Then there was our captain guide from the regular army, a volunteer automobile officer, a soldier servant for each man—­for the Austrians do such things in style—­and even, on a separate flat car, our own motor.  The Carpathians here are in the neighborhood of three thousand five hundred feet high—­a tangle of pine-covered slopes as steep as a roof sometimes, and reminding one a bit of our Oregon Cascades on a much-reduced scale.  You must imagine snow waist-deep, the heights furrowed with trenches, the frosty balsam stillness split with screaming shells and shrapnel and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns; imagine yourself floundering upward with winter overcoat, blanket, pack, rifle, and cartridge-belt—­any one who has snow-shoed in mountains in midwinter can fancy what fighting meant in a place like this.  Men’s feet and hands were frozen on sentry duty or merely while asleep—­for the soldiers slept as a rule in the open, merely huddled in their blankets before a fire—­the severely wounded simply dropped in the snow, and for most of them, no doubt, that was the end of it.

Puffing and steaming in our rain-coats, we climbed the fifteen hundred feet or so to the top of the mountain, up which the Russians had built a sort of cork-screw series of trenches, twisting one behind the other.  We reached one sky-line only to find another looking down at us.  Barbed-wire entanglements and “Spanish riders” crossed the slopes in front of them—­it was the sort of place that looks to a civilian as if it could hold out forever.

The difficulty in country like this is, of course, to escape flanking fire.  You fortify yourself against attack from one direction only to be enfiladed by artillery from some ridge to right or left.  That was what the Austrians and Germans did and, following their artillery with an infantry assault, captured one of the upper Russian trenches.  From this it was only a matter of a few hours to clear out the others.  Except for the visits of a few peasants the battle-field had scarcely been touched since the snow melted.  The hillside was peppered with shell holes, the trenches littered with old hand-grenades, brown Russian over-coats, the rectangular metal cartridge clip cases—–­about like biscuit tins—­which the Russians leave everywhere, and some of the brush-covered shelters in which the Russians had lived, with their spoons and wet papers and here and there a cigarette box or a tube of tooth-paste, might have almost been lived in yesterday.

The valley all the way back to Skole was strung with the brush and timber shelters in which the Russians had camped—­the first of thousands of cut-up pine-trees we were to see before we left Galicia.  All the drab and dreary side of war was in that little mountain town—­smashed houses; sidewalks, streets, and fences splashed with lime against cholera; stores closed or just keeping alive, and here and there signs threatening spies and stating that any one found