"General Pushkin. Everyone agrees that he was the one great soldier that the Balkan wars produced. He won his battles against the Turks easily, and without the loss of great numbers of men, and when the Bulgarians attacked, we and the Greeks fought the campaign according to his strategy. The German military attaché said that General Pushkin was fit to command the greatest army in the world. He said he was a military genius of the first rank, and one of the greatest soldiers developed in Europe since the time of von Moltke."
"Then he must be good, because the Germans know a good soldier when they see him."
"He has done everything that has been required of him so far. This war with Austria will be his great test--only he doesn't regard it as a test, but as an opportunity. My father says that that is the true mark of a man's character. He says the weak man, who hasn't got it in him to succeed, thinks of a difficult thing he has to do, or to try to do, as a trial, a test, and that the big man, who is sure to amount to something, simply looks at it as a chance to show what he has in him."
"I know what you mean." Dick nodded. "My own father used to say that, too. That was the trouble with Mike Hallo, I guess. If things looked hard he was always complaining, and my father used to get pretty sore at him sometimes. My father just gritted his teeth and went to work. I remember hearing them talk about the panic a few years ago. An awful lot of business houses were smashed then, but my father pulled through, though Hallo wanted to quit. He said they would only be throwing good money after bad if they kept on."
They had been walking briskly while they talked, and it was not long before they came to the flat, marshy ground near the banks of the Danube. Here it was a sluggish, thick, yellow stream, flowing along impressively because of its bulk, but lacking every element of beauty and romance.
"This doesn't look much like the beautiful blue Danube, does it, Steve?" Dick suggested.
"No," said Steve, with a laugh. "It's not pretty--not here. There is some fine scenery between here and the coast, though, where it marks the boundary between Roumania and Bulgaria. And it's all historic. On the Bulgarian side further down, the ground is high, with a sharp ascent from the river. There was some fierce fighting in the Russo-Turkish war--the war that freed Bulgaria, you know, and really helped a lot to make Servia free, too. At one place the Russians crossed in boats and stormed the heights, with the Turks above, firing down on them."