Part 15

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."

"No, Captain," I said. "We would like to see the battlefield from the 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.