utonic troops furnished
by a German correspondent:

"Truly fantastic is the appearance of one of these modern supply
caravans, stretching in zigzag, with numerous sharp corners and turns,
upward to the heights of the passes and down on the opposite side.
Here we see in stages, one above the other and moving in opposite
directions, the queerest mixture of men, vehicles, machines and animals,
all subordinated to a common military purpose and organization by
military leadership, moving continually and regularly along. The
drivers have been drummed up from all parts of the monarchy, Serbs,
Ruthenians, Poles, Croats, Rumanians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Austrians,
and turbaned Mohammedans from Bosnia. Everyone is shouting to his
animals and cursing in his own language. The whole mix-up is a
traveling exhibition of most variegated characteristic costumes,
for the most part, of course, extremely the worse for wear. Common
to all these are the little wagons adapted to mountain travel,
elastic and tough, which carry only half loads and are drawn by
little ponylike, ambitious horses. In between are great German
draft horses, stamping along with their broad high-wheeled baggage
and ammunition wagons, as though they belonged to a nation of giants.

"Gravely, with a kind of sullen dignity, slow-stepping steers drag
at their yokes heavily laden sledges. They are a powerful white
breed, with broad-spreading horns a yard long. These are followed
in endless rows by carefully stepping pack animals, small and large
horses, mules and donkeys. On the wooden packsaddles on their backs
are the carefully weighed bales of hay or ammunition boxes or other
war materials. Walking gingerly by the edges of the mountain ridges
they avoid pitfalls and rocks and walk round the stiff, distended
bodies of their comrades that have broken down on the way. At times
there ambles along a long row of working animals a colt, curious and
restlessly sniffing. In the midst of this movement of the legs of
animals, of waving arms, of creaking and swaying loaded vehicles of
manifold origin, there climbs upward the weighty iron of an Austrian
motor battery, with an almost incomprehensible inevitableness,
flattening out the broken roads like a steam roller.

"From the first pass the baggage train sinks down into the depths,
again to climb upward on the next ridge, to continue striving upward
ever toward higher passages, slowly pushing forward toward its
objective agains