Part 19 (1/2)
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 f.a.gged 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sault 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 squas.h.i.+ng 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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 G.o.ds 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 suns.h.i.+ne. 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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, onrus.h.i.+ng 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 gra.s.s--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 fas.h.i.+on 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 cla.s.s 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 sn.o.bbish 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.