The difficulty in country like this is, of course, to escape flanking fire. You fortify yourself against attack from one direction only to be enfiladed by artillery from some ridge to right or left. That was what the Austrians and Germans did and, following their artillery with an infantry assault, captured one of the upper Russian trenches. From this it was only a matter of a few hours to clear out the others. Except for the visits of a few peasants the battle-field had scarcely been touched since the snow melted. The hillside was peppered with shell holes, the trenches littered with old hand-grenades, brown Russian over-coats, the rectangular metal cartridge clip cases---about like biscuit tins--which the Russians leave everywhere, and some of the brush-covered shelters in which the Russians had lived, with their spoons and wet papers and here and there a cigarette box or a tube of tooth-paste, might have almost been lived in yesterday. The valley all the way back to Skole was strung with the brush and timber shelters in which the Russians had camped--the first of thousands of cut-up pine-trees we were to see before we left Galicia. All the drab and dreary side of war was in that little mountain town--smashed houses; sidewalks, streets, and fences splashed with lime against cholera; stores closed or just keeping alive, and here and there signs threatening spies and stating that any one found carrying explosives or building fires would be shot. I went into one fairly clean little cafe, where it seemed one might risk a cup of tea--you are not supposed to drink unboiled or unbottled water in such neighborhoods--and the dismal old Jew who kept the place told me that he had been there since the war began. He made a sour face when I said he must have seen a good deal. A lot he could see, he said, six months in a cellar "gesteckt." There was a certain amount of cholera all through eastern Galicia, especially among the peasants, not so well housed, often, as the soldiers, and not nearly so well fed and taken care of. Every one who went into Galicia had to be vaccinated for cholera, and in the army this had all but prevented it. In a whole division living in a cholera-infected neighborhood there would be only one or two cases, and sometimes none at all. The uncomfortable rumor of it was everywhere, however, and one was not supposed to eat raw fruit or vegetables, and in some places hand-shaking, even in an officers' mess, was prohibited. Russian prisoners were working about the station as they were all over eastern Austria-Hungary--big, blond, easy-going children, apparently quite content. Our Warsaw Pole talked with one of them, who seemed to mourn only the fact that he didn't have quite so big a ration of bread as he had had as a soldier. He had come from Siberia, where he had left a wife and three children--four, maybe, by this time, he said; some rascally Austrian might have made another one.