row of white beds watching him: "I always knew
that I was hopeless ... hopeless ... hopeless."

"Look here," I said. "You mustn't take things so hard. You go up and
down.... Your emotions...."

But he only shook his head:

"She shouldn't have said it--like that--before every one," he
repeated.

I left him. Afterwards as I stood in the passage, white and ghostly in
the moonlight, something suddenly told me that this night the prologue
of our drama was concluded.

I waited on the steps of the house, heard the laughing voices in the
distance, while over the rest of the world there was absolute silence;
then abruptly, quite sharply, across the long low fields there came
the rumble of cannon. Three times it sounded. Then hearing no more I
returned into the house.

CHAPTER III

THE INVISIBLE BATTLE

On the evening of the following day Trenchard, Andrey Vassilievitch
and I were sent with sanitars and wagons to the little hamlet of
M----, five versts only from the Position. It was night when we
arrived there; no sound of cannon, only on the high hills (the first
lines of the Carpathians) that faced us the scattered watchfires of
our own Sixty-Fifth Division, and in the little village street a line
of cavalry moving silently, without a spoken word, on to the high-road
beyond. After much difficulty (the village was filled with the
officers of the Sixty-Fifth) we found a kitchen in which we might
sleep. Upon the rough earth floor our mattresses were spread, my feet
under the huge black oven, my head beneath a gilt picture of the
Virgin and Child that in the candlelight bowed and smiled, in company
with eight other pictures of Virgins and Children, to give us
confidence and encouragement.

It was a terrible night. On a high pillared bed set into the farther
wall, an old Galician woman, her head bound up in a red handkerchief,
knelt all night and prayed aloud. Her daughter crouched against the
wall, sleeping, perhaps, but nevertheless rocking ceaselessly a wooden
cradle that hung from a black bar in the ceiling. In this cradle lay
her son, aged one or two, and once and again he cried for half an hour
or so, protesting, I suppose, against our invasion. There was a smell
in the kitchen of sour bread, mice, and bad water. The heat was
terrible but the old lady told us that the grandchild was ill and
would certainly die were the window opened. The candle we blew out but
there remained a little burning lamp under th