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.
Following the Petersburg Prospeckt, a wide unpaved highway, obviously
the Main Street of gray, squat housed Suwalki, our motor bumped out on
the road to Augustowo--a road of frozen brown snow in the middle of a
dreary snow covered plain and tunneling ahead into a green forest of
pine. We passed a huddle of miserable huts and a great Russian church
with bulb shaped cupolas, slender minarets and a dome gleaming with
gold. We passed the deserted garrison barracks, places of filth, in
which the Germans would not live. We ran along a line of pretty pale
blue fence palings; and then we saw the boys. They seemed to be playing
a game. A little fellow, whose round fur hat and brown pea jacket was
typical of his chums, was poking at something with a stick. Greatly
excited, he called the boys, who seemed to be looking for something
across the road in the snow. Stridently he called to them.
"That boy is saying," explained Tzschirner who understands Russian,
"that he has found another one."
And we saw that the youngster was poking the snow away from a big
bearded man in a sheepskin coat. The game the boys of Suwalki were
playing was hunting the dead....
The woods opened up; a funeral stillness closed in. A Uhlan on patrol
passed at a canter. Tzschirner gave a command and the motor stopped.
"_Laden_," he said, and while the red haired mechanician was loading the
two carbines strapped to the car, Tzschirner said, "The battle is
continuing. Russians cut off from their regiments are in the woods. They
are fugitives. They are hungry and if they see us, they'll shoot. I must
say you this."
We began to take an interest in the woods. We saw that the slender
trunks of the pines gave poor concealment to a man but in the snow we
discerned many tracks. Somewhere in their depths a rifle cracked.
Tzschirner stopped the car. We listened; everything was still. We drove
on. We came upon an abandoned howitzer and in the snow a magnum of
unexploded shells, a great stain that had turned black, and a yellow
mound of fresh clay.
"A gun position," said Tzschirner briefly. "Our soldiers made advance
too rapidly for the Russians to retreat."
There are thirty kilometers on the road from Suwalki to Augustowo and
the thirty kilometers were strewn with the tangle and débris of war. I
found myself counting caps--round Russian caps of goatskin and fur, and
the black peaked caps of muster day. I counted these caps until I
counted thirty-three in an unbelievably short time and I found myself
thinking of them as thirty-three dead. For a soldier will discard his
coat before his cap.
Near Szszepki which is where the forest opens into a brief snow gray
plain, ringed with a dreariness of sky, we met the woman, a young
peasant woman, her loose hair wreathing her sullen eyes with thick black
curls. As she saw us, she made the sign of the cross.
"Stop the car," I called to Tzschirner.
He got out with me, the woman gave a scream and fled down the road. We
ran after her.
"Please, Madame," the Rittmeister asked her, "why did you make the sign
of the cross when you saw us?"
She began mumbling a prayer; her shaking finger traced the sign in the
air.
"Why," said Tzschirner gently, "do you fear us?"
When she spoke it was without looking up. "Our soldiers," she said,
losing her fear, "told me you were devils, so I thought if I made the
cross you could not pass it. They told me you would burn my house and
kill me."
"Has your house been burned?"
"No-o."
"And you will not be killed, Madame," said Tzschirner, touching his hat.
"I promise you."
We left her looking after us in a bewildered way and when we climbed
into the motor she fled up the road.
"They have bad minds, the Russians," remarked Tzschirner. "They know
what they have made in East Prussia."
And then near Szczobra we overtook the "clean up squad." We saw them
advancing, as in extended order, the teeth of a great comb, cleaning
woods, fields and ponds, of the dead. We saw segments of the line
abruptly stop, and come together and begin digging in the snow.
"How," I asked Tzschirner, "did they miss the dead we saw along the
road?"
"They have not been there," he explained. "They first work where
considerable actions have occurred; then they take up the more isolated
points of the line."
All this time the grumble of the guns had grown more distinct. We were
nearing Augustowo. A horde of prisoners stolidly shuffled and I saw that
their hands and faces were black with the battle. The German light
wounded commenced to straggle along, holding a white bound hand, or
unconcernedly handling a cheap cigar while the other arm hung cradled in
a sling. I thought they all looked tired but their step was alert. And
always the roll of the guns grew louder, monstrous drums insanely
beating their Miserere from somewhere beyond the tops of the pines.
Finding at Szczobra a field bakery, we ate. Seated around an empty box
with two officers of the commissary, we ate from deep tin dishes filled
with a stew of white beans and beef; there were chunks of a brown bread
made from Russian meal. And the floor almost in the long shed that the
engineers had built in a night, was covered with loaves of the brown
bread baked fresh in the twelve oven transports outside; while at the
other end of the shed, white aproned bakers were mixing their dough.
"They are all volunteers," the commissary officer was saying. "By trade
they are bakers and when war broke out they at once put themselves at
the disposal of the government. I am sorry," he went on, "that I cannot
give you better bread, but here in Russia," and he shrugged.
"I like the Russian meal," I told him. "What did you do, commandeer
quantities of it?"
"We bought it," he replied a little indignant, "and paid cash for it. As
soon as we occupied Suwalki, all the Jews took their meal out of their
hiding places and brought it to us. Here," and opening a wallet he
handed me a receipt that showed how Herr Friedmann, of Suwalki, had
received 10,000 marks cash for meal delivered to the German army.
We continued in the motor. I saw a trooper's grave--his lance upright in
the snow, the black and white Prussian pennon snapping in the wind. We
passed a frozen pond where Russian prisoners were breaking the ice to
fill their canteens. We stooped at a great wooden cross, on which an
officer's Rosary hung; and then I saw the birds.
They were gray bellied birds with black wings and heads. They were
waddling birds that grotesquely marched across the snow, pecking as they
went. They were fluttering winged birds that you thought of as being
too heavy to fly strong. And as I noticed one near the road, I saw that
his gray breast bulged plumply; he seemed to have eaten well.
Further on in the field,--in the same field where waddled the birds,--I
saw a shapeless heap of men; and then another heap, and another, until I
had counted six. I saw a bristle of barbed entanglements trampled in the
snow and just behind them a trench, a deep long grave that days before
the living had dug for themselves--a pit filled with clay and snow and
men. I had never seen such men before. They were men postured like
jumping jacks only their legs and arms were still. They were men who
seemed standing on their heads, their feet over the trench top, turned
soles up to the sky. Somehow, they gave you the impression of being all
legs and arms,--stiff grotesque legs, stiff grotesque arms. They all
seemed lumpy, all but one, and he was standing up, his grayish face
turned in the direction the clean up squad would come; and he was
standing because the piled dead braced him so that he could not fall....
_The Road Through the Forest_
"Eighty thousand prisoners by to-night--I think," added Rittmeister
Tzschirner. He had just left the office of the Kommandant in Augustowo,
a little gray building, the walls chipped with shrapnel. From the East
rolled the steady boom of the guns; the battle was two miles away.
"I have just looked at his map," continued Tzschirner, and he glanced
at his watch. "One o'clock.... I think by to-night we make eighty
thousand prisoners--perhaps not so many, _naturlich_. But from the
position of the lines, I think yes.... And now I think I can take you to
the battle. You wish?"
Above the bluish walls of Augustowo the tops of the green pines laid
against a leaden sky. Over there was the battle, the dense forest an
impenetrable curtain, through which reverberated the pang of shrapnel
and the roar of _grenaten_.
"I must tell you," hesitated Tzschirner, as our motor, lurching through
the mud of Augustowo, turned toward the woods. "It is very dangerous.
The forest is filled with Russians and they will shoot. It may not be
agreeable."
"Let's have a try at it," I suggested.
The Rittmeister smiled.
"Seyring!" he called to the red haired mechanician. "_Fertig zu feuer!_
Be ready to fire. Gelbricke!" and he tapped the chauffeur. "If I say
turn back, turn instantly and drive fast!" With a smile he turned to me.
"Mr. Fox," he said, "you know how to use German rifle, do you not?"
Then making a turn to the left, we entered a better road that tunneled
away through the trees.
"This is the road to Grodno," said Tzschirner, "the Russian fortress.
Our soldiers make their advance here."
We rattled across a wooden bridge that the German pioneers had thrown on
top of a dynamited ruin across the Augustowo Canal. The road dipped to
a lower level, that pointed toward Grodno, a straight brown band
finally seeming to terminate where rows of distant pines, meeting like
converging railway tracks, closed across the last thin slit of sky. At a
slower pace, as though sensing danger, the car passed into the woods.
There came a German soldier. He was on foot. He had no rifle and his
right hand squeezed the left as though it were asleep and he would waken
it. But as we drew near, he dropped the left hand as though it were of
no importance--and I saw the blood spread all over it--and the right
hand flashed to his cap.
"Where," asked the Rittmeister, returning the salute, "are the
Russians?"
"In the woods," said the soldier, and walked on; he was holding his hand
again.
Watching the woods, we drove slowly on, past the few huts, which are
Bealobrzegi, until we heard a noise like a bunch of Japanese
firecrackers confusedly exploding in the woods.
"The Russians!" I exclaimed.
"And our soldiers," added Tzschirner. "Our men are going through the
forest hunting them down."
And I began to understand the fresh tracks in the snow that crisscrossed
in among the slender trunks of the pines, until they darkened with the
forest gloom. And I began to think of this battle of Augustowo Wald as
another Battle of the Wilderness, although here the ground was free of
underbrush; and I realized that on both sides of us a grim game was
being played, that we could hear but could not see; a long pursuit in
which Germans and Russians stalked each other from tree to tree, to find
the quarry and kill.
A battery clanked by at a canter, and the gunners, swinging their legs,
seemed stolid and tired. I began to see traces of death in the
snow--discarded clothing, broken rifles, clips of cartridges, a
profusion of shaggy Russian hats--all the frightful débris of war. We
met a Huzzar and he too seemed tired and lethargic.
"_Aus wo fahren sie?_" called Tzschirner.
"Von _Promiska_," shouted the Huzzar.
"_Ist der Weg frei?_"
"_Jawohl! Nach Jamine._"
"The road is clear of Russians as far as the village of Jamine,"
explained Tzschirner.
And then I saw the dead Russians. There was one who had fallen in a heap
and you thought that his face, buried in the cold snow, had found solace
there. I saw another who lay in a ditch, his waxy bearded face staring
at the cheerless sky, his arms wide stretched as if impaled on a cross;
and I noticed that his boots had been stripped from him, and that one
foot was wound with a white stained cloth, as though bruised with the
rush of retreating miles over the frozen roads ... and now he could
rest.
And out of the gray drizzle down the road there emerged an old woman and
a child. The old woman was a grotesque figure as she hobbled along in a
vain attempt to run. The little girl at her heels looked incredibly old.
She was carrying a schoolbag, bulging with hastily packed belongings.
In the old woman's arms there was something covered with a red cloth.
She had a way of staring at this bundle and breaking into sobs. And as I
watched them fleeing down the road, a swarm of bullets sung overhead
with a sucking sound and spattered among the trees. "They will see the
dead men," I thought.
A grimy trooper was galloping down the road. "Halt!" ordered the
Rittmeister.
"Where are the Russians?"
"In the woods, everywhere, in front and behind you," called the trooper,
and galloped away. I heard Tzschirner ask the chauffeur how quickly he
could turn round the car if we were attacked. The chauffeur stopped and
tried. The result was painfully slow. "I must warn you," said
Tzschirner, "it is very dangerous. Entire companies of Russians that
have been cut off from their regiments are in the woods. They might
easily surround us before help could come."
"Let's try it a little further," I suggested, for as yet we had seen no
living Russian.
"_Langsam_ Gelbricke," called Tzschirner to the chauffeur, and then the
Rittmeister drew his pistol and sat with his hand on the trigger, a
precaution which until now I had never seen a German officer take in the
tensest situations of the Eastern or Western front. From Jamine, the
roar of the guns broke through the cold rain in a monotone of clamor,
but more distinct became the rattle of rifles among the pines. A bullet
kicked up the dirty snow.
At that moment I glanced toward the edge of the trees at the left, where
I saw a Russian lying on his back in the snow. He wore a brown army coat
with red shoulder straps, sewed with the yellow numerals of his
regiments. His gun was leaning against a tree and I thought that it had
been torn from his hands or placed there. For with upraised arms, rigid
in the struggle with death, his clawing hands seemed to have been turned
to stone. At the same time, with odd irrelevance, there flashed into my
mind the remembrance of the lead soldiers that I had played with as a
boy--a soldier whose gun I had broken off and whose arms I had bent, to
signify his death. And I thought of the lead soldier until we passed a
yellow haired Finn, whose hands were folded on his great chest, as
though a comrade had fixed him for burial before fleeing among the firs.
Now the crack of the rifles came closer and with more frequency, and we
began to see blood upon the snow, and then a big red hole around which
fragments of clothing and fragments of stiff things were strewn. "A
shell burst there," remarked Tzschirner.
A few paces on we came upon a dead horse from whose flanks a square
chunk had been cut, presumably by a fugitive who, with this first food
of days, had crept into the woods. All around we could never see the men
who were shooting or the dim outlines of their human targets. And then,
from out of the trees, a German soldier came stumbling, and fell limply
into the snow. Jumping out while the car was in motion, our red haired
mechanician ran toward him. "Dead," called Seyring, throwing up his
hands. Tzschirner seemed to come to a decision.
"I think," he said, "that this is as far as we had better go. You have
seen it. It is the same."
"But, Captain," I urged, "isn't there some place from which we could see
an artillery position?"
"You would go into the woods," bantered Tzschirner. "I will take you,
but it is very dangerous."