In The Dust Of The Russian Retreat
Warsaw had fallen, and Ivangorod, and the centre of the German and
Austro-Hungarian armies, sweeping across eastern Europe like beaters
across a prairie, was now before Brest-Litovsk. This was the apex of
this central triangle of Russian forts, a city and a rail-road centre as
well as a fortress, and the last strongly fortified place on the direct
road to Moscow. It seemed as if the Russians must make a stand here,
and even though we were four or five days getting there, the heavy
artillery was not yet up, and there might still be time.
We wound through the green hills and under the ruined castles of
northern Hungary in the afternoon, rolled slowly up across Silesia and
into Russian Poland in the night, and came at noon to Radom, only
sixty-five miles south of Warsaw. Hindenburg had been here in October,
1914, when he invaded Poland to draw off the Russians from Galicia, then
the Russian offensive had rolled over the place. The Russians had held
it all the winter; now they were a hundred and fifty miles eastward--
beyond the Vistula and the Bug--"boog," not "bug," by the way--and just
hanging to the edge of Poland.
The war had scarcely touched Budapest and Vienna--scarcely touched the
ordinary city surfaces, that is to say. In hotels and cafes, streets
and parks, life flowed on almost as brightly as ever. Farther north, in
the Hungarian towns and villages, life still went on as usual, but one
felt the grip of war--you might not go there nor move about without a
military pass. Beyond Radom, where now in the pleasant park the very
literary Polish young people were strolling, reading as they walked,
there was, so to speak, no ordinary life at all--only the desert of war
and the curious, intense, and complicated life of those who made it.
Our car was hitched to a long transport-train--for it would be another
two days before the automobiles would come back for us from the front--
and we rode into this deserted Polish country toward Ivangorod.
It had all been fought over at least twice--railroad stations and farm
buildings burned, bridges dynamited, telegraph-poles cut down. The
stations now were mere board shelters for a commandant and a soldiers'
lunch-room; the bridges, timber bridges flung across by the pioneers;
and the sawed-off telegraph-poles, spliced between railroad rails to
save cutting new ones, were stuck back into the ground like forks. The
Russians had a rather odd way of burning stations and leaving the rails,
the important thing, intact, but here and there they had neatly
destroyed them for miles by exploding a cartridge under the end of each.
The country is level here--fields interspersed with dark pine forests,
planted in the European fashion, to be grown and harvested like any
other crop--parks of living telephone-posts, thick as the quills of a
porcupine. And through these pines and across the fields were the
eternal Russian trenches, carefully built, timber-lined, sometimes
roofed and sodded over, with rifle holes under the eaves. Barbed-wire
entanglements, seven rows deep sometimes, trailed in front of them,
through timber, through the long grass and flowers of marsh-land, a
wicked foggy band against the green as far as one could see. Along the
Galician front and in the Carpathians I had seen mile after mile of such
trenches, timber-work, wires, and Spanish riders left behind, good as
new, until it began to seem as if war were a peculiarly absurd game,
consisting principally in chopping down good trees and digging ditches,
and then going somewhere else.
In front of Ivangorod great preparations had been made. There was no
town here, but the great fortress, with its citadel, barracks,
machine-shops, gardens, church, and protecting forts, was almost a city
in itself. It had a garrison of twenty thousand, and its gigantic
concrete walls, covered over with earth and grass, its, moat and barbed
wire, looked formidable enough. It had no modern heavy artillery,
however, and even if it had, artillery in a fixed, known spot is
comparatively helpless against the mobile guns, screened by hills and
timber, besiegers can bring against it. Elaborate earthworks had,
therefore, been thrown up several miles to the west of the fortress, but
these became useless when the enemy, crossing the Vistula to north and
south, swung round to cut off the one way out--the railroad to
Brest-Litovsk.
The Russians might have shut themselves in and waited--not very long,
probably--until the big "thirty-point-fives" smashed the fort to pieces.
They chose to get out in time, blew up the railroad bridge across the
Bug, burned the barracks, and, with enough dynamite to give a good
imitation of an earthquake, tumbled the walls and galleries of the
fortress into melancholy heaps of rock.
It was dusk when we rolled into Ivangorod and into the thick of that
vast and complicated labor which goes on in the rear of an advancing
army--all that laborious building up which follows the retreating army's
orgy of tearing down--bridge builders, an acre or two of transport
horses, blacksmiths and iron-workers, a semi-permanent bakery, the
ovens, on wheels, like thrashing-machine engines, dropping sparks and
sending out a sweet, warm, steamy smell of corn and wheat. It never
stopped, this bakery, night or day, and the bread was piled up in a big
tent near by like cord-wood.
And here you could see the amount of trouble that can be made by blowing
up a railroad bridge. First, of course, a new timber bridge has to be
flung across, and the Vistula is a good two hundred yards wide here and
the river was high. Up ahead the army was fighting forward, dependent,
for the moment, on what came across that bridge. A train arrives,
hundreds of tons of freight which normally would roll across the river
in a few puffs of a cigarette. The cars must be opened, each box and
sack taken out by hand, carried down a bank, loaded into a wagon; the
wagons creep over the pontoons, struggle through the sand on the other
side, then each piece must be unloaded and put on a train again.
An axle breaks, the returning line waits an hour for the other to cross,
a sixty-foot pine log for the new railway bridge wedges fast in turning
a corner and stops everything--you must imagine them at it all day,
sweating and swearing in all the dialects of the dual monarchy--all
night, with fagged horses and drivers dazed with sleep, in the blaze of
a search-light reaching out over the river. Meanwhile a tall timber
railroad bridge was creeping across. There was no pile-driver engine,
and at each cluster of piles fifteen or twenty Russian prisoners, in
their brown service uniforms, hung to as many ropes--"Heave... whack!
Heave... whack!"--in quaint retribution for what a few sticks of
dynamite had done a fortnight before.
A thousand fresh Hungarian troops had just come in next morning, and
were waiting for their coffee, when the word came by field-telephone
that a Russian flier was dropping bombs about twenty kilometres away.
It was fine hunting-ground--men, horses, stores, and the new bridge--but
he sailed away, and we drove a dozen miles up the Vistula to New
Alexandria, burned during the enveloping movement on Ivangorod.
All along the way were trenches, telltale yellow lines of sand winding
among the pines, gun positions, barbed wire, and every now and then a
big plane-tree, with ladders running up to an artillery observation
platform. I climbed up one of them on cleats worn by Russian boots for
a look at the Vistula and the string of Red Cross barges, filled with
wounded, going up the river. The children hereabout, at any rate, will
revere the Russians, for their pioneers had carried that winding
stairway up to the very tip-top of the tree in a manner only seen in
dreams or picture-books.
All the farmhouses had been burned, and the peasants were just
returning. We passed several tired mothers with babies in shawls
hanging from their shoulders and little boys trudging behind with some
rusty kettle or coffee-pot, and once a woman, standing in the ruins of
her house, of which only the chimney was left, calmly cooking her
dinner.
New Alexandria, a pleasant little town, grown up round an old chateau,
and used as a sort of summer resort by Warsaw people, was nothing but
blackened chimneys and heaps of brick. The Russians had burned
everything, and the inhabitants, who had fled into the pines, were just
now beginning to straggle back. Some had set up little stands in front
of their burned houses and were trying to sell apples, plums, pears,
about the only marketable thing left; some were cleaning brick and
trying to rebuild, some contented themselves with roofing over their
cellars. And while we were observing these domestic scenes, the army,
which had taken the outer forts by assault the preceding night, was
marching into burning Brest-Litovsk.
It was another day before the motors came and we could get under way and
whirl through such a cross-section of a modern army's life as one could
scarcely have seen in the west of Europe since the Germans first came
rolling down on Paris. No suburban warfare this; none of that hideous,
burrowing, blowing up, methodically squashing out yard after yard of
trenches and men. This was war in the grand old style--an army on the
march, literally, down roads smoky with dust and sunshine, across
bridges their own pioneers had built, a river of men and horses, wagons
and guns, from one hazy blue horizon to another.
And all these men had come from victory and knew they were marching to
it. How far they were going none could tell, but the gods were with
them--so might the Grand Army have looked when it started eastward a
hundred years ago. Men and horses had been pouring down that road for
weeks--on each side of the macadam highway the level, unfenced fields
were trampled flat. It was fully one hundred and twenty miles, as the
motor road ran, to Brest-Litovsk, and there was scarce a moment when, if
we were not in the thick of them, we were not at least in sight of
wagons, motors, horses, and men. And, of course, this was but the rear
of the army; the fighting men proper were up in front. The dust hung
like fog in the autumn sunshine. Drivers were black with it; in the
distance, on parallel roads, it climbed high in the still air like smoke
from burning villages. And out of this dust, as we whizzed on, our
soldier chauffeur, whistle in mouth, shrieking for room, appeared
pontoon trains--big steel scows on top, beams underneath, cut, numbered,
and ready to put together; trains of light farm wagons, wide at the top,
slanting toward the middle, commandeered from all over Austria-Hungary
at the beginning of the war and driven, some by soldiers, but oftener by
civilians with the yellow Austrian bands on their arms; heavy ammunition
wagons drawn by four horse; with a soldier outrider astride one of the
leaders, and from time to time columns of reserves, older men for the
most part, bound for guard duty, probably, shuffling along in loose
order. Round and through these wagon-trains, in a swirl of dust,
rumbled and swayed big motor-trucks, and once or twice, scattering
everything with a lilting "Ta-te... Ta-da" the gray motor, the flash of
scarlet, pale blue, and gold, and the bronzed, begoggled, imperial
visage of some one high in command.
Once we passed a big Austrian mortar, covered with tarpaulin, by the
side of the road, and again two big 20-centimetre guns, which had not
had time to get up to Brest-Litovsk. This is where you find the heavy
artillery nowadays, quite as likely as in a fort, on some hard highway,
where it can easily be moved and sheltered, not behind concrete, but
some innocent-looking apple-tree. Each fence corner was chalked with
letters and numbers intelligible to the drivers, who passed that way;
each bridge, down to the few boards across a ditch, had been examined by
the pioneers, rebuilt if necessary, and a neat little sign set up on it,
telling whether or not the heavy artillery could safely cross. Flowing
back toward this huge, confident, onrushing organism, the peasants--
timid, halting, weary, and dust-covered, with wagons heaped with
furniture, beds, hay for the horses, with the littlest children and
those too old to walk--were returning to the charred ruins of their
homes. They, too--like the grass--had their unconquerable strength.
The same patience and quiet courage which had struck me in Antwerp as
peculiarly Belgian, was here again in these Poles, Slovaks, and
Ruthenians, whose boys, perhaps, were fighting with the armies which had
driven the Belgians out. You would see peasant mothers with their
children hanging from their shoulders--women who had been tramping for
days, perhaps, and might have days yet to tramp before they reached the
heap of charred bricks that had once been a home. Nearly all had a cow,
sometimes pulling back on its halter and filling the air with
lamentation, sometimes harnessed with the horse to the family wagon.
They had their pet dogs and birds, the little girls their kittens; from
the front of one wagon poked the foolish head of a colt. Babies
scarcely big enough to sit up crammed their little fingers into their
eyes to shut out the dust; bigger children, to whom the ride would be,
no doubt, the event of their lives, laughed and clapped their hands, and
old men on foot took off their caps, after the fashion of the country,
and bowed gravely as we whirled past. It seemed as if it were we who
should do the saluting.
From the fields, as we whirled into and out of layers of air, sharply,
as one does in a motor, came now the odor of ripe straw, now a whiff of
coffee from a "goulash cannon," steaming away behind its troop like the
calliope in the old-fashioned circus, and now and then, from some
thicket or across a clover field, the sharp, dismaying smell of rotting
flesh. The countryside lay so tranquil under the August sun that it was
only when one saw a dead animal lying in an open field that one recalled
the fire that, a few days before, must have crisscrossed this whole
country, as now, doubtless, in constant cavalry fights and rear-guard
skirmishes, it was crisscrossing the country up ahead.
Half an hour short of Brest-Litovsk an unfinished bridge turned us off
into a potato field. The soft ground had long since been pounded flat,
as the army, swinging round to the north, had crossed on a pontoon a
mile or two lower down. The motor plunged, snarled, and stopped, and
again, as we shovelled in front and pushed behind, we knew why armies
burn bridges behind them.
Past us, as we sweated there, the slow but surer wagon-trains ploughed
forward. One, a German train, stopped beside us to bait their horses--
officers of the Landwehr or Landsturm type, who looked as if they might
be, as doubtless they were, lawyers, professors, or successful business
men at home. They were from a class who, with us, would generally be
helpless in the field, yet these bronzed, bearded, thoughtful-looking
men seemed just as familiar with the details of their present job as
with the work they had left behind.
Ever since we had crossed into Poland this sober, steel-gray stream had
been mingling with and stiffening our lighter-hearted, more boyish,
blue-gray stream of Austrians and Hungarians. Here were men who knew
what they were doing, believed in it, and had the will to put it
through. One thought of Emerson's "Earnest of the North Wind" whenever
they came in sight.
Those who talk of "frightfulness" and get their notions of German
soldiers from the vaporings of sedentary publicists, who know no more of
them than may be seen through the pipe smoke of their own editorial
rooms, are destined to a melancholy awakening. You may prefer your own
ways, but you cannot make them prevail by blackguarding the other man's
weaknesses; you must beat him where he is strong.
Lies and the snobbish ridicule with which our magazines and papers have
been full, run off men like these like water off a duck. These men are
in earnest. They have work to do. No one who has heard them singing the
"Wacht am Rhein" through the starlight of garrisoned towns all the way
from the Channel to the Carpathians, will talk of their being "stolid";
but they have, it is true, no coltishness. They are grown up. And this
discipline of theirs does not mean, as so many people seem to think it
does, being compelled to do what you don't want to do. It means doing
what you are told to do as well as it possibly can be done, no matter
how small it is nor who is looking on--a sense of duty which makes every
switchman behind the lines act as if he were Von Hindenburg. The thing
of theirs, this will-power and moral earnestness, is one of the things
that last--something before which the merely frivolous has always gone
down and always will.
The road down which we were going was, in a general way, the path
already taken by the Austrian and Hungarian troops which had stormed the
outer works at Kobilany two days before and been the first to enter the
town. What happened was much like what had happened at Ivangorod. A
German corps crossed the Bug to north and south and closed in on the
rail-road, the Sixth Austro-Hungarian Corps under Corps General of
Infantry Arz attacked the centre. The Russians sent the entire civil
population eastward, removed their artillery and everything of value
they could take, and set fire to the city. There was a brief artillery
preparation to which the Russians, who all through this retreat appeared
to be short in ammunition and artillery, replied for a time; then the
outer forts were stormed, and when the Sixth Corps entered the burning
city the Russians, except for the rear-guard prisoners, were gone.
We swung past a freight yard littered with over-turned cars, through a
tangle of wagons--army wagons pushing one way and distracted peasants
the other--over a pontoon across the narrow Bug and on into the town.
A city of sixty-five thousand people, with the exception of a church or
two and houses that could almost be counted on one's fingers, was a
waste of gaping windows and blackened chimneys. The Russians' purpose
was not altogether clear, for the town was their town, and its
destruction at this time of the year could not seriously embarrass a
well-provisioned, confident enemy, but they had, at any rate, wiped it
off the map. Not a woman, a child, a glimmer of peaceful life; only
smouldering ruins, the occasional abandoned rifles and cartridge-boxes
of the army that had retired, and the endless wagon-trains of the army
pursuing them.
All the dust through which we had ridden since morning seemed to have
gathered over that dismal wreck. It was a fog in the streets, on which
darkness was already settling--streets without a lamp or a sound except
that from the onflowing trains. Through this dust we tried to find the
headquarters of the Sixth Army Corps. To its commander our passes took
us and without him we had no reason for being in Brest-Litovsk. Nobody
knew where the Sixth was. Two Hungarian officers, hurrying by in a
commandeered carriage, shouted back something about the "church with a
blue cupola"; somebody else said "near the schnapps factory"; a beaming
young lieutenant, helping to disentangle wagon-trains at the main street
comers, said that the Sixth had marched at three that morning. We had
driven all day with nothing to eat but a bit of war bread and chocolate,
we were black with dust, there was not a crumb in the place that did not
belong to the army, and we sat there in the thickening dusk, almost as
much adrift as a raft in mid-ocean,
The two armies--wagon-trains, that is to say--were crossing each other
at that corner. The Germans were going one way, the Austro-Hungarians
the other--tired, dust-covered horses and men, anonymous cogs in the
vast machine, which had been following the man ahead since the day
before, like enough, and might go on into another day before they could
make camp.
Young Hungarian officers greeted one another gayly, and exchanged the
day's adventures and news; young Germans rode by, slim, serious, and
self-contained. Now the stream would stop as one line tried to break
through the other, puzzled drivers would yank their horses back, then
some determined section commander would come charging back, fling his
horse into the tangle--wagon tongues jammed into the canopy in front,
protestations in German, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, goodness knows what,
until at last one line gave way and the other shot forward through the
dust again.
I had been in another captured city, with the besieged then, and when I
think of Antwerp it is of the creepy, bright stillness during the
bombardment--the autumn sun, the smell of dead leaves, the shuttered
streets, without a sound except when a shell came screaming in from the
country or, a block or so away, there was a detonation and some facade
came rumbling down. But when I think of Brest-Litovsk it will be of
dust--dust like fog and thickened with the smoke and twilight--and that
strange, wild, creaking stream of wagons fighting through it as they
might have fought in the days when Europe was young and whole races of
men came pouring over the frontiers.
We started off finally on foot through streets silent as the grave--not
a person, not a lamp, not so much as a barking dog, as queer and as
creepy as some made-up thing in a theatre. Once we stumbled past a
naked and dismembered trunk set up beside a doorway--a physician's
manikin that chance or some sinister clown had left there. Once--and
one of the strangest sounds I ever heard--behind the closed up-stair
shutters of an apothecary's shop, whose powders and poisons were strewn
over the sidewalk, a piano haltingly played with one finger.
At last a light, an open door, a sentry--and this was, indeed,
theatrical--a lighted room and a long table set with candles, flowers,
and wine. The commander of the Sixth Corps had just been decorated with
the order "Pour le mérite" and he and his officers were dining before
taking up the march. He welcomed us in the true Hungarian style,
grabbed me by the arms and asked if I was hungry, apologized for their
frugal war-time fare, told how splendidly his men had behaved, had a
word and a place for every-body, as if we were all old friends.
There were three rooms full of officers, and every-one half rose and
bowed in military fashion as we made our way between the tables to our
seats at the end of the third. An amiable young signal-officer who had
been at his telephone some thirty kilometres away when the city was
taken and was off at three next morning, sat opposite me and told with
great spirit how the only common language between him and some of his
polyglot men was the English he had learned in school and they had
picked up in America.
We slept on commandeered mattresses that night on the floor of a vacant
house, with a few Hungarian hussars still singing over the victory in
the back yard, and got up to find the crowded town of the night before
as empty as the old camp-ground the day after the circus.
We strolled through some of the empty streets and into the citadel,
where a handful of German soldiers were guarding a placid, tan-colored
little herd of Russian prisoners; recrossed the pontoon bridge, as
crowded as it had been the afternoon before, and then stopped at
Kobilany fort on the way back to Ivangorod.
The brief Austrian fire had been accurate. There were shell holes
inside the fort, along the parapet, and one frightful bull's-eye, which
had struck square on the inner concrete rim and blown chunks of
concrete, as well as its own steel, all over the place. The rifle-men
left in this embrasure were killed at a stroke, and their blood remained
freshly dried on the stones. Of various uncomfortable places I have
seen in the war this was one--left behind in an open concrete fort to
cover the retreat of artillery, and wait with a pop-gun rifle until the
enemy decided that his artillery had "silenced" you and that it was time
to storm.
One outer angle of the fort had been blown up and the rest was to have
been dynamited, but a nimble Pole, fearing that he might be blown up,
too, before the order came to retire, had, so we were told, cut the
electric wire. Just why Brest-Litovsk was given up must be left for
those who have had a more comprehensive view of all the causes behind
the Russian retreat. It was plain to any one, however, that although
this outer fortress had been taken by storm and a certain amount of
damage done to the attacking force by mines laid in front of it,
scarcely more than nominal resistance, considering the original
preparations, had been made.
Again we whirled down the Ivangorod road, through a stream of wagons and
peasants' carts almost as thick as the day before. We took a new road
this time, but the deserted trenches still crossed the fields, and
creeping up toward them, behind trees, through the greasy, black mud of
pasture-land, were those eloquent little shelters, scarcely more than a
basketful of earth, thrown up by the skirmishers as they ran forward,
dropped and dug themselves in.
We came to Radom and turned southward again. There were people, smoke
coming from cottage chimneys, goose-girls with their spotless and
absurdly peaceful geese, once a group of peasants--young men and
barefooted girls--sitting on the grass resting from their work in the
fields. As the train passed one of the boys flung his arm round the neck
of the tanned young nymph beside him, and over they rolled, fighting
like good-natured puppies. They were the very peasants we had seen
dragging through the dust of the Brest-Litovsk road and this the same
country, though it looked so strangely bright and warm and full of
people. War had blown over it, that was all, and life, which is so much
stronger than the strongest field-marshal, which can be bent, beaten
down, and crushed some-times, like the grass, was growing back again.
The End