The quiet of the morning departed. The rumble of the guns seemed quite close now. When luncheon was over, we all mounted horses and rode off in the direction they called. We came to a halt on the shores of another and much larger lake, a great inland sea nearly fifteen miles long. The wind had lashed its surface into whitecaps, and waves came beating noisily against the barbed-wire entanglements that poked their heads formidably above the water. Here we dismounted, and they led me to an observation station cleverly screened by trees. Young Gusaroff adjusted the glasses and turned them over to me; then--“Bvistra, Miss Beatty, bvistra!” he shouted. I looked, and at the opposite side of the lake a great cloud of sand rose suddenly into the air. A section of a German trench blew up in a puff of smoke. Stretched out before me, beyond that powerful lens, were the Russian and German trenches. Above the ground the barbed-wire entanglements zigzagged across the gray hillsides. Under the surface, facing each other with watchful eyes and ears and ready trigger-fingers, were two long lines of silent men. In the reserve trenches beyond were more men--thousands of them, talking, sleeping, playing cards, brewing tea, living their lives like so many ants--who were of the earth and knew no other world. A flotilla of tiny armored water-craft guarded the Russian end of the lake, and between it and the little German lake-craft was a stretch of mined water, which either would hesitate to cross. It was hard to realize, looking through those glasses at the clouds of dust now on the German side of the line, now on the Russian, that every time the slim young lieutenant called “Bvistra!” the reaper of battlefields was shouting a more final command to some one or more of the dwellers under the earth. Back at staff headquarters again, we sat down at a table with military maps spread before us. Gusaroff was an engineer, and loved every line of the complicated maps. “If we had had enough ammunition in 1915 you would not have to be fighting to-day,” he said. “Here”--pointing to a spot in Poland now in the possession of the Germans--“sixteen thousand of us went into battle in 1915, and only five hundred of us returned. The artillery retreated, not because it did not want to go on fighting--not because it was beaten--but because it had only two rounds of ammunition left.” He moved his finger to another point on the map. “There is a hill here,” he said, “which our men charged forty-eight times. On the forty-ninth attack there were only four survivors out of three thousand, and they shot themselves rather than surrender to the Germans. Reserves arrived in time to rescue the situation, but too late to save the men.” “Yes,” said another officer; “if we had had the ammunition in 1915, I would be back with Mother Moscow, practising law, and all this business would be over. What will happen now--I don’t know. It is very bad.”