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Show :375 'rui: mun iroia-is'r ('Illlllt‘lll rages. his sutlth u i‘uurh liuvluesws dinl one a world ol‘ good. We tilled tin‘ waywus aunl H'Hl them bark. then about miil‘laji. under a lilaxiup hot sun. we went on with the Htllt‘l‘>. ls tin-1e any flaw in the globe hot and sull'oeating quite as this l‘iori u, is'.' l‘:\<‘n iu the open >1):lt't‘s one can‘t breathe and lilt‘l‘t‘.> never any proper shade under the trees. .\t lirst we wrri- at a loss. No one seemed quite to l had to go on know wlure the ‘x'ruerorsky l'oll». \\'l re. alone and rerouuoitre. I was right out in the open then and more alone than «illt‘ muhl ln‘llt‘Yt‘. ('annou were blazing away and one baIu-ry swiuwl .llhl behind me- ~and yet 1 couldn‘t >('(‘ it. 1 could see nothing «only great ridges of hills with the Forest like gigantic torrents of green water under the mist. and jll>t at my feet eorntields {711.671} with eornllowers. Then l saw rather a wonderful thing. .l came to the edge of my hill and looked down into a cup of a valley. quite a little valley with the green waves towering on every side of it. Through the mist there shim1nered below me a blue lake. I was puzzled-there was no water here that l knew, but by this time the Forest has so bewitehed my senses that I‘m ready to believe anything Of it. There it was, anyway, a blue lake, shifting a little under gold haze. l climbed down the hill a yard or two and then you can believe that I jumped! My blue lake was Austrian prisoners, nothing more nor less! Has any one FOUR? 279 came to the, prisoners, crossed a, stream and plunged into a shining dazzling nightmare. ll'lzcre the cannon were I don't know--all a considerable distance away, I suppose, he 'ause the only sign of shell were the little breaking putts of smoke in the blue sky with just a pin-flash of light as they broke; but. really amongst that welter of wooded hill the sounds were uncanny. 'l‘hey'd be under one's feet, over one's head, in one's car, up against one's stomach, straight in the small of one's baek. Since my night with Nikitin physical tear really seems to have left memthe whole outward paraphernalia of the war has become an en- tirely commonplace thing, but it was the Forest that I felt -exaetly as though it were playing with me. Wasn't there at their an old mediazval torture when they shot arrows then on side, one on first Victim, always just missing him, fixed him another, until at last, tired of the game, they was try- through the head? \Vell, that's what the old beast and what is ing to do to me, anything to doubt what's real senses. . . . W0 not, anything to make me question my small lied ("ross tumbled quite suddenly 011 to some men, a sitting under the shelter and two or three hundred soldiers The doc: trees by the road resting~most of them sleeping. fussy man-was illtor in the Red Cross place--a small tempcred and overworked. There were at. least thirty dead and the army saur men lying in a row outside the Shelter, the middle of them, found an oliieer, asked him about every minute. "\thy tars were bringing in more wounded use of eominf-l' weren't there more wagons? What was the doctor, some one or with so few? \Vhere was the other '3" There he was, other who ought to have relieved him and down .in the up like a little monkey on wires, dancing wounded, and got directed some two versts in front of me. blood, pincers in one blazing road, his arms covered with Then l climbed up the hill back to my wagons and we started olt. We went down the hill round by the road and the inside of his shelter hand and bandages in the other and out of it that you (1 with such a green, filthy smell coming quite seen them like that before, I wonder, and isn't this .li‘orest really the old witch's forest, able to do what it pleases with anything? There they were, hundreds of them, cover- ing the whole ilOor of the little valley. l walked down into |