with sod that a birdman might fly over
the place until the cows came home without knowing guns were there.
Another, hidden just within the shadow of a pine forest, was as
attractive as some rich man's mountain camp, the gun positions as snug
as yacht cabins, the officer's lodges made of fresh, sweet-smelling pine
logs, and in a little recess in the trees a shrine had been built to St.
Barbara, who looks out for artillery-men.

The infantry trenches along the river, cut in the clean sand and neatly
timbered and loopholed, were like model trenches on some exposition
ground. Through these loopholes one could see the Russian trenches,
perhaps a mile away, and in between the peasant women, bright red and
white splashes in the yellow wheat, were calmly going ahead with their
harvest. All along the Galician front we saw peasants working thus and
regarding this elaborate game of war very much apparently as busy
farmers regard a draghunt or a party of city fishermen. At one point we
had to come out in the open and cross a foot-bridge. "Please--
Lieutenant," one of the soldiers protested as the officer with us
stepped out, standing erect, "it is not safe!" The officer crouched and
hurried across and so did we