Part 19 (2/2)

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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 embarra.s.s 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 pa.s.ses took us and without him we had no reason for being in Brest-Litovsk. n.o.body 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 sh.e.l.l 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 merite” 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 sh.e.l.l 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 gra.s.s resting from their work in the fields. As the train pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s, was growing back again.

The End

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