Imagine the vision of an army marching along the roads from the foothills to the mountains leading through mysterious, shadowy spruce forests, where the soil is covered with rich carpets of moss.  Foaming streams ripple in among the moss-covered bowlders.  Then the paths emerge on the cheerful, emerald-green pastures of the slopes, alive with the flocks of goats, sheep and cattle, attended by their shepherds.  A little farther and the whole scenery changes, and the armies approach tremendous mountains of solid granite, ominously dark, shining like hammered iron, rising abruptly from the stone debris and black patches of mountain fir, and towering bluffs and crags seem to pierce the sky with their sharp peaks, bastions and jagged ridges, like gigantic fortresses.  Clouds of white mist, driven and torn by gusts of wind, cling to the precipitous walls, and masses of eternal snow lie in the many fissures and depressions, forming large, sharply outlined streaks and patches.

The Magyars inhabit the great central plains of Hungary which constitutes ethnologically a vast island of Magyars in a sea of Slavs.  The Carpathian slopes on the Hungarian side of the ranges, including the mounts of the Tatra—­with the exception of the Zips district, which is peopled with German-Saxon colonists—­are inhabited, in their western parts, by two million Slovaks, in the eastern parts by half a million Ruthenians or Little Russians, and on the Transylvanian side by nearly three million Rumanians.  The border lines between these Rumanians and the Magyars and between the Hungaro-Slav groups (Slovaks and Ruthenians) and the Magyars lie far down within the borders of the great central Hungarian plains.  This line at one point extends to within a few miles of the Hungarian capital of Bupapest.

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CHAPTER XLIV

THE BALKANS-COUNTRIES AND PEOPLES

This survey of the fighting ground in eastern Europe brings us now to the “cockpit of the war.”  From a military point of view, as well as from the political, the Balkan theatre is of equal importance with other big fronts in Europe.  It is the gateway to the Orient for central Europe.  Here the armies engaged are numbered only by the hundred thousands, none reach a million.  But from the point of view of human interest and political intrigue it is by far the most picturesque.  Here the hatred between the combatants is most bitter; indeed so bitter that when it burst into flame a mad whirlwind of passion swept over half the world.  For here the great conflagration began.

A map of the Balkan Peninsula is almost, on the face of it, a full explanation of the causes of the war.  The military campaigns, studied in connection with their physical environment, explain all the diplomatic intrigues of the past fifty years, for they are the intrigues themselves translated into action.