"You don't use cavalry very much, though, do you?"
"No, not as a rule. Our men fight better on foot, and a great deal of our fighting is done in mountainous country that is all split up with ravines and clumps of woods. It was so, at least, against the Turks and the Bulgarians. But in this war there will be some chance for cavalry, at first, anyhow. And, besides, the horses are needed for the guns."
"Oh, yes! I didn't think of that. You don't use motor cars much, I suppose?"
"We can't. We haven't the roads. If the French get in, they and the Germans will use cars a great deal, I suppose, for all sorts of things. But our roads are too bad for that. It's just as well, because the Austrians have had so much more money to spend than we that they are far ahead of us. They've got better heavy guns than we, too, but I don't think they'll get much more chance to use them. We are not going to shut ourselves up in fortresses. And when it comes to field pieces we can hold our own with them a good deal better."
"Field guns will be the ones most used, won't they?"
"We think so. We've got light guns that are easy to move about, and we've got the men who know how to handle them, too. Our men are all veterans, and that is going to make a lot of difference. They know what it is to have hard fighting, and if things go against them at first it won't bother them. My father says that the experience we have had in actual war will be worth five army corps."
"Who is the commander-in-chief?"
"General Pushkin. Everyone agrees that he was the one great soldier that the Balkan wars produced. He won his battles against the Turks easily, and without the loss of great numbers of men, and when the Bulgarians attacked, we and the Greeks fought the campaign according to his strategy. The German military attaché said that General Pushkin was fit to command the greatest army in the world. He said he was a military genius of the first rank, and one of the greatest soldiers developed in Europe since the time of von Moltke."
"Then he must be good, because the Germans know a good soldier when they see him."
"He has done everything that has been required of him so far. This war with Austria will be his great test—only he doesn't regard it as a test, but as an opportunity. My father says that that is the true mark of a man's character. He says the weak man, who hasn't got it in him to succeed, thinks of a difficult thing he has to do, or to try to do, as a trial, a test, and that the big man, who is sure to amount to something, simply looks at it as a chance to show what he has in him."