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 a youth or an old man met you—each one fairly pierced you with his eyes.

“The women there were very odd. You hear often of the beauty of Hercegovinian women, you see their pictures—I ought not to spoil your illusions. I looked at every woman that I met, and I arrived at an opposite conclusion on the beauty question. All of them were ugly, positively hideous and withered, as if they had never been young. If there happened to be one here and there that was really young she was ugly just like the rest.

“The Turkish women were just the same. We saw them often. They were veiled up to their eyes—but those eyes sufficed for the observer. They were eyes, altogether so stupid, so entirely without shine or beauty that they gave birth among us to the permanent joke that their faces were veiled out of consideration for our refined sense of beauty. And, strangely enough, too, this joke was taken up and soon spread over all Hercegovina.

“And the life there! Drill, sentinel inspection, drill and sentinel inspection! It was a dog’s life—worse than the marches and battles which we had to go through before. Our only joy, in reality, our only consolation was wine. And a man sat in the casino (it was a filthy hut, one large room with a low, smokedup ceiling) and drank and forgot. Yes, a man forgot and drank—and frequently drank down his whole future.