We lunched with a corps commander and dined with a genial old colonel and his staff, and between times motored through level farming country to a position to the northward on the Rata, a tributary of the Bug.  Both sides were watching each other here from their sausage-shaped captive balloons, and a few aeroplanes were snooping about but at the moment all was quiet.  The Austro-Hungarians had been waiting here for over a fortnight, and the artillery-men had polished up their battery positions as artillery-men like to do when they have time.  Two were in a pasture, so neatly roofed over with sod that a birdman might fly over the place until the cows came home without knowing guns were there.  Another, hidden just within the shadow of a pine forest, was as attractive as some rich man’s mountain camp, the gun positions as snug as yacht cabins, the officer’s lodges made of fresh, sweet-smelling pine logs, and in a little recess in the trees a shrine had been built to St. Barbara, who looks out for artillery-men.

The infantry trenches along the river, cut in the clean sand and neatly timbered and loopholed, were like model trenches on some exposition ground.  Through these loopholes one could see the Russian trenches, perhaps a mile away, and in between the peasant women, bright red and white splashes in the yellow wheat, were calmly going ahead with their harvest.  All along the Galician front we saw peasants working thus and regarding this elaborate game of war very much apparently as busy farmers regard a draghunt or a party of city fishermen.  At one point we had to come out in the open and cross a foot-bridge.  “Please—­ Lieutenant,” one of the soldiers protested as the officer with us stepped out, standing erect, “it is not safe!” The officer crouched and hurried across and so did we, but just before we did so, up out of the field where they had been mowing, straight through this gap, came a little company of barefooted peasant women with their bundles of gleanings on their heads, and talking in that singsong monotone of theirs, as detached as so many birds, they went pat-patting across the bridge.  If one of these women could but write her impressions of war!

They had done their part, these peasant women and old men and children.  All over Galicia, round the burned villages, right through barbed-wire entanglements up to the very trenches, stretched the yellow wheat.  Somehow they had ploughed and sowed and brought it to harvest, and now with scythes, with knives even, sometimes, they were getting it under cover.  At home we know gleaners generally only in rather sentimental pictures; here we saw them day after day, barefooted women and children going over the stubble and picking up the forgotten wheat heads and arranging them in one hand as if they were a bouquet.  There will be no wheat wasted this year.