Five fronts Author:Robert Dunn Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II THE CHOLERA TRAIL TO PRZEMYSL Przemysl, October 25-November 3.— Last evening while we skidded down the hill toward the River San, the flashes of Russian... more » artillery fire twelve miles to the eastward pulsed through the night-mist like reddish heat lightning. Yet then, as we passed the sentries of the outer and the inner fortifications, where nothing was visible except great redoubts of sod and masses of wire entanglements, and received the " Feld- ruf" (password), you could hear no detonations; nor any throughout the night in this long- beleaguered Austrian stronghold. But certainly a battle was on. In the streets our headlights struck the blinking eyelids of endless files of grey infantry, trudging afield under their hairy knapsacks; and toward midnight in the Cafe Stieber it was whispered that again the Russians were attempting to surround the city. To this place from the Austrian staff headquarters, as the crow flies, it is scarcely sixty miles, but by motor-cars and rail it took us three days and nights. As to mud and landscape, you might have been touring the Piedmont region of Virginia. The single-track railroad was blocked with returning hospital trains, trains of wounded, of Russian prisoners, Red Cross trains going forward; each with no less than two engines and two dozen cars. Remember, that for all one reads of France and Belgium, this eastern war theatre is by far the greater both in length of firing line and numbers engaged. The line extends from the Baltic Sea to Rumania, now that the German and Austrian armies are joined. Here three nations with some 6,000,000 men in arms face one another in unending battle. But a nearer marvel lies in the contrast, both human and military, between the war here and the war in the west; and in that difference there is a r...« less