And with them everywhere were the Russian prisoners, swinging scythes, binding grain, sometimes coming down the road, without even a guard, sprawled in the sun on a load of straw.  It would be hard to find a place where war seemed more a vast theatricalism than in some of these Hungarian and Galician neighborhoods.  There seemed to be no enmity whatever between captors and prisoners.  Everywhere the latter were making themselves useful in the fields, in road-making, about railroad yards, and several officers told me that it was surprising how many good artisans, carpenters, iron-workers, and so on, there were among them.  The Russians got exactly the same food as the Hungarian soldiers, and were paid a few cents a day for their work.  You would see men in the two uniforms hobnobbing in the open freight-cars as the work-trains rolled up the line, and sometimes a score or so of husky Russians working in the wheat, guarded by some miniature, lone, Landsturm man.  Of all the various war victims I had seen, these struck me as the most lucky—­they could not even, like the wounded, be sent back again.

We drove back through the dark that night, and in the bright, waving circle of an automobile search-light, with the cool breath from the pines in our faces, saw that long “front” roll back again.  Now and then a soldier would step into the white circle and, holding up his arm, struggle between his awe of this snorting motor with its imperial double-eagle flag and its sharp-voiced officers muffled in gray coats—­ between his peasant’s habit of taking off his hat and letting such people blow by, and his soldier’s orders to stop every-thing that passed.  He stopped us, nevertheless, and the pass was laboriously read in the light of his electric lamp before we went on again.

In the dark and quiet all the countless joints and wheels of the vast organism were still mysteriously turning.  Once, in a cloud of dust, we passed troops marching toward the front—­tired faces, laughing faces—­ the shout “Man in the road !” and then the glimpse of a couple of Red Cross men kneeling by a soldier who had given out on the way; once, in the black pines, cows driven by two little frightened peasant children; once a long line of bearded Jews, bound, with packs on their backs, for what was left of their homes; a supply-train, a clanking battery, and now and then other motors like ours with shrouded gray figures, streaking by in a flashing mist of dust.

Next day, swinging southward into another sector of the front, over beautiful rolling hills, rather like the Genesee Valley, we drummed up a hill and came out at the top in a village square.  It had once been a white little village clinging to the skirts of an old chateau—­the village of Swirz and Count Lavasan’s chateau—­and both were now black and tumbled walls.

In the centre of the square people were singing—­a strange little crowd and strange, mournful singing.  We thought at first it was a funeral service, for the women were weeping as they sang, but as the auto-mobile swept up beside them, we saw that it was men the women were crowding round—­live men, going away to war.