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."
* * * * *