Chapter M: L'Aryesse was in alarm; it would never do to take a picture. What if (1)

his friends should see it! He began wringing his hand and then nervously running his fingers through his hair. To think of such a specimen of his work being photographed and published in America. But the photographer assured him that the statue was wonderful, and in an incredibly short time a flashlight powder boomed in the room and the job was done.

From the studio we walked up to the end of the street and entered a shed where a swarm of roughly-clad prisoners divided into groups were standing around a post pulling at something. They were braiding straw. One of them exhibited a round mat made of braided straw about five inches in diameter, which, it appeared, were mats to put in the hoofs of the horses to keep out the snow.

And again you marveled at the German system, this obvious weeding out of men who knew how to braid straw and putting them to work making a winter supply for the army horses. These men were the worst type of Belgians from the Antwerp slums and from the farms. One black-haired, evil-looking fellow had two yellow bands sewn to the sleeve of his coat, the badge of their spokesman and officer.

This black-haired gentleman was known as Lulu. Lulu was very proud of his rank. I doubted at first whether the man had a forehead; his black hair hung low; he was of the type--and there were many more in that room like him--of the hereditary criminal. Our gunmen would look like saints in comparison with this apache of the slums. Through an interpreter I was permitted to talk to the Belgians, and I chose the mildest looking man of them all. He said that he was perfectly satisfied to be where he was. The other men in the room nodded assent. This puzzled me a little, for they looked sullen enough to be unafraid to speak their minds even in the presence of a gray coated Prussian officer. But the Belgian explained, "Here we have a place to sleep, we get food, and we are not in danger of being killed."

Another black-browed fellow volunteered his story. "When the war began I was a reserve. I was told to hide my uniform and shoot at the Germans whenever I got a chance. Then I was called into regular service, and I put on my uniform and fought in the ranks. After that, with hundreds of my comrades, I was told to put on my civilian clothes again and go back home or any place where I could hide and take shots at any stray German soldiers I could see."

This seemed to me to be a confirmation of the German charges, that soldier civilians had been making war upon them.

At the other extremity of the street I found the other feature of the camp. Here were the Turcos. Dressed in outlandish costumes I saw some still wearing the burnooses of their tribes, others natty little, light blue, gold-embroidered jackets, some with the red fez, others with turbans, a motley collection that did not look at all the terrible Turco we had heard about. It happened to be what Captain Stutterheim called "Lice day," and thoroughly enjoying it the Turcos were standing in the street beating their blankets.

The leader of the Belgians was Lulu; but the Turks had a handsome gentleman who looked as if he would cut your throat for two cents, who answered to the name of Jumbo. Like Lulu, Jumbo was very proud of the two yellow stripes sewn on his arm. It was Lulu who posed his comrades for the photographer, arranging them with a nice sense of values. And when I looked the length of that line, glanced from one brutish face to another, I need no other confirmation of the statement that out of two hundred Turcos at the Zossen camp one in every four had been captured with ghastly trophies in his possession. The same charge of savagery has been made against the Turk, but from everything I can learn about the Turkish soldier--and here in Berlin I have talked to three American correspondents who have traveled with Turkish armies--there is a vast difference between the German trained Turkish soldier, and the French Turco.

Presently we selected a grinning, black villain and the most dapper Frenchman in the camp. All his comrades roared with laughter when they understood, and the whole procession came up the camp street as if they were going to a workman's Sunday picnic. Nicely posed, they made a splendid picture, which provoked the Baron's _"Allies!"_ and roars of deep-throated Germanic laughter.

Possibly with a stage-manager's instinct to relieve the setting, the Captain walked us a short distance to a model little hospital camp in the pine woods. The surgeon in charge amazed us by saying that fifty per cent. of the captured French soldiers were tubercular. After walking with the wounded through the pines, we returned to the camp. We passed Frenchmen busy at landscape gardening. It seemed incredible. On every camp street they had made a long box design of evergreen and lettered to read the name of the company and the regiment.

It was then that I saw the man who had been making the paper flowers leave his shed and cross the street. Remembering what he had told me that the flowers were made for the chapel, I suggested that we go there. Following the soldier, we found ourselves in an anteroom at one end of a scrupulously clean shed. From the anteroom a door opened into a long unpainted room, at the far end of which I saw a crude altar. I noticed a square of red cloth of some cheap material, half covering the wall, and against this, in white and gold relief stood different figures of worship, candles, crucifixes, a host covered with a roughly cut piece of the same red muslin, and surmounting it all, high on the wall, an Almighty crown.

I saw the soldier with the flowers enter by a distant door and give them to the priests. When the priest handed him a plain vase and let him fill it himself, the soldier seemed ready to cry out with happiness. Silently the three figures at the altar went about their devotions. Again the door opened, a line of prisoners appeared, walking on tip-toe, their rough boots creaking; they filed across the room, and making two lines before the altar, dropped on their knees, their lips moving in a monotonous monotone of prayer. Rising, they tip-toed out and another file came in, and among them the vivid garments of a Turco. Making a sign to the Captain, I left the chapel. Presently they brought the Turco to me. He could speak French. I asked him why he had turned Christian and he said something to the effect that he had seen the way to the one real religion. He was explaining volubly about his conversion just before a battle in France, when the Captain pulled off the Turco's fez and grabbed a little braided pigtail concealed beneath.

"Christian, eh?" laughed the Captain. "What are you still wearing that thing for, then?"

The Turco began to grin.

"This religion," he said, "makes it pleasant among the Frenchmen, and then when I get home--well, how can I be a good Mohammedan without this?" and lovingly he patted his braided hair.

Prisoners of war? Are they ill or well treated? I leave my reader to judge the facts. I have tried to give you accurate pictures of the varied camps, typical of the German system. Of the camps in England and France, I do not know; of the camps in Russia no man knows. To silence the stories of ill-treatment that official press bureaus intermittently produce, why not apply a remedy?

Why not standardize the prison camps? As it is a task for humanitarians why should not the suggestions come from Switzerland, the home of the Red Cross, with the tacit understanding and backing up of the United States. A standard set of prison camp recommendations could be drafted recommending certain quantities and kinds of food, certain conditions for sleeping quarters, certain limitations to the enforced labor. The old Geneva document is out of date; its compilers could not foresee a World War; no nation to-day could meet its recommendations; the problem of handling prisoners of war has become too vast.

X

ON THE HEELS OF THE RUSSIAN RETREAT

The Russians were retreating! In Pschoor's our waiter told us; on the Linden great pennants began to appear; an hour and Berlin had bedecked itself in flags.... The Russians were retreating! In front of the newspaper offices the crowds stood twenty deep, their faces turned to a bulletin which said that Hindenburg was driving the enemy from East Prussia. Magically, vendors selling little photographic buttons of the German hero, swarmed on to the streets. _"Bilder von Hindenburg! Bilder von Hindenburg!"_

The great cafés which an hour ago had been empty, were suddenly filled. The air was tense with excitement. At every table the "beer strategists" were discussing this newest of great victories, which they were calling a second Tannenberg. Unable even to get a place of vantage from which to overlook this ecstasy of patriotism, I returned to Adlon just in time to receive a message from a blue-coated page boy; Major von Herwarth, of the General Staff, wanted me at the telephone.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Fox," the Major was saying. "I am very happy to say that everything has been arranged and that you start to-night for the East." Thanking Major von Herwarth, who has done everything in his power to help every open-minded American correspondent locate the facts, I hurried to my room to get my luggage together.

And an hour later we were completing arrangements for the most amazing piece of reporting done in this war. With the cooperation of the Foreign Office, the Staff had decided to permit Herbert Corey and myself to send collaborated reports from the front to America. Subsequently filed at different points on the battle line, they went by military telegraph into Germany, thence by the regular Government lines to Berlin, thence by the great wireless to Sayville, Long Island. Only a limited number of words a day are sent by the transatlantic wireless but the Foreign Office gave us one hundred and fifty of these which is why thirty-seven American cities read as swiftly as science could bring it to them, the truth of the terrific smash of Hindenburg's army.

That night, my only luggage, a change of clothing wrapped in a sleeping bag--for we had been cautioned to reduce what we had brought to the barest necessities--I went at eleven to the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof where I met the officer who was to take me to the front. I found Baron von Stietencron, a captain in the 5th Regiment of the Prussian Guards, the crack infantry of Germany, to be a light spirited devil-may-care type of officer, gifted with a touch-and-go sense of humor, high strung and imaginative. Since the war he had let a reddish beard grow around his chin but one could see he was young and never happy in the field unless he was leading a charge. Indeed, later that night I learned that Baron von Stietencron had been shot through the throat when the Germans stormed at St. Quentin!

Troops swarmed on the platform; new recruits going out to fill the gaps in the line, officers rejoining their regiments. The train for Königsberg glided into the arc lighted shed; we managed to get a first class compartment.

"I tried to get sleeping accommodation," apologized Baron von Stietencron, who spoke good American, "but we were too late."

To the waving and calling of good-bys, the train glided past the pallid faces of soldiers' loved ones, and clanking over the switches, turned its headlight towards the Eastern night. It was near three before any of us thought of sleeping. In that short space of time we came to know Baron von Stietencron amazingly well. And I heard some things of war that made my blood run cold.

"The Russians are in retreat now at this point," explained the Baron, tracing his finger over one of those marvelously minute staff maps. "We arrive at Königsberg in the morning and from there we shall go south to Lyck. It was at Lyck that the first big engagement of the battle took place."

Lyck from which only a few days ago the Russians had been sent flying! There was no bed that night; we slept sitting but the drowsy rumble of the car wheels seemed to be the clatter of the Russian retreat and when the big light glared through the window into my eyes, I had to awake fully before realizing that it was not a searchlight seeking out the retreating soldiers of the Czar, but only the station lamp at Dirschau.

Morning found us in the beery dining-room of the old station at Königsberg, breakfasting on coffee and wurst, and watching through the window a bivouac of young soldiers who had spent the night outside. We were walking down the platform to take the train for Korschen, when we saw a little boy tug at his mother's arm and stare with mouth agape into the sky. There to the south what seemed to be a stub of black pencil was slowly dissolving into the snow gray clouds. "Zeppelin! Zeppelin!" In a clamor the waiting rooms emptied but already the great bag was a thing of the mists, vanishing, with its cargo of death, towards Warsaw.

Half an hour and we were on the train for Korschen.

Running almost due south from Königsberg, the railroad enters Masurenland where swamps and lakes still hold the Russian dead of those terrible August days, when Tannenberg turned East Prussia red. There the empty yellowish fields, undulating from hillock to gully, across the picture that the car window framed, bristled but five days before with Russian lines. There at Korschen where we changed cars, they had burned the station. There we saw on flat cars, ready to be pulled to some point behind the front, three black painted motors that the Russians had abandoned in their flight; coupled to them a heavy truck, bearing a long German howitzer; beside that a Belgian freight car, marked Louvain. Somehow it seemed quite natural that they all should be there--the Russian motors, the Belgian car, the German gun.

It was just as we were leaving Korschen that a smiling slender young man who wore glasses, bowed outside the compartment door, and said: "You're an American, aren't you?" And when I told him yes, he said: "I am too." He went on to say that he was from Passaic, and I found myself recalling Gus Schwing of Newark, the Lieutenant Brevet whom we had met in Brussels and wondering if all the Americans in the German army came from New Jersey.

"I am an architect in Passaic," he said. "I happened to be in Germany on August 3rd. Before coming to America I had served my time in the army, but I, being born in Germany, offered my services at the outbreak of war to the government. They are using me to go behind the army, building up what has been destroyed. I have just come from France where we're rebuilding everything behind our battle line."

Captain von Stietencron, who had noticed my amazement, smiled and added, "In France and Belgium our soldiers planted the fields with a winter crop, last fall, and they're planting an autumn crop now."

Which seems to be a case of harvesting machines following the howitzers. At Stürlack where the railroad strikes due east for Lötzen we were made to feel the growing intimacy of the front, by being shunted on a side while troop trains rumbled by for an hour. It being four o'clock then and not having been able to eat since morning, the Baron led a foraging expedition into a track-side farmhouse, which resulted in more wurst and heavy black bread. I can still see the expression in that old farmer's eyes as, opening the cottage door, he saw the Baron outside. It was as if the gray officer's cape, hanging over the Baron's broad shoulders, at once made him in the eyes of that old man, something superhuman and to be idolized. And I did not wholly understand this until I learned that the Russians had spent a rioting night in the farmer's house and that thenceforth to him, the German troops had become avengers and deliverers.

"They are swine, these Russians," he told the Baron. "Further on you will see."

Beginning with Lötzen, the railroad became wholly military. No passenger cars went further than Lötzen, a direct feeding point to the front. Learning, upon leaving our car that a military train would pull out for Lyck in a few minutes, we ran down the tracks, stumbling on the ties, for it had become dark, trying to find a place to get on. But every freight car filled with food and ammunition was sealed and even on the flat cars there was not room to stand between the caissons and guns.

"Next to the engine," some one shouted, but even as we ran towards that car, where we now saw the pale glow of lantern light framed by an open door, the train pulled out.

"It's an hour," remarked Captain von Stietencron, "before there's another."

Picking our way back over the rails we made towards the dimly lighted station, its platform swarming with soldiers, gleaming with bayonets as they moved in a path of light. Entering a dingy waiting room, we stood beside a crowded lunch counter while the Baron went in to see the station Kommandant. Around the little stained topped table officers were eating dinner.

I wondered first at the contrast of their uniforms stained and worn with the field, and the immaculate cleanliness of their persons, at their finger nails which each man must have manicured, for they shone, at their clean shaven faces, and glistening combed hair; one fancied their eyebrows were brushed too. These officers in the well worn uniforms stained by six months of field service had obviously made their toilettes as for the opera.

We saw Captain von Stietencron coming out of the Kommandant's office.

"There will be no troop train leaving for Lyck," he said, "until to-morrow. However, in forty minutes a big supply train is going and if you can stand riding in a freight car," and the Baron paused with the unspoken question.

"Anything at all," I assured him. "When do we reach Lyck?"

"With a supply train," he smiled, "one never knows." Whereupon, being a soldier, and having a chance to eat, the Baron proposed taking advantage of this chance.

A steaming platter of an amazing good goulash, and we were picking our way over the rails to find the freight car in which we were to ride. We found it coupled to the engine and behind us, car after car, filled with ammunition, fodder and food, stretched endlessly up the track. We were in a freight car that had been painted inside and fitted with three long benches. From the white roof, two lanterns swung their flickering light across the brown walls, and at the farther end near a stiflingly hot round stove, I saw a big pile of straw where doubtless the train crew spent the night.

So we sat under the swinging lanterns, while the light car rattled and shook as with a disorder. Time never passed more quickly, listening to the Captain's stories of the war. And later I knew of many things concerning that first great drive into France, of how Namur was taken by storm, but the Iron Cross that hung from Von Stietencron's coat did not appear in the narrative, although I referred to it many times.

And with the shadows trembling on the wall and the two tired soldiers sleeping in the straw, it seemed the way to go to war, not as in the West, in a train on a soft plush seat. I involuntarily shuddered at the thought of the potential death we carried in the cars behind, the tons of ammunition coming now to make Russian dead. As the engine drew its heavy, dangerous load slowly on, through the partly opened door, I saw a drift of white falling snow beginning to blow past us in the night.

By the time we reached Windennen, the fields had turned white and when a soldier told us we would be delayed here twenty minutes, we got out. A sullen murmur, almost as of animals, met the ear, and walking up the tracks in the direction of the murmur, we saw presently, the glisten of bayonets and beyond that in the obscured light of a station lamp a horde of Russian prisoners. Herded within the confines of a barbed wire square that gave the impression of having hastily been built as a _Gefangenenlager_, the Russians watched our approach with suspicious eyes. Splendid types of the human animal, deep chested, tall fellows, with mighty physiques and stupid faces, the Russians of that greater Russia, who exist in the fiction of those who portray the "beautiful Russian soul." One recognized the great coats of sheepskin and goat, the round shaggy fur hats, that had succeeded the natty peaked caps of the first mustering in; one recognized the Russian smell which sickens you in the great prison camps all over Germany. As we looked at them the muttering ceased and uneasily they shifted about seeming to be waiting for something and instinctly you thought, upon realizing the utter ignorance of their faces waiting for a sentence of death.

"Over here are the officers," remarked Captain von Stietencron, and we followed him to a separate enclosure where a yellow bearded Russian glowered at us from the doorway of what had been a signal tower, while another drew his tall form up straight and smiled. The Captain spoke to this man in German. I caught the words: Doctor of Medicine, Esthland, which is one of the Baltic provinces of Russia, where five centuries ago the inhabitants were German.

"As a surgeon," the Captain was saying to tall, smiling, beardless Russian, "you might be returned to your country. There is a possibility."

Emphatically the Russian shook his head.

"No," he replied. "I've had enough of their army. I want to remain in Germany."

And then both evidently having interest in some proper noun that happened to fall into their conversation, they talked with increasing pleasure and speed.

"Queer," mused Von Stietencron, as we walked back to the freight car. "That Russian's father is the priest who gave me my first communion--and I meet him here."

But then anything is possible in this war.

From Lötzen to Lyck, by rail is twenty-five kilometers; in times of peace, the average passenger train takes little more than half an hour. In times of war, the run of a heavy supply train such as ours, is about an hour. We left Lötzen before seven; four hours and Lyck was still away. Rattling along, jumping the switches into sidings while coaches filled with troops rushed clanking past, faintly luminous phantoms in the snowy night, stopping at one little station after another, the weirdest ride of my life, even before we came to Iucha.

The village of Iucha, typical of that section of East Prussia which is known as Masurenland, hides behind the trees half a mile from the railroad. There being forty minutes before our train would leave, we gratefully accepted Julius the station master's invitation to visit his house. It would be cozy there. "Just up the track aways," he said. Imagining a comfortable half hour of lounging on some pillowed German chair, we followed the station master who led the way with a lantern. Outside his house, a squat two floor, stone structure, I noticed in the yard, a sofa, from which the plush cover had been removed. "A frugal man," I thought; "saving it no doubt for something else."

We followed him into the house. Nauseated by a stench we stared bewildered into a room. In the lantern's light, it was a place of pillage and filth. Torn papers made soft the floor, the walls seemed ragged with torn pictures, hanging shredlike from their frames--torn plush covers from old chairs, torn curtains--everything torn, broken or slashed.

"The Russians," he remarked, "they lived in my home," and I thought his eyes filled. "I lived here fifteen years. My boy was born here."

Following the station master into the room where the Russians had eaten, I saw the little brass meat cans of the Russian commissary, strewn around the floor amid an overpowering clutter of cooked meat and decaying vegetables. I opened a little closet in the wall and stood looking at something that my electric torch picked out on the floor. It was a pair of cow's hoofs, cut off a little below the knees. Probably left there until they got ripe enough to be cooked in a stew.

We found every room in that little home destroyed and filthy, and as we made our way across the snow to the village, we felt certain that we were to look upon even more depressing scenes. Little Iucha, a pretty place on a crest of the rolling country, we found to be utterly and wantonly devastated. We learned there was no fighting in Iucha, yet home after home we found destroyed. We visited the shop of G. Geydon, and found all the goods missing from his shelves, all the counters smashed, all his business papers torn and strewn on the floor. We went into another store, where amid a ruin of splintered wood, stood the owner's safe, blown open as by cracksmen.

In another house, a private dwelling, we entered a room that the Russian officers must have used as a council chamber, for chairs were drawn around one end of a long table. Beside the table, on the floor, I noticed a Russian map of this section of Germany. Here in this room, beyond doubt, the staff officers were in conference when the alarm rang through the town--"The Germans are coming!" Everywhere were signs of the panic in which they had fled.

"On that hill over there," said the station master, pointing across the snow, "the Russians had a trench. The morning after they retreated, we went up there and found it filled with loot and the dead bodies of three good women of the village whom they had taken up there, outraged, and slain."

"How long," I asked him, "were the Russians here?"

"From November sixth," he replied, "to February twelfth."

Six days ago! The trail was getting hot. As we passed the station, I looked in at a window and saw sitting on the floor there, their backs sliding down on the wall, a room filled with sleeping German soldiers, obviously two machine gun squads, for the guns were in the middle of the room; and beside this another room where in the light of a candle stub, under officers were playing cards with ten pfennig pieces as the stakes. Feeling as though I had been walking through a dream, I followed the others back to the car.

It was after midnight when somebody said we were in Lyck and clambering down from the car, we began packing our way across the tracks towards the station. Even at a distance we could perceive the marks of destruction, with one jagged wall leaning against the night. Leading the way past the burned building, Captain von Stietencron asked us to wait while he went into a rude shack where a light burned. Out of the night stalked a shadowy form and the electric eye of a powerful torch gleamed in my face, hesitated and darkened, while with a "_Gute Nacht!_" the shadowy form stalked on. It was the Lyck greeting--friend or foe?

In a few minutes, the Captain called us to come into the little shack.

"Be good enough to wait here," he said, "while I go out and find the officer who was to meet us in Lyck, and tell us where we will be quartered for the night."

He was gone and we were looking around the little board walled room. In a darkened corner I discerned the sleeping forms of three soldiers and along a wooden shelf, sat two others with heavy lidded eyes, field telephones clamped to their heads. A large white shaded lamp, evidently from the same house as the sofa on which we sat and the three upholstered chairs, stood upon a rough board table in the center of the room. Getting up and walking around, I saw that the wooden shelf had been the table for the Russian field telegraph, for two of their despatches obviously left there in the excitement of retreating, had been pasted by the Germans on the wall.

The time passed with Captain von Stietencron plodding somewhere through the snow. A young officer came in, a big handsome fellow, who looked at me in polite surprise, and seating himself at the table, began to write a letter. I saw that his pencil was of gold and flashing with little diamonds.

"An American, I take it," he said after a pause. "I know your country well. I like it." I talked with him about the cities he had visited while he hesitated over his letter. "It is so difficult," he remarked, "when you are writing your wife from the front. You want to tell her all the news, and then," with a grim smile, "you don't."

We watched him deliberating long over the composition of the note which, finally sealing, he gave to a soldier and sped him away.

"I am leaving now for Russia," he said, drawing on his great coat of beaver; "I must be at headquarters by morning. Good night, I am most happy to have chanced to meet you."

We heard the muffling snort of his motor die away in the snowy night. It was after three before the Baron returned.

"I am so sorry," he apologized, "but there has been a mistake. They know nothing here about us. We must go in the morning to the --th Army headquarters at Goldap. And now," and the Baron looked about him in dismay, "we must sleep."

So we stretched our sleeping bags on the floor of the shack and in a moment were sleeping like the soldiers, whom not even a cannon could awaken....

I awoke to find the brown coats of Russian soldiers passing outside the window. Rubbing the drowsiness out of my eyes, I saw follow, larger men in goat and sheepskins, and then a squad of black hatted, slit-eyed Siberians, a squad of strapping fair haired Finns. A guard of mature looking _Landsturm_ complacently puffing at big German pipes were watching them shoveling away the snow.

It was the second night I had not been able to take my clothes off, and as for the civilized luxuries, given a tooth brush, a morning shave is not a matter of grave concern.

"Roll up your bag," advised Captain von Stietencron, "and leave it here. We'll go to the Officers' Casino for coffee. There a motor will meet us. We can pick up the baggage here and then we start for Goldap."

As we walked down the long shaded street that seemed to be the main street of Lyck, a gray transport train of "prairie schooners," slowly but steadily rattled by. The way was strewn with discarded cartridge clips and smashed rifles. On the walls of the houses we began to see the spatter of shrapnel.

"This is where General von Buelow's army broke through," explained the Captain. "One division of our soldiers rolled up four Russian divisions here and put them in retreat for the frontier."

An automobile of the Flying Corps shrieked past. We came into a zone of looted shops. We entered a store where bottled liquors had been sold, a chaos now of smashed glass. On the day of the battle when all discipline flew to the winds the Russians had evidently sought their solace or courage in vodka. We became aware that not a house nor store in Lyck had escaped their pillage. As we crossed a little public park we found they had vented their revenge at defeat by smashing every bench in the square. Since we learned that no Germans had remained in the town of Lyck, and no sniping could have been possible, this orgy of broken shop windows, blown up safes, and robbery, before our eyes, was the indisputable evidence of Russian barbarism.

We had our coffee in a little inn that had been the Russian Officers' Casino where a squad of Germans were already at work cleaning out the filth. Black coffee, black bread, in a room where the wall was riddled with bullets, from the pistols of drunken Russian officers who had sat there making a target of a portrait of the German Emperor, now lying on the floor. A tired officer of the Hussars came in as we left and I heard him say to Von Stietencron, "So their officers were here, were they?" And Von Stietencron replied: "I'm afraid they were as bad as their men...."

We climbed into the automobile, one of the gray-green army cars that I had seen in the West, and in a few minutes we were rushing by the never ending transport train. We left Lyck with its pillaged houses and shelled walls behind and swept across the open country. But we could not put the war behind us. We overtook a long shuffling column of Russian prisoners and further on, the Germans who were slightly wounded walking with almost a springy step in contrast to the dispirited Russians. We passed another of the gray supply trains, where the sleepy horses of the Uhlan escort pranced on its flanks. We came to a bridge which the engineers were rebuilding, and had to make a detour, crossing further up the stream beside a burned mill, its twisted, charred, water wheel a mute witness of the devastation that the Russians have brought to this land.

On the left the ground fell away into a gully and on the bottom of this I noticed a farmer's sled, the horse in a dead tangle beside it. I noticed a second sled, a third, a fourth; apparently these sleds having been met on the road by the beaten Russians were hurled with their drivers into the gully below.

As we drove into the great square at Goldap, a "goulash cannon," one of the German field kitchens, was smoking. It was the only smoke we saw in this once busy town of eight thousand people. We seemed to be standing in a burned sepulcher for all around us the houses were black with fire and on the streets no human thing stirred, save soldiers.

"I must go to the Kommandant," said the Captain, and noticing that I was staring at the desolation, he added, "There was no fighting in Goldap, not a shot. All this that you see has been done by the Russians."

I wondered if there would be a roof to shelter us. Where could the German general and his staff have their headquarters? It seemed impossible that they could find a single habitable house in this awful desolation. We left the motor and walked around. On one of the side streets we questioned one of the victims of Russian brutality. She found us another. And we heard from their own lips black tales of Russian savagery and violation of defenseless mothers and daughters--too ghastly for these pages.

I saw Captain von Stietencron coming across the square. He looked perturbed.

"I cannot understand it," he said. "There is no Oberkommandant here and in the office of the Etappen Kommando they told me that I must find a Rittmeister Tzschirner."

We went with Von Stietencron to find the Rittmeister, which means Captain of Cavalry. We found him standing beside a long rakish motor car, outside a looted bank. Von Stietencron held a long conference with the officer at the end of which I thought the Baron looked a trifle disappointed.

"I must say good-by to you," he said, coming over. "New orders from the staff. I must return to Berlin, and Rittmeister Tzschirner of General Hindenburg's staff will be your officer from now on."

I remembered that first night in the train to Königsberg, how Von Stietencron was constantly reiterating his boyish delight in the trip. And now with a glum face he was saying good-by. "Look me up when you return to Berlin," he said. "We'll have dinner together," and waving a farewell from the gray car he disappeared down the road.

My new guide and councilor, Rittmeister Tzschirner, was a short, springy, fair haired, young officer, of the ideal cavalry build. I saw that his were the cold steady eyes of the fighter, yet not without a twinkle, and the good natured mouth that the little mustache could not hide, suggested that here again we were in luck--another of these wonderful German officers with a sense of humor.

"Captain von Stietencron," I remarked, "said that headquarters were no longer here."

"No," said Tzschirner, "they have moved up with the pursuit of the Russians. We start now, if you like, for Suwalki, Russia."

If we liked! Suwalki was on the very dust of the Russian retreat.

"It is fifty kilometers to Suwalki," said the Rittmeister; "we should make our arrival there by seven o'clock."

He must have forgotten that it was on the line of communications.

As we set out on this road it was growing dark. Turning in a southerly direction toward Kowahlen we began a ride through a vague, darkening country, peopled--except when our searchlight picked them up--with indistinct beings. Through the trees that fringe Goldap on the east, there gleamed a huge campfire that spread its yellow light on a ruined wall; as long as we could, we watched the black forms that must have been soldiers, passing across the flames. The motor rumbled on; signs of the retreat began to appear. In the ditch beside the road, I saw a dead horse, a second dead horse, a third dead horse. An abandoned Russian cannon leaned against the night, its long howitzer barrel pointing an angle of ruin into the sky. One thought of that as a symbol of the Russian rout.

Along the road there commenced a strew of clothing, a trail of discarded hats and coats, the dirty brown of the Russian soldiery. I saw rifles, cartridge bones, single shoes and then a broken caisson, a hooped roofed transport, overturned in the ditch; and then even whiter in the failing light, the scarred trees torn with shrapnel and shell.

"Did your artillery harass their retreat?" I asked Rittmeister Tzschirner.

"Oh, yes," he replied. "It was very fine."

And the strewn débris of war continued in a silent clutter of horror; and an inky darkness closed round shutting it all out; and we sat listening to the motor's rumble. Where were the dead? In the fields? We strained our eyes but the damp night was impassable; yet we felt they were there.

"Rittmeister," I asked suddenly, "were many men killed here?"

"Oh, yes. The losses of the Russians were very great. Our artillery shot very well. I cannot give you the exact number. We do not know. The Russians did not wish us to know the regiments engaged so they carried away their dead. I mean they carried away as many as they could; but our soldiers came very fast and the Russians had not always the time. Yes, they left many dead but we cleared the road of them."

"And the fields too?"

"Oh, no," he said quickly as if unwilling that I should make a mistake. "In the fields here are many Russian dead. We shall bury them."

We were passing between the fields of the unburied dead....

It was when we had made the turn of Kowahlen, which is where the road strikes due east toward the frontier, that we saw silhouetted against the sky a man, a woman and a girl. Caught by our headlight, they stood beside the road, as if they had paused there to rest. The man in the heavy coat of an East Prussian farmer leaned on a cane, watching with suspicious eyes. The woman, stout and motherly, sat on a stone, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes blinking from an awakened sleep. And the girl seemed to draw a cheap shawl as if to hide her face but not so quickly but that I saw she was astonishingly pretty. This sudden protective movement had its origin perhaps in some horrible experience. Had the Cossacks--

The road tunneled through a vista of trees. We passed another peasant family--a father and a mother bearing packs, three children, one carrying a bird cage in which there was no bird. They too were on the heels of the retreat, only they were going back to the homes which they had fled in those terrifying November days when the Russians had overrun the land ... going back to what?

The sledge had stopped. A scrawny girl held the cow by a rope. As our searchlight glared into their faces, the children, piled among the household goods, frowned and blinked. The man was holding the horse. The woman was staring off into the night.

Our gaze followed hers. Our headlight was shining on a roofless house with charred windows as the empty sockets of a skull and revealed the outlines of a jagged wall that had been the barn, and a huddle of fence palings and soft earth, once the garden. The woman who sat with her children on the loaded sledge, must have sobbed--although we could not hear it above the motor's din--for the man holding the horse turned, and the girl holding the cow turned, and the frowning, blinking children turned in her direction. And after we had passed we looked back and they were standing there in the same postures, transfixed, gazing at the blackened chaos once their home.

* * * * *

There are many villages between Kowahlen and the frontier--the villages of Lukellen, Drosdowen and Mierunsken. But to-day they are only names by which may be characterized certain works of Russian arson. Not a house did we find intact on this road to the frontier, not a home but that was ashes or if of stone whose walls were black. Not even the church at Mierunsken had escaped the torch. In a few moments more we were in Russia. We did not need the striped frontier posts to confirm this; nor the holes and lumps, that marked the end of German road building. Something more significant revealed to us that at last we had come to the land of the Bear. For we passed through two villages but a kilometer apart and in these not a house had been burned, not even a fence smashed; they were Amt and Filipowa, in the Czar's domain.

"Rittmeister," I asked, "did German soldiers follow the Russians down this road?"

"All the way to Suwalki," replied Tzschirner.

"German soldiers," I persisted, "who passed through Goldap and all those villages to the frontier."

"Naturlich. That was the line of advance."

I was silent.

"Rittmeister, you have wonderful discipline in your army."

Tzschirner seemed surprised. "Why?"

"I cannot understand," I said, "how your soldiers, seeing what the Russians had done to East Prussian villages, could refrain from taking vengeance on the first Russian village they entered."

I think the Rittmeister was a little offended.

"We are soldiers," he said with dignity; "not criminals." He paused and perhaps guessing that Belgium was in my mind, "We only make war on non-combatants when they make war on us."

* * * * *

Near Jemieliste we overtook the army. Visible at the extremity of our long, yellowish light, there grew out of the darkness, the grayish tops of transports, rolling as on a sea; and as we came up with them we distinguished in their muffled clamor, the clanking of chains, the cries of the drivers and the cracking of whips on the horses' backs. Throttling down until we barely crept along, our soldier chauffeur dexterously guided the car between the maze of wagon wheels and balking horses, so on, until after I had counted twenty wagons struggling hub deep through the frozen snow, we came to the head of the column, where the serene officer, utterly oblivious to the confusion behind him, leisurely rode the lead. And I thought of that other great general who dared the Russian snows without railroads and all that modern science has given war, penetrating the land to Moscow and across such frightful roads through the heart of the Russian winter; in that night one was awed with the name Napoleon.

The yelling of the transport men died away. The gloom thickened; rain fell. Milanowizizna passed, a ghostly village. Torn, by heavy wagons, furrowed and frozen into icy ridges, the road became almost impassable. It was like going over a huge washboard, with the corrugations running in crisscrosses. Jumping insanely from ridge to hole, our motor stood up wonderfully, until we came to an abrupt hill where nubbles of frozen snow impeded the way. Three times did Gelbricke, the chauffeur, try to make it; and three times the wheels spun helplessly. Finally with reluctance the Rittmeister said it would be better if we all got out. And then in the pitch darkness and cold rain, we put our shoulders to the car, but with futile effort.

"Let's find some wood for treads," I suggested.

The Rittmeister would have none of it. He seemed to be mortified that we should be put to this inconvenience while guests of the German army. "Seyring!" he called the mechanician by name.

"_Jawohl._"

Of course, out on a Russian plain, in pitch darkness, it was quite easy to find wood; but one thought that Seyring's "Jawohl" would have been equally as cheery had the Rittmeister ordered him to find a bottle of wine.

I too went to find wood. Only my foot stumbled against something in the ditch and I almost fell upon it. And when I flashed on my electric torch I saw that it was a Russian soldier. His face was buried in the snow, his stiff, extended arms pawing the frozen ground. On the shoulders of his long brown coat I read the number of his regiment, 256, and on his feet, from which the boots had been stripped, were wound with strips of knitted wool. His black, bare head, intensified by the contrasting snow, seemed the blackness of a raven.... The others found the wood.

The car climbed the hill. Near Mlinisko we passed a clanking transport, near Turowka, a mired limousine of the Flying Corps. The rain froze to hail and as we crossed the great open plain to Suwalki, snow came, a slow, steady fall, unnaturally white in the headlight's glow. Progress became even slower. Ahead the road seemed choked with wagons, but always there opened up a lane through which drove this soldier shaving the hub of transports with the nicety of a race driver.

And then we came up with the artillery, two batteries to pound away at the crumbling Russian front. We saw the drivers, each with a carbine slung over his shoulders, astride the straining horses, while the heavy caissons and guns rumbled behind. Our headlight shone upon a gray and red cloaked soldier, sitting on the gun carriage, his spurred boots dangling, his body jumping and jouncing, while quite complacently he munched on a bar of chocolate. The battery blocked the road; Seyring blew his horn; Rittmeister was shouting, "_Los! Los!_ Away! Away!" But the soldier with the chocolate simply ignored us and went on munching that sweet of which the German army is so fond.

"_Abspannen!_" the command gutturaled from driver to driver. It was the order to unhitch the horses. It being impossible now to drive ahead, we watched the tired carabineers slide down from the saddles and loosen the horses from the spans, while the gun crews poured out oats from big gray bags and gave the horses their meal. And, two by two, the drivers led them clanking off into the night, with the gun crews following on foot, with the caissons and cannon let standing in the snow. They were going to sleep. Where? On either side the rolling snow covered plains seemed to spread illimitably, before graying into the black Russian night.

The horses gone, a gap opened in the road.

"_Los!_ Gelbricke! _Los!_"

To the Rittmeister's urgings, the car sped forward, and we rushed past the battery, so silent now, in the snowy night, but on the morrow to roar forth death. Through the gray white curtain of snow, the lights of Suwalki came twinkling to meet us, and as we drove down a shaded street, even there I could see the débris of war--discarded uniforms, guns and shells. And when finally we stopped before an old stone building and followed the Rittmeister through a damp archway into a dirty looking café, where we had ham and tea; after I had seen two German officers pay for their meal and then bow courteously to the sullen proprietor of this Europiski Hotel, after I had stretched my sleeping bag on three chairs and said good night, I heard a swift succession of heavy reports.

"The Russian artillery," said Rittmeister Tzschirner.

"How do you know?" I asked.

"Because the Russians fire like this--one-two-three-four, then--one-two-three-four. Listen."

I caught then the quick but measured beat of their guns, but having just ridden down the road of their retreat, I could not think of their artillery as firing so methodically; rather, to me, those quick salvos seemed to be the firing of desperation, the frantic gunnery of men who knew the enemy was closing in--an enemy who upon their heels had followed the red Russian trail through East Prussia, across the snow swept plains to the pine forests of Augustowo, where even now the guns bellowed that a hell on earth was there.

XI

THE BATTLE OF AUGUSTOWO WALD

_This is the first complete account of a great battle that has been told in this war_

The battles in the East are so vast and the movements of the troops are so swift and secret that up to the middle of February the war against Russia was, to all correspondents, only a thing to be seen in unimportant fragments. Through sheer good fortune I saw the Battle of Augustowo Wald, which historians may or may not write of as being a decisive conflict, but in which a Russian army of 240,000 men was annihilated; only one intact division escaping to Grodno, there to be swallowed up by a new Russian army, which became the new Tenth. And because of these huge reinforcements the Germans did not break the line of the Niemen, flinging it back on Warsaw. Russia has denied this annihilation. With another American, Herbert Corey, I saw it.

The story I shall tell is a story of this battle, of its strategy, as told to me by Rittmeister Tzschirner of Field Marshal von Hindenburg's staff, of its actual fighting, which I saw, and of its celebration. For on the night of victory I was the guest of Excellence von Eichorn, commander-in-chief of one of Von Hindenburg's victorious armies, and with his staff I sat around a strange banquet--a little room in a Russian inn, with candle-light flickering on the wall, and for music, the rolling of the guns, while the victors celebrated the battle in a way that I could not understand.

_The Road to Augustowo_

We awoke to hear the guns, great drums beating a sinister roll.

"To-day," said Rittmeister Tzschirner, "I take you to the front. Do you wish?"

I was for a quick breakfast.

"Oh, no, Mr. Fox. There is much time. The battle will endure all day."

Nevertheless I hurried the Rittmeister to breakfast downstairs in the Europiski Hotel. Quantities of black coffee, served in long glasses, platters of white buns coated with some tasteless powder, suspiciously Russian, and Ober-Lieutenant Lieckfeld of the Eighth Battery of the First Guards, joined us--a handsome, healthy skinned, smiling man, who spoke a fair English. He told us what an officer had seen on the road back from Augustowo this morning.

"Just this side of Augustowo," explained Lieckfeld, "the Captain saw a Russian gun that had been hit by one of our shells. The horses and men were all killed and the carriages smashed. The Captain said they looked very bloody and all sort of mixed."

This was the kind of war I had seen for years in pictures--the war of de Neuville and Verestchagin. I wonder if the officers noticed my impatience to be on the road to Augustowo. And then the Rittmeister did a significant thing. Drawing his Browning, he drew the clip from the magazine to see that it was full.

"And now," he said, "we go to Augustowo," adding with a tantalizing smile, "Do you wish?"

"Don't kill any Russians," Lieckfeld called after us and chuckled.