SCENES IN THE GREAT WAR
mountains, and exposed to the northern blasts that sweep down from the broad steppes of Russia, the long and narrow stretch of Galician territory is probably the most inhospitable region in the western world. Flat and featureless; with swampy and ague-stricken plains, unbroken by trees and hedges; with roads like canals, dissecting dreary wastes, black in the south, where the loam lies, light in the north where salt is found; with rivers without banks fraying into pools and ponds and marshes; with soppy fields in formal stripes like the patches of a patchwork quilt; with villages of log-houses, each having its cemetery a little apart, and its wooden crucifix like a gibbet at a space beyond—such is a great part of Galicia, the Polish province of Austria.
A PROVINCE WITHOUT A SOUL
But little as Nature has done to cheer the
spirits of the Poles, who live under Austrian rule,
what man has done is less. It is nothing at all,
or worse than nothing. Thickly sown on the
eastern frontier are many densely populated
manufacturing towns, ugly and squat, and giving
the effect of standing barefoot on the damp earth.
As you walk through them they look like interminable
lines of featureless streets, full of those
sweating, screaming, squabbling masses of
