“I’ve been in ‘Yankee Jim’s’ Canyon of the Yellowstone when the flood behind the break-up of the ice-jam in the lake came down, but that was a rat-a-tat to the roar that sounded now. The mountains themselves were shaking, and the movement started the ‘hanging’ snow-slides all the way down the gorge. It must have been a racket like that when the world was made. The lake was drained of all but mud in ten minutes, and it must have been about twice that long before a new sound broke in--a roar so deep that it seemed to almost be a rumbling from under the earth. But we knew that it was the big dam going--that our work was done for that night. “The next morning at daybreak every man in shape to stand the climb over a mountain path we knew--the road down the gorge had been scoured out clean--dropped down from three sides on the little Austrian force in the village where the dam had been, and killed or captured the whole bunch. Then we pushed on to the top of the foothills looking down to the plain. Where the main Austrian camp had been was a slither of smooth mud, dotted with the stumps of snapped-off trees; and just that, and no more, was all we could see as far as our eyes could reach. “And just so,” cried Radovitch, leaping to his feet and shaking a fist toward the serrated sky-line to the north-east, beyond which ran the roads to Monastir and Prilep and Uskub; “just so, when the time comes, will the whole ---- ---- herd of the swine be swept out of Serbia!” BEATING BACK FROM GERMANY (AS TOLD BY AN ESCAPED PRISONER). I was born on a Wisconsin farm, almost within sight of Lake Michigan and only a few miles from the Illinois State line. My father was Irish and my mother German. Like my name, most of my qualities--both good and bad--were those of my father rather than my mother. He died when I was ten, and within a year my mother married our German hired-man. My mother was never unkind to me, but my stepfather was a brute, and from the day of his coming to live with us I date a steadily growing dislike for his race, which has been made worse by a sort of fatality which, in spite of myself, has seemed to work to throw me amongst them all my life. My stepfather was always rough with me, but until I was sixteen confined himself to a black-snake and horsewhip in beating me. I got on as best I could with him, but when he celebrated my coming to what he called “man’s estate” by starting in on me with a hoe-handle, it was more than I could stand. The second time he tried it I was ready for him and caught him a blow behind the ear with an iron monkey-wrench that laid him out across the chopping-block. Afraid that I had killed him--he was really not hurt much--I ran away, taking nothing with me but the wrench I had in my hand. I never parted with that good old monkey-wrench during all my wanderings of the next ten years, and I felt worse about losing it to the Germans in Flanders than I did about the two fingers their shrapnel bashed off.