[Sidenote:  Successes of the little Venizelist army.]

“It isn’t funny in the least,” was the reply, “and it would seem still less so if we could see at close range some of the things that are lying out on a hundred miles of these accursed mountain sides as a consequence of what has happened.  But what did strike us as a bit rich was the fact that, of all the Allies, this little piece of the Venizelist army, which we have held in leash all winter while we made up our minds as to whether it would be safe to slip or not, is the only one of the whole lot of us that has taken all the objectives set for it.”

A sporting instinct and a grim sense of humor—­the readiness to admire a brave foe and the ability to extract amusement from discomfiture—­are the two things that have conspired to make the British soldier so uniformly successful in treating those “twin impostors,” Triumph and Disaster, “just the same.”

[Sidenote:  The view across the Vardar.]

The sky was lightening and throwing into ghostly silhouette the line of the mountain ridge across the Vardar by the time we had pushed on out along the communication trench to the Greek Observation Post on the extreme brow of the hill.  Since midnight the enemy “heavies” had been coughing gruffly under the mist-blanket that overlaid the plain, dappling it with alternately flashing and fading blotches of light till it glowed fantastically like a lamp-shade of Carrara marble; star-shells, fired with a low trajectory, popped up and dove out of sight again, throwing a fluttering green radiance over the white pall which swathed the battlefield.

[Sidenote:  The Bulgar preparing to go over the top.]

The mist-mask must have fended the day-break from the plain long after it was light upon the hill from where we watched, for it was not until the range of serrated peaks to the east of Doiran was all aglow with the red and gold of sunrise that the higher-keyed crack of the enemy’s field-guns came welling up to tell us that the Bulgar was getting ready to go over the top.  The flame-spurts—­paling from a hot red to faded lemon as the light grew stronger—­splashed up against the mist-pall as the jet of an illuminated fountain rises and falls, and down where the battered first-line trenches faced each other the dust-geysers of the exploding shells rolled up in clouds to the surface of the thinning vapors as the mud of the bottom boils up through the waters of an agitated pool.

[Sidenote:  The Allied artillery opens.]

For a minute or two the ragged line of the barrage wallowed forward through the outraged mist alone.  Then, as a sudden flight of rockets spat forth from the Greek first line to warn that the enemy infantry was on the way, all the Allied artillery that could be brought to bear opened up and began dropping shells just behind where the murky mist-clouds marked the swath of the Bulgar barrage.