position of one of your batteries in action."
"That is possible," said Tzschirner. "But we must return to Augustowo
and journey by another road."
The rifles were cracking not two hundred meters away--so the Rittmeister
said--as the car turned and raced down the road to Augustowo. We passed
a rumbling ammunition train; and the soldier sitting beside the driver
of the first car was munching on a huge chunk of black bread. We noticed
more of the fresh dead as we came to a lonely shack set in a little
clearing among the pines. I saw outside the door a fallen man who, like
a wild animal, had crawled to some hidden place to die. Always guns were
booming in the direction of Jamine, their song rolling over the sky an
immeasurable travail. Here among the pines, to the right and to the
left, the ruthless game of tracking and shooting went on with a cracking
sound, and the snow became more cluttered with coats, and I counted
furry, shaggy Russian hats until I could count no more. If a bird still
lived in that forest, it did not sing; only the black winged birds with
the gray bellies of carrion were there, hovering cautiously above the
trees with weird instinct that a grewsome feast was near. As we left the
great green forest, and rushed the grade toward the bridge over the
canal made by the German engineers, we suddenly stopped and our red
haired boy of a mechanician got out and lifted a dark object which
barred the way and which had not been there when we crossed the bridge
before. I saw him dragging at a German soldier whose feet grotesquely
bobbed against the boards, and he was careful, the red haired boy, to
lay the soldier at the extreme edge of the bridge, as if to make certain
that no wagon would pass over him; he was very careful of that, was the
red haired boy. But when he was through I saw that the soldier's head
dangled over the bridge as though needing but a push to flop into the
muddy canal below....
_The Battle_
We had left the forest, where the rifles croaked and chugged again
between the pale blue houses of Augustowo.
"_Chausee nach Raygrod?_" cried the Rittmeister to the sentry by the
Kommandant office.
"Links gehen!" was the reply.
"We must go toward Raygrod if you would visit with the battery,"
explained Tzschirner. "Perhaps the road will not be good, all the way. I
hope, yes."
From east and south rolled the thunder of the guns and across the street
from a muddy yard that was strewn with Russian dead, I saw five German
soldiers, picking the caked dirt from their boots and singing a song.
And as we left behind the last squalid house of Augustowo I saw a squad
of smiling soldiers crowding around a captured Russian field kitchen.
But the odor that assailed my nostrils was not of steaming food; in the
road nearby lay the carcass of a horse.
There opened a great grayish plain, serried with hastily thrown up
trenches, filled with melting snow and the lying, the kneeling and the
sitting dead; a wilderness of sky closed in, grayish like the earth, and
across it an aeroplane came, the black crosses painted beneath its
wings, crosses of death--for would not the bombs fall?--and it cackled
away, the bird of destruction toward the eastern sky. Through Naddamki
and Koszielny, into a brief dense forest, and we drove toward Bauszcke
to the growing clamor of the guns.
"It is better," said Tzschirner, "that we leave our auto in Bauszcke and
proceed on foot. To Tayno we must journey five kilometers. It grows
dangerous and the auto might be observed by the Russians."
Leaving the car on the highway to Raygrod--Seyring, the red haired
mechanician begging in vain to be allowed to come--we tramped through
the snow and mud of a narrow Russian road toward Tayno.
"I must tell you," was Tzschirner's note of warning, "this is very
dangerous. The Russians no longer have any orders. They are everywhere,
little bodies cut off from their commands and trying to escape. You must
remember there exists no line like the West here. Everything is
movement."
Still the only Russians we had seen were dead or prisoners, so we went
on. Two Uhlans passed at a trot, turning from right to left with alert
eyes.
"_Ist der weg frei?_" called Tzschirner.
"_Jawohl. Alles ruhig!_"
Satisfied, the Rittmeister thought we could go on. The grumble of the
guns became clearer; a _grenat_ burst not half a mile away, emitting its
terrifying grinding yelp, and staining the air with an ugly spume of
brownish smoke. The road turned, skirting a pond, the Drengstwo See,
beyond it a grove of pines above which shrapnel was breaking in
beautiful billowing clouds. And then just ahead, reverberating in a bowl
in the rolling ground, I heard four crashing reports, first two, then
two more; and wisps of grayish smoke rose in the air and as quickly
thinned away. Hurrying up the road and into the hollow, we joined the
battery. Four 10.5 field pieces, set in pairs with thirty feet between,
the battery was shelling a Russian position on the Bobr. Moving with a
feverish ordered haste, the black striped gunners drew the empty copper
jackets of the shrapnel, returned each to its oiled cloth case, and
glancing toward an officer who was kneeling beside a tree, seemed
waiting for something. I saw that the officer had a telephone clamped
over his ear, and then two slender wires, which led from this to another
tree, festooned from one to the other like the tendrils of a vine, He
was furiously scribbling in a despatch book that rested on his knee and
once he looked up to fling some words to the orderly standing by.
Whatever they were, these words seemed to fire the orderly with a
purpose, for, leaping toward the battery, he called: "_Bischen rechts.
Vierzig metres tiefer!_"
For this information the impatient gunners seemed to be waiting. At once
they broke into the same feverish motions at the guns, setting the hand
on the shrapnel clock, so the burst would come "_Verzig metres
tiefer_"--or forty meters further on--then the breeches snapped shut,
and I saw them clap their hands to their ears--just as I had seen the
boyish gunners of the 7.7s do in the West--while in salvos the guns
roared and a multitude of specks filled the air, and there came back to
us the loose rattling sounds of four shells, getting under way on their
trip to the enemy's lines. In the unreal stillness that followed, I
heard the telephone buzz and drone. "_Schön!_" called the officer to his
battery. "_Viele Russlanders tot!_"
"Do they get back the results so quickly?" I asked Tzschirner. "How is
it possible?"
"You would wish to see?" he asked. "I shall try."
He said something to the officer, who immediately telephoned something
to whoever was at the end of the line. After a brief conference
Tzschirner saluted the officer and came to us with a smile.
"We shall go now. We can see the battle--if you should like."
What a wonderful little officer he was!--a Miracle Man, who now was
granting the one great desire. "What luck!" I was saying, "a battle!"
With his pistol drawn--for, "were we to meet Russians, they would not
know who you were and I should have to protect you,"--Rittmeister
Tzschirner followed the telephone wires, along the edge of the woods
until skirting a frozen reed grown pond, he moved cautiously into the
forest, pausing every few strides to listen, while the feeling came upon
me that I was utterly hollow and my throat was dry as a board. Once we
saw tracks in the snow, a wet red stain and a sleeve of a Russian army
coat, which seemed to have been slashed off; once we heard a shrapnel
pang behind us on the tops of the trees; and then there came no sound to
break the crunch of our boots in the snow. As we proceeded I began to
experience a curious sense of security in contrast to the passage
through the forest that croaked with rifles. By the time we came out on
a ledge that overhung a yellowish frozen swamp, I forgot myself in the
interest of the drama before me. As we gazed across the kilometers of
the Netta swamp toward where the Bobr lay among the weeds, a monstrous
smoking serpent, the shrapnel puffed like the clouds of June, drifting
with serene white beauty, while those who had stood near, lay stricken
below....
I heard Tzschirner call to some one. From the great pine at our back
there came an answer in German.
"You may go into the observing post," said Tzschirner. "Do you wish?"
And I climbed up a ladder that had been nailed on the pine and squeezed
my way up through the floor of a little house, hidden amid the boughs of
the tree; and there I found the captain of the battery, crouching, for
the pine thatched house was tiny, and staring with his glasses through a
hole in the wall.
"Come in," he said pleasantly, without looking around. "You will not
find it comfortable, I fear. Will you excuse me, please, a moment? It is
important. I must see."
While he made his observation, I noticed that a field telephone was
strapped to his head and that a writing tablet covered with figures
dangled from his belt. I watched him lower the glasses and speak quickly
into the phone. "Pardon me," he said when he had finished talking, "it
was very necessary."
And then he went on to explain that his battery was doing great damage
to the Russians now; that the shrapnel was breaking over their trenches.
"You would like to see?" he said, unstrapping his binoculars.
And now I was looking upon the battle. I saw on the edges of the great
swamp two villages in flames. I located the German columns issuing from
the south Augustowo woods and breaking into extended order, spread
across the snow toward Mogilnice, a multitude of creeping specks of
brown; and toward the south, out of Grezedy, they seemed suddenly to
spring up from the earth, as if a Cadmus had sown them, and roll in a
cloud toward a point beyond the yellow weeds, where now all the shrapnel
seemed bursting, as if by fantastic intent, making beautiful the sky
with the fleecy clouds that brought death. And in the din of it all, I
heard now the harsh pecking of machine guns, and that which had been a
rolling gray-green mass of men became jagged and wavering; and then as
suddenly the earth gave up another armed harvest, and the wavering mass
of men was caught up in this and hurled forward. Suddenly for the first
time that day the sun streaked through the greasy clouds, and the
bayonets flashed it back. Was that roar a cheer? As the gray-green mass
rolled on, and there came a mad clamor as if all the machine guns were
pecking away at once. Then it was as if the mass, swept over like a
mighty inundation, for you could hear their volleys no more--only the
shrapnel, which seemed suddenly to have lengthened its range, panged
ever more faintly away, wreathing a covert where fugitives might flee in
a halo of pure smoke.
I felt my arms growing tired. The officer looked patient. I thanked him
and climbed to the ground. Tzschirner, too, looked patient.
"I thought you would remain there for the night," he smiled.
"Was I long?" I asked, surprised.
"Half an hour," he said.
But it is not the battery of 10.5's, not the village in flames, not the
death stalking amid the pines, not the storm of the Germans near
Grezedy, that will be my memory of the battle of Augustowo Wald. Rather
it will be of an old woman--an old woman who lives in a little hut on
the big farm, to the right of the road as you enter Augustowo. As we
started for the battle I saw this wizened little figure with her red
shawl wrapped around her head peering from the shelter of the door, like
a hen thrusting its head from a coop. Two hours later, while returning,
I looked toward the hut again and saw the little woman who wore the red
shawl. She stood as before, her head cautiously peering through the
crack of the door, as if she feared that her body might present too big
a mark for the battle fire. As I looked again when our motor snorted
past, I realized that she stood there frozen in terror. At the noise of
our coming she turned her face to the road and I saw that her mouth was
open wide--as wide as my hand.
_The Feast of Victory_
As we drove into Suwalki, the muffled rolling of the guns followed us
through the damp twilight. Stopping at the Europiski Hotel, a faded
building of painted stones, we passed to the clicking of sentries' heels
under a dripping archway, opening into a filthy, watery court. One saw
bare-legged women, yoked with double pails, picking their way between
the shiny automobiles of the staff, to a typhus menacing well beyond.
On the right of the archway a flight of heavy stone steps ran up to a
dingy drinking room; a tea room now, since the days of the vodka
_ukase_. A greasy proletarian smirked a welcome from behind a counter,
laden with platters of food, as sour as his smile. Excusing himself,
Rittmeister Tzschirner opened the door to a larger room on the right,
which we had seen open during the day, but always closed after six at
night. Taking seats at one of the little round topped tables, I watched
the German officers filing in, taking plates from a high stack, and
helping themselves from the large platters on the counter, always paying
the price without comment and in money, while the greasy proprietor rang
a merry tune on his cash register, and contemptuous, no doubt, that the
conquering Germans paid his outrageous prices without protest. I knew
the man with the smirk was thinking that had the Russians been the
conquerors they would not have bothered about the score. No, not the
Russians. They would have had his daughters dance for them, and they
would have eaten their fill in the name of the Czar. To give him full
measure, they might have beaten him with the flats of their swords. Bah,
these Germans, they were fools!
"Excellence von Eichorn," said Tzschirner, returning, "begs that you be
his guest at dinner."
I could scarcely credit my good fortune. Dinner with the Commanding
General of the 10th German army on the night of his triumph.
"We shall eat with Excellence and his staff--in celebration of the
victory," added the Rittmeister.
This latter was a bit of gentle irony that for the moment I missed. I
later learned that the room which always closed at six, was the dining
hall of General von Eichorn and his staff. As we passed in with
Tzschirner, the officers showed a polite curiosity and then bent over
their food. "_Amerikaner!_" I heard some one say. Soon I was shaking
hands with the hero of the battle of Augustowo Wald. A tall white haired
man, who must have been over sixty, whose face betokened more of the
scholar than the soldier. The clear twinkling eyes and the fine
thoughtful forehead, were those of a serene doctor of laws who was
living out his life among the flowers of some pretty university town;
and yet his jaw was a buttress of steel and his mouth had a way of
thinning in a straight grim line--a strange combination of the
humanitarian and militant elements.
"I congratulate your Excellency" (what a feeble attempt it was!) "upon
your wonderful victory." Telling me I was very kind, he then by some
trick of his marvelous personality almost succeeded in making us feel
that we, not he, were the heroes of the evening. While we were meeting
different members of his staff, we learned what the Russian rout was.
The entire Tenth Army under General Russky had been smashed. One hundred
thousand men had been made prisoners; eighty thousand wounded, forty
thousand dead, ten thousand fugitives. About three hundred and fifty
cannons had been captured, with munition and with machine guns, so vast
in numbers that there had not yet been time to count them. An entire
army annihilated! The white haired man, who, sitting at the table at the
end of the room, from which radiated other tables like those at a
banquet, and he who was now raising a cup of tea, and smiling about him
with gentle eyes, he had directed it all--the smashing of almost a
quarter million men--making ninety thousand of them captive and killing
or wounding or starving the rest.
And this was the feast in celebration of victory. In English and
American newspapers I had read of the drunken revels with which the
Barbarians made the nights of their triumphs more terrible. I had read
that the first great drive into France fell short of Paris, because
entire staffs had gone drunk; and then I recalled Rittmeister Tzschirner
in extending Von Eichorn's invitation had added with genial irony--"_in
celebration of the victory._"
And this was the feast, stewed hare and fried meat cakes, mashed
potatoes and rice, all covered with a brown gravy and served all in the
same big platters, a slice of black bread, tea, the sweetened whipped
white of an egg, and one glass of a cheap Bordeaux for each man--that
was the menu with which the battle of Augustowo Wald was celebrated.
I was busy at the hare when the Rittmeister said to us:
"Excellence von Eichorn would drink wine with you."
Tzschirner told us afterwards that it was a great honor.
"I know I made a mess of it," I lamented to him. "What should I have
done?"
"Oh, no," said the Rittmeister. "You are American and we do not expect
you to understand our military customs," which made me feel a little
easier.
On my left, Captain Kluth, who early in the morning would leave for
Augustowo to bring back four captured Russian generals, spoke English,
like an American. Kluth, a merry eyed, dark skinned Rheinlander, smiled
when he said he was sorry that they had no grape juice--and then he did
not smile when he said:
"In America, you want peace. You could bring about peace if you would
stop selling ammunition. To-day we captured so much ammunition that
Russia would be in a bad way for more, were it not for America."
"Did you capture any American ammunition?" I asked him.
"Quantities," he replied, "and the trouble with it is that your
ammunition is good. It kills more men."
And then came the champagne, not in honor of Von Eichorn or the victory,
but in honor of the American guest.
"I have," smiled Captain Kluth, "two pints of champagne in my room. We
shall drink together."
Knowing that in the Russia of to-day, that next to cleanliness wine is
the rarest commodity, I begged Captain Kluth to keep his treasure
hidden; but he would have none of it, and when he returned with the
bottles he told me their story.
"When we occupied Suwalki," he said, "I asked an old Jew if he knew
where there was any champagne. He said, no. I gave him two marks and he
said, yes. From somewhere he produced these two pint bottles and wanted
twenty marks for them. I gave him ten. It's enough for two pints of bad
champagne, isn't it?"
In response to a query of mine, a captain of the telegraph corps gave me
his story of the battle.
"This morning," he began, "one of our corps telegraphed here that they
were without food. They got an answer that the Russians were in the
woods with plenty of food. Two hours later they telegraphed again. 'We
are enjoying our dinner,' was the message."
"Yes," added Captain Kluth, "and that corps was made up of volunteers.
The Emperor sent word to them that they had battled as well as first
line troops."
Then we talked of many things concerning the war, while one by one the
officers of the staff, leaving the table, bowed and went to the rooms.
During this unique feast there was frequent laughter at witty sallies,
but no boisterousness; and we began to marvel at the cool, confident,
almost commonplace way with which the staff was taking the victory. It
lacked a few minutes of ten when General von Eichorn said good night to
us and went to his room; and after he had gone we heard something about
him, that his home was in Frankfort, that his record in maneuvers was
one of unbroken success, that the outbreak of war had found him ill, and
that this was his first campaign. And then at a hint from Rittmeister
Tzschirner, I begged to be excused.
"These officers," he whispered, "have had much to tire them to-day and
must be up very early."
I nodded. As we rose the officers did also, and the soldier cook came in
to smile a good-by, and the soldier waiters passed platters in which
each officer dropped a few coins.
"How much?" I asked Tzschirner.
"One mark eighty pfennigs. But you are not to pay."
And so was celebrated the battle of Augustowo Wald, one of the greatest
victories of modern history, with a dinner that cost one mark eighty
pfennigs a cover, or about forty cents.
_The Strategy of the Battle_
The battle of Augustowo Wald, which resulted in the annihilation of an
entire Russian army on February 21, actually began on February 7, when
Field Marshal Hindenburg secretly transported troops from Poland to East
Prussia and new troops, young soldiers who were to get their baptism of
fire were brought up from inner garrisons. The total reinforcements were
five corps. Concentrating around Gumbinnen, the Tenth German army, under
the command of Excellence von Eichorn, awaited the command to advance
simultaneously with General von Buelow's army, which was making its
preparations behind Lyck. Like a country fence, the Russian line
zigzagged across East Prussia, south of the Memel, east of Ragnit, to
Gumbinnen, wedging forward along the line of the Angerapp and back
through the Masuren lakes to Lyck. Since mid-November the Russians had
held this line, a third of the rich East Prussian farmland behind their
crooked fence. And the fence must be smashed.
It was on the ninth of February that General von Lowenstein's troops of
General von Eichorn's army began the battle by making forced marches in
the snow from Gumbinnen toward Pillkallen and Stallupönen. All that
night snow fell and confident the Germans would not attack because they
could not bring up their artillery, the Russians fell back on Eydtkuhnen
(East Prussia) and Kibarty and Wirballen, just across the frontier. Here
they ate from their field kitchens--something they had been unable to do
in twenty-four hours, turned in for a good sleep and left the road
without outposts. Why bother with outposts? The snow was sufficient; the
Germans could never bring up their cannon on those roads. Apparently
since the days of Napoleon, Russia had believed too foolishly that
winter is always on its side.
Not being able to advance with their cannon, the Germans came up without
it. Unsupported by a single gun, forcing their way through the downpour
of snow, the German infantry, young soldiers in their first battle,
swept down on Eydtkuhnen. On the road stood two batteries, totaling
twelve howitzers and a large number of ammunition wagons. Up to within
fifty meters of the Russian batteries the Germans were able to advance
before being discovered. In a panic the Russians tried with carbine fire
to cover the retreat of their guns, but storming the position the
Germans shot down the horses in the traces and piling the dead and the
living, blocked the road of escape. Supported now by the captured
cannon, the Germans rushed on and there followed a night battle in the
streets of Eydtkuhnen, back across the frontier to Russian Kibarty,
where ten thousand prisoners were made. By midnight another division of
Von Eichorn's army, which broke through at Pillkallen, had driven the
Russians down into Wirballen, where the Russians, again surprised by
similar forced marches through the snowstorm, fought desperately in the
streets and surrendered.
Three hospital trains, one the Czarina's, another Prince Lievin's, were
captured in Kibarty, and in them General von Lowenstein's staff found
unexpectedly comfortable quarters for the night, and stores of
delicacies like preserves and chocolate. Captured cars filled with boots
and fur lined vests made the soldiers more comfortable, and when they
found one hundred and ten Russian field kitchens filled with warm food,
the joy of the young German regiments was complete. For two days they
had been living on knapsack rations.