We breakfasted separately, whenever we felt like it, on the rolls with the glass of whipped cream and coffee usual in this part of the world; lunched and dined—­officers and correspondents—­together.  There were soldier waiters who with military precision told how many pieces one might take, and on every table big carafes of Hungarian white wine, drunk generally instead of water.  For beer one paid extra.

The commandant and his staff, including a doctor, and the officer guides not on excursions at the moment, sat at the head of the long U-shaped table.  Any one who came in or went out after the commandant was seated was supposed to advance a bit into this “U,” catch his eye, bow, and receive his returning nod.  The silver click of spurs, of course, accompanied this salute when an officer left the room, and the Austro-Hungarian and German correspondents generally snapped their heels together in semi-military fashion.  All our goings and comings, indeed, were accompanied by a good deal of manner.  People who had seen each other at breakfast shook hands formally half an hour later in the village square, and one bowed and was bowed to and heard the singsong... “’habe die Ehre!” a dozen times a day.

Nagybiesce is in northern Hungary, and the peasants round about were Slovaks—­sturdy, solid, blond people with legs the same size all the way down.  Many of them still reaped with scythes and thrashed on the barn floor with old-fashioned flails, and one afternoon there was a curious plaintive singing under my window—­a party of harvesters, oldish men and brown, barefooted peasant girls, who had finished their work on a neighboring farm, and were crossing our village on their way to their own.

The Quartier naturally stirred things up a good deal in Nagybiesce.  There was one week when we could not go into the street without being surrounded by little girls with pencils and cards asking for our “autogram.”  The candy shop kept by two girl wives whose husbands were at the front did a vast business, and the young women had somebody to talk to all day long.  The evening the news came that Warsaw had fallen, candles were lighted in all the windows on the square, and the band with the villagers behind it came to serenade us as we were at dinner.  The commandant bowed from the window, but a young Hungarian journalist leaned out and without a moment’s hesitation poured forth a torrent for fully fifteen minutes with scarce a pause for breath.  I told him that such impromptu oratory seemed marvellous, but he dismissed it as nothing.  “I’m politiker!” he explained, with a wave of his hand.