With an officer from General Bom-Ermolh’s staff, and maps, we drove out to the outlying fortifications, where the real fighting had taken place.  The concrete gun positions, the permanent infantry protections with loopholes in concrete, and all the trenches and barbed wire, looked certainly as if the Russians had intended to stay in Lemberg.  The full explanation of why they did not must be left for the present.  What happened at one fortified position, a few miles southwest of Lemberg, was plain enough.

Here, in pleasant open farming country was a concrete and earth fort, protected by elaborate trenches and entanglements, in front of which, for nearly a mile across the fields, was an open field of fire.  Infantry might have charged across that open space until the end of the war without getting any nearer, but the offensive did not, of course, try that.  Over behind distant clumps of trees and a wooded ridge on the horizon they planted their heavy batteries.  On a space perhaps three hundred yards long some sixty of these heavy guns concentrated their fire.  The infantry pushed up under its protection, the fort fell, and the garrison was captured with it.

It is by such use of artillery that herds of prisoners are sometimes gathered in.  Just before the charging infantry reaches the trench, the cataract of artillery fire, which has been pouring into it, is suddenly shifted back a few hundred yards, where it hangs like a curtain shutting off escape.  The success of such tactics demands, of course, finished work from the artillery-men and perfect co-ordination between artillery and infantry.  At lunch a few days later in Cracow, a young Austrian officer was telling me how they had once arranged that the artillery should fire twenty rounds, and on the twenty-first the infantry, without waiting for the usual bugle signal to storm, should charge the trenches.  At the same instant the artillery-men were to move up their range a couple of hundred yards.  The manoeuvre was successful and the Russians caught, huddled under cover, before they knew what had happened.

Though Lemberg’s cafes were gay enough and the old Jews in gaberdines, with the orthodox curl dangling before each ear, dozed peacefully on the park benches, still the Russians were only a few hours’ motor drive to the eastward, and next morning we went out to see them.  All of the country through which we drove was, in a way, the “front”—­beginning with the staff head-quarters and going on up through wagon-trains, reserves, horse camps, ammunition-stations, and so on, to the first-line trenches themselves.

Sweeping up through this long front on a fine autumn morning is to see the very glitter and bloom of war.  Wounds and suffering, burned towns, and broken lives—­all that is forgotten in the splendid panorama—­men and motors and fliers and guns, the cheerful smell of hay and coffee and horses, the clank of heavy trucks and the jangle of chains, all in beautiful harvest country; in the contagion of pushing on, shoulder to shoulder, and the devil take the hindmost, toward something vastly interesting up ahead.