“We had been hoping all along that the Austrians might let the water go on piling up behind the dam until it gave way, but it was not till one day when our scouts brought word that the gates had now been opened, with the evident intention of holding the lake at a level which they figured at about ten feet above the danger-point, that it occurred to us that we might do something to help the good work along. Nobody ever recalled afterwards whose idea it was, but a dozen of us--officers and men together, in the Serbian fashion--suddenly found ourselves waving our arms and getting red in the face discussing a plan for building a little dam of our own, backing up as big a lakeful of water behind it as we could, and then turning it loose on the big lake below at the crest of the spring floods. If any of us had had any engineering sense we’d have known that we couldn’t build--with no tools but a few axes and spades, and no materials but what nature had put there--a dam in a year big enough to be of any use, let alone in a month. But having no sense to speak of in things of that kind, we went ahead with the job, and, with the luck of fools, pulled it off. “There was a fine site for a dam at the upper end of the cart-road gorge, where it looked as though a solid barrier thirty feet high would back up a lake something like three-quarters of a mile long and from a quarter to half a mile wide. We began by building a ‘crib’ of pine-trunks thirty feet wide--which was to be filled with boulders and gravel. On our pencil plan of it, it was to be heavily buttressed from below and slope from both sides till it was only ten feet wide at the top. Our idea was to make it as much like a fort as possible, so that if the Austrians piped it off from an aeroplane they would think we were only working on defences. A hole was to be left in the middle for the river to flow out through, as we didn’t intend to store water till the big rains and thaws set in. As it was rainy or windy every day from the time we started to work, the Austrians--as far as we ever knew--did no flying over the mountains, so that we had no worry on that score.