Beyond Skole we left the mountains--looking back at that imposing wall on the horizon, one could fancy the Russians coming down from the north and thinking, "There we shall stand!"--and rode northward through a pleasant, shallow, valley country, past Ruthenian settlements with their three-domed churches and houses steep-roofed with heavy thatch. Some of these Ruthenians, following the Little Russians of the south, Gogol's country, were not enthusiastic when the Russians came through. Among others, the Russian Government had made great propaganda, given money for churches and so on, so that the apparently guileless peasants occasionally revealed artillery positions, the Austrians said, by driving their cattle past them or by smoke signals from cottage chimneys. We stopped for dinner at Strij, another of those drab, dusty, half-Jewish towns filled now with German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers, officers, proclamations, and all the machinery of a staff headquarters, and the next morning rolled into Lemberg. The Russians captured it in the first week of the war, held it through the winter, and then, after the Czar had, from a balcony in the town, formally annexed it to the empire forever and a day, in April, the Austro-Hungarians retook it again in June. There were smashed windows in the railroad station, but otherwise, to a stranger coming in for the first time, Lemberg seemed swinging along, a big modern city of some-two hundred thousand people, almost as if nothing had happened. With an officer from General Bom-Ermolh's staff, and maps, we drove out to the outlying fortifications, where the real fighting had taken place. The concrete gun positions, the permanent infantry protections with loopholes in concrete, and all the trenches and barbed wire, looked certainly as if the Russians had intended to stay in Lemberg. The full explanation of why they did not must be left for the present. What happened at one fortified position, a few miles southwest of Lemberg, was plain enough. Here, in pleasant open farming country was a concrete and earth fort, protected by elaborate trenches and entanglements, in front of which, for nearly a mile across the fields, was an open field of fire. Infantry might have charged across that open space until the end of the war without getting any nearer, but the offensive did not, of course, try that. Over behind distant clumps of trees and a wooded ridge on the horizon they planted their heavy batteries. On a space perhaps three hundred yards long some sixty of these heavy guns concentrated their fire. The infantry pushed up under its protection, the fort fell, and the garrison was captured with it.