At the table that evening was a middle-aged officer and his aid on their way to a new detail at the front.  They were simple and soldier-like and, after the flashing bosoms of the sedentary hinterland, it was pleasant to see these men, who had been on active service since the beginning, without a single medal.  The younger Hungarian was one of those slumbering daredevils who combine a compact, rugged shape—­strong wrists, hair low on the forehead—­with the soft voice and shy manners of a girl.  He spoke a little German and English in the slow, almost plaintive Hungarian cadence, but all we could get out of him about the war was that it had made him so tired—­so ‘mude’.  He had gone to school in Zurich but could not tell our Swiss lieutenant the name of his teacher—­he couldn’t remember anything, any more, he said, with his plaintive smile.  He had a little factory in Budapest and had gone back on furlough to see that things were ship-shape, but it was no use, he couldn’t tell them what to do when he got there.  Common enough, our captain guide observed.  He had been in the fighting along the San until invalided back to the Presse-Quartier, and there were times, then, he said, when for days it was hard for him to remember his own name.

We climbed up into the mountains in the night and he had us up at daylight to look down from creaking, six-story timber bridges built by the Austro-Hungarian engineers to replace the steel railroad bridges blown up by the Russians.  We passed a tunnel or two, a big stockade full of Russian prisoners milling round in their brown overcoats, and down from the pass into the village of Skole.  Here we were to climb the near-by heights of Ostry, which the Hungarians of the Corps Hoffmann stormed in April when the snow was still on the ground, and “orientiren” ourselves a bit about this Carpathian fighting.

I had looked back at it through the “histories” and the amputated feet and hands in the hospital at Budapest—­now, in the muggy air of a late August morning we were to tramp over the ground itself.  There were, in this party of rather leisurely reporters, a tall, wise, slow-smiling young Swede who had gone to sea at twelve and been captain of a destroyer before leaving the navy to manage a newspaper; a young Polish count, amiably interested in many sorts of learning and nearly all sorts of ladies—­he had seen some of the Carpathian fighting as an officer in the Polish Legion; one of the Swiss citizen officers—­one can hear him now whacking his heels together whenever he was presented, and fairly hissing “Oberleutnant W—–­, aw Schweiz!” and a young Bulgarian professor, who spoke German and a little French, but, unlike so many of the Bulgarians of the older generation who were educated at Robert College, no English.  The Bulgarians are intensely patriotic and there was nothing under sun, moon, or stars which this young man did not compare with what they had in Sofia.  German tactics, Russian novels, sky-scrapers, music, steamships—­no matter what—­in a moment would come his “Bei uns in Sofia”—­(With us in Sofia) and his characteristic febrile gesture, thumb and forefinger joined, other fingers extended, pumping emphatically before his face.