than they
gave him all the way. It's sad but true that in this, our 'Great Spring
Offensive,' as the papers at home have talked of it, the whole lot of
us--French, British, Russian, Italian, and even the Serb--have been
fought to a standstill by the Bulgar. Far as I can see, the only gain we
have to show for it is in the casualty lists."

I failed to see just what there was to chuckle about in such an
interpretation of the glowing lines of the evening bulletin, and said as
much.

[Sidenote: Successes of the little Venizelist army.]

"It isn't funny in the least," was the reply, "and it would seem still
less so if we could see at close range some of the things that are lying
out on a hundred miles of these accursed mountain sides as a
consequence of what has happened. But what _did_ strike us as a bit rich
was the fact that, of all the Allies, this little piece of the
Venizelist army, which we have held in leash all winter while we made up
our minds as to whether it would be safe to slip or not, is the only one
of the whole lot of us that has taken all the objectives set for it."

A sporting instinct and a grim sense of humor--the readiness to admire a
brave foe and the ability to extract amusement from discomfiture--are
the two things that have conspired to make the British soldier so
uniformly successful in treating those "twin impostors," Triumph and
Disaster, "just the same."

[Sidenote: The view across the Vardar.]

The sky was lightening and throwing into ghostly silhouette the line of
the mountain ridge across the Vardar by the time we had pushed on out
along the communication trench to the Greek Observation Post on the
extreme brow of the hill. Since midnight the enemy "heavies" had been
coughing gruffly under the mist-blanket that overlaid the plain,
dappling it with alternately flashing and fading blotches of light till
it glowed fantastically like a lamp-shade of Carrara marble;
star-shells, fired with a low trajectory, popped up and dove out of
sight again, throwing a fluttering green radiance over the white pall
which swathed the battlefield.

[Sidenote: The Bulgar preparing to go over the top.]

The mist-mask must have fended the day-break from the plain long after
it was light upon the hill from where we watched, for it was not until
the range of serrated peaks to the east of Doiran was all aglow with the
red and gold of sunrise that the higher-keyed crack of the enemy's
field-guns came welling