They laughed at us in welcome, crawling out of their igloos on all fours like bears out of a cave; they laughed when we photographed them crowding to get in front of the camera, when we scattered among them copies of _L'Opinion_, when up the snow-clad hillside we skidded and slipped and fell. And if we peered into the gloom of the shelters, where they crouched on the frozen ground with snow dripping from above, with shoulders pressed against walls of icy mud, they waved spoons at us and invited us to share their soup. Even the dark-skinned, sombre-eyed men of the desert, the tall Moors and Algerians, showed their white teeth and laughed when a "seventy-five" exploded from an unsuspicious bush, and we jumped. It was like a camp of Boy Scouts, picnicking for one day, and sure the same night of a warm supper and bed. But the best these _poilus_ might hope for was months of ice, snow, and mud, of discomfort, colds, long marches carrying heavy burdens, the pain of frost-bite, and, worst of all, homesickness. They were sure of nothing: not even of the next minute. For hill 516 was dotted with oblong rows of stones with, at one end, a cross of green twigs and a soldier's cap. The hill was the highest point of a ridge that looked down into the valleys of the Vardar and of Bodjinia. Toward the Bulgarians we could see the one village of Kosturino, almost indistinguishable against the snow, and for fifty miles, even with glasses, no other sign of life. Nothing but hills, rocks, bushes, and snow. When the "seventy-fives" spoke with their smart, sharp crack that always seems to say, "Take that!" and to add, with aristocratic insolence, "and be damned to you!" one could not guess what they were firing at. In Champagne, where the Germans were as near as from a hundred to forty yards; in Artois, where they were a mile distant, but where their trench was as clearly in sight as the butts of a rifle-range, you could understand. You knew that "that dark line over there" was the enemy. A year before at Soissons you had seen the smoke of the German guns in a line fifteen miles long. In other little wars you had watched the shells destroy a blockhouse, a village, or burst upon a column of men. But from hill 516 you could see no enemy; only mountains draped in snow, silent, empty, inscrutable. It seemed ridiculous to be attacking fifty miles of landscape with tiny pills of steel. But although we could not see the Bulgars, they could see the flashes on hill 516, and from somewhere out of the inscrutable mountains shells burst and fell. They fell very close, within forty feet of us, and, like children being sent to bed just at dessert time, our hosts hurried us out of the trenches and drove us away.