A sporting instinct and a grim sense of humor--the readiness to admire a
brave foe and the ability to extract amusement from discomfiture--are
the two things that have conspired to make the British soldier so
uniformly successful in treating those "twin impostors," Triumph and
Disaster, "just the same."

[Sidenote: The view across the Vardar.]

The sky was lightening and throwing into ghostly silhouette the line of
the mountain ridge across the Vardar by the time we had pushed on out
along the communication trench to the Greek Observation Post on the
extreme brow of the hill. Since midnight the enemy "heavies" had been
coughing gruffly under the mist-blanket that overlaid the plain,
dappling it with alternately flashing and fading blotches of light till
it glowed fantastically like a lamp-shade of Carrara marble;
star-shells, fired with a low trajectory, popped up and dove out of
sight again, throwing a fluttering green radiance over the white pall
which swathed the battlefield.

[Sidenote: The Bulgar preparing to go over the top.]

The mist-mask must have fended the day-break from the plain long after
it was light upon the hill from where we watched, for it was not until
the range of serrated peaks to the east of Doiran was all aglow with the
red and gold of sunrise that the higher-keyed crack of the enemy's
field-guns came welling up to tell us that the Bulgar was getting ready
to go over the top. The flame-spurts--paling from a hot red to faded
lemon as the light grew stronger--splashed up against the mist-pall as
the jet of an illuminated fountain rises and falls, and down where the
battered first-line trenches faced each other the dust-geysers of the