_In the Snow-Clad Mountains with the Austrians Told by Ludwig Bauer, of
Vienna_
This war has set new standards of endurance for the soldier. They
have been compelled to keep the field--to march, to fight or to
carry on siege warfare in the trenches--regardless of weather
conditions. Battles have frequently been fought while a blizzard
raged or while the thermometer stood below zero. War in the solitary,
snow-clad wastes of a mountain range is war stripped of all its
glamor. It is the repellant, savage struggle of wild beasts or of
primitive men stalking one another and at the same time engaging in
a life-and-death struggle with the destructive forces of nature.
Something of the extraordinary physical and mental strain of service
in the Carpathians in the winter of 1915-'16 is conveyed in the
following story by Ludwig Bauer, the well known Viennese writer. It
was published originally in the _New Yorker Staats Zeitung_, with
whose permission it is here translated by William L. McPherson with
editorial note for the _New York Tribune_.