carrying explosives or building fires would be shot.  I went into one fairly clean little cafe, where it seemed one might risk a cup of tea—­you are not supposed to drink unboiled or unbottled water in such neighborhoods—­and the dismal old Jew who kept the place told me that he had been there since the war began.  He made a sour face when I said he must have seen a good deal.  A lot he could see, he said, six months in a cellar “gesteckt.”

There was a certain amount of cholera all through eastern Galicia, especially among the peasants, not so well housed, often, as the soldiers, and not nearly so well fed and taken care of.  Every one who went into Galicia had to be vaccinated for cholera, and in the army this had all but prevented it.  In a whole division living in a cholera-infected neighborhood there would be only one or two cases, and sometimes none at all.  The uncomfortable rumor of it was everywhere, however, and one was not supposed to eat raw fruit or vegetables, and in some places hand-shaking, even in an officers’ mess, was prohibited.

Russian prisoners were working about the station as they were all over eastern Austria-Hungary—­big, blond, easy-going children, apparently quite content.  Our Warsaw Pole talked with one of them, who seemed to mourn only the fact that he didn’t have quite so big a ration of bread as he had had as a soldier.  He had come from Siberia, where he had left a wife and three children—­four, maybe, by this time, he said; some rascally Austrian might have made another one.

Beyond Skole we left the mountains—­looking back at that imposing wall on the horizon, one could fancy the Russians coming down from the north and thinking, “There we shall stand!”—­and rode northward through a pleasant, shallow, valley country, past Ruthenian settlements with their three-domed churches and houses steep-roofed with heavy thatch.  Some of these Ruthenians, following the Little Russians of the south, Gogol’s country, were not enthusiastic when the Russians came through.  Among others, the Russian Government had made great propaganda, given money for churches and so on, so that the apparently guileless peasants occasionally revealed artillery positions, the Austrians said, by driving their cattle past them or by smoke signals from cottage chimneys.  We stopped for dinner at Strij, another of those drab, dusty, half-Jewish towns filled now with German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers, officers, proclamations, and all the machinery of a staff headquarters, and the next morning rolled into Lemberg.  The Russians captured it in the first week of the war, held it through the winter, and then, after the Czar had, from a balcony in the town, formally annexed it to the empire forever and a day, in April, the Austro-Hungarians retook it again in June.

There were smashed windows in the railroad station, but otherwise, to a stranger coming in for the first time, Lemberg seemed swinging along, a big modern city of some-two hundred thousand people, almost as if nothing had happened.