There was a moment's pause, from over the woods behind us came a "Whr-r-rong !" and out over the sunny fields a shell went milling away to send back a faint report and show a puff of cotton above the trenches to the right. It was a bit short—the next fell better. Another nod, another "Whr-r-row?/" from somewhere behind us, and this time the cottony puff was just short of the clump of trees where the Russians had concealed their battery. I picked up the spot through the glass and— one might have known !—there was One of those eternal peasants calmly swinging his scythe about fifty yards short of the spot where the shrapnel had exploded. I could see him straighten up, glance at it, then go on with his mowing again.
There was a certain elegance, a fine spaciousness about these artillery-men and their work which made one more content with war again. No huddling in muddy trenches here, waiting to be smashed by jagged chunks of iron—everything clean, aloof, scientific, exact, a matter of fine wires crossing on a periscope lens, of elevation, wind pressure, and so on, and everything in the wide outdoors, and done, so to say, with a magnificent gesture.
People drive high-power motor-cars and ride strong horses because of the sense of power it gives them—how about standing on a hill, looking over miles of splendid country to where a huddle of ants and hobby-horse specks—say a battalion or two—are just crawling around a hill or jammed on a narrow bridge, and then to scatter them, herd them, chase them from one horizon to another with a mere, "Mr. Jones, you may fire now," and a wave of the hand!
The division commander took us back a mile or so to his headquarters for lunch, the Russians slowly waking up and sending a few perfunctory shells after us as we went over the hill, and here was another genial party, with three "Hochs" for the guests at the end. Even out here in empty Galicia the soldiers got their beer. "We're not quite so temperate as the Russians," the general smiled. "A little alcohol—not too much—does 'em good."
A young lieutenant who sat next me regaled me with his impression of things in general. The Russians had squandered ammunition, he said, in the early days of the war—they would fire twenty rounds or so at a single cavalryman or anything that showed itself. They were short now, but a supply would come evidently every now and then, for they would blaze away for a day or so, then there would be a lull again. They were short on officers, too, but not so much as you might think, because they kept their officers well back of the line, generally. Their artillery was better than the infantry, as a rule; the latter shot carelessly and generally too high.
Both he and the officer at my left—a big, farmer-like commissary man— spoke most amiably of the Russians. The latter told of one place where both sides had to get water out of the same well. And there was no trouble. "No," he said, in his deep voice, "they're not hose," using the same word "bad" one would apply to a naughty boy. They were a particularly chipper lot, these artillerymen, and when I told the young lieutenant, who had been assigned to speak French to me under the notion that I was more at home in that language, that I had stopped at Queens Hotel instead of the St. Antoine in Antwerp, and that the Belgian army had crossed the Scheldt, and the pontoon bridge had been blown up directly in front of the hotel, he said that he would "certainly engage rooms there for the next bombardment," as he waved good-by.
We were presented, while in Lemberg, to General Bom-Ermolli, and lunched at the headquarters mess. We also met Major-General Bardolf, his chief of staff, and chief of staff of the assassinated Crown Prince. The latter described to us the campaign about Lemberg, and it was interesting to hear the rasping accent he gave to a word like "Durchbrechung," for instance, as if he were a Prussian instead of an Austrian, and to observe the frankness with which he ascribed the difference that had come over the spirit of the Austro-Hungarian army to the coming of Mackensen and the Germans.
West of Lemberg the pleasant country lost its war-time air and in Przemysl the two or three lonely Landsturm men guarding the wrecked fortifications, twice taken and twice blown up by retreating armies, lit candles to take us through the smashed galleries, and accepted a few Hellers when we came out, with quite the bored air of professional museum guides.
The town of Przemysl itself was untouched. The greater part of the visible damage to the forts, some distance outside the town, was done by the dynamite of the retreating army. In one place, however, we saw the crater of one of the 42-centimetre shells which have been talked about oftener than they have been used. The Austrian "thirty-point-fives" have done much of the smashing ascribed to the "forty-twos," and ordinary work, like that of bombarding a city or infantry trenches, by cannon of smaller caliber. A genuine forty-two had been dropped here, however, we were told, on a building used by the Russians to store ammunition, and the building had simply disappeared. There was nothing left but a crater sixty or seventy feet across and eighteen to twenty feet deep.
We trailed westward, through Tarnow, where the great drive first broke through, and on to the pleasant old university city of Cracow on the frontier of the Poland of which it was once the capital, and to which it belonged until the partition of 1795. It was toward Cracow that the Russians were driving when they first started for Berlin, and they were but a stone's throw away most of the winter. We got to Cracow on the Emperor's birthday and saw a military mass on the great parade-ground with the commandant of the fort standing uncovered and alone facing the altar, behind him his staff, and perhaps a hundred yards behind them and stretching for a quarter of a mile down the field, the garrison. At the intervals in the mass the whole garrison fired salutes, the volleys going down the field, a battalion at a time, now and then reinforced by the cannon on Kosciusko Hill.