, but just before we did so, up out of the
field where they had been mowing, straight through this gap, came a
little company of barefooted peasant women with their bundles of
gleanings on their heads, and talking in that singsong monotone of
theirs, as detached as so many birds, they went pat-patting across the
bridge. If one of these women could but write her impressions of war!

They had done their part, these peasant women and old men and children.
All over Galicia, round the burned villages, right through barbed-wire
entanglements up to the very trenches, stretched the yellow wheat.
Somehow they had ploughed and sowed and brought it to harvest, and now
with scythes, with knives even, sometimes, they were getting it under
cover. At home we know gleaners generally only in rather sentimental
pictures; here we saw them day after day, barefooted women and children
going over the stubble and picking up the forgotten wheat heads and
arranging them in one hand as if they were a bouquet. There will be no
wheat wasted this year.

And with them everywhere were the Russian prisoners, swinging scythes,
binding grain, sometimes coming down the road, without even a guard,
sprawled in the sun on a load of straw. It would be hard to find a
place where war seemed more a vast theatricalism than in some of these
Hungarian and Galician neighborhoods. There seemed to be no enmity
whatever between captors and prisoners. Everywhere the latter were
making themselves useful in the fields, in road-making, about railroad
yards, and several officers told me that it was surprising how many good
artisans, carpenters, iron-workers, and so on, there were among them.
The Russians got exactly the same food as the Hungarian soldiers, and
were paid a few cents a day for their work. You would see men in the
two uniforms hobnobbing in the open freight-cars as the work-trains
rolled up the line, and sometimes a score or so of husky Russians
working in the wheat, guarded by some miniature, lone, Landsturm man. Of
all the various war victims I had seen, these struck me as the most
lucky--they could not even, like the wounded, be sent back again.

We drove back through the dark that night, and in the bright, waving
circle of an automobile search-light, with the cool breath from the
pines in our faces, saw that long "front" roll back again. Now and then
a soldier would step into the white circle and, holding up his arm,
struggle between his awe of t