In the centre of the square people were singing--a strange little crowd and strange, mournful singing. We thought at first it was a funeral service, for the women were weeping as they sang, but as the auto-mobile swept up beside them, we saw that it was men the women were crowding round--live men, going away to war. They were men who had not been called out because the Russians held the country, and by one of fate's ironies, now that the enemy had been beaten and driven home, they must go out and fight. At a little table by the side of the square sat the recruiting officer with his pen and ledger, and the village school-master, a grave, intelligent-looking young man, who must have held such a place in this half-feudal village as he would have done a hundred years ago, was doing his best to glamour over the very realistic loss of these wives and sweethearts with patriotism's romance. He sang and obediently they all wailed after him the old song of scattered Poland--"Poland is not lost" "Yeszcze Polska me Zginela Poki my zygemy..." The song stopped, there was a word of command, and the little squad started away. The women clung to their men and cried aloud. The children hanging to their skirts began to wail, too. There was something creepy and horrible, like the cries of tortured animals, in that uncontrolled crying there in the bright morning sunshine. The schoolmaster spoke to them bluntly, told them to go back to their homes and their work, and obedient, and a little quieter now, they drifted away, with aprons to their faces and their little children clinging to their skirts--back to their cottages and the winter ahead. This picture did not fit in very well with our rollicking military panorama, but we were soon over the hills, and half an hour later were breakfasting on pate-de-foie-gras sandwiches and champagne, with a charming old corps commandant, at a round table set outdoors in a circle of trees that must have been planted for that very purpose. Cheered and stiffened by many bows and heel clickings and warming hospitality, we hurried off to an artillery position near the village of Olszanica. Just under the brow of a hill we were stopped and told that it was dangerous to go farther, and we skirted off to the right under cover, to the observation station itself. More little Swiss chalets, more hospitable officers, and out in front, across a mile of open country, the Russian trenches. Through a periscope one could see Russians exercising their horses by riding them round the circle--as silent and remote and of another world as a picture on a biograph screen.