r day the Russians fed troops in on their side of
the wood. Companies, battalions, regiments, and even brigades, were
absolutely cut off from all communication. None knew what was going on
anywhere but a few feet in front. All knew that the only thing required
of them was to keep advancing.

"Yard by yard the ranks and lines of the Austrians were driven back, but
the nearer their retreat brought them to the open country west of the
wood the hotter was the contest waged. The last two kilometers of the
woody belt are something incredible to behold; there seems hardly an
acre that is not sown like the scene of a paperchase--only here with
bloody bandages and bits of uniform. Men fighting hand to hand with
clubbed muskets and bayonets contested each tree and ditch. The end was,
of course, inevitable. The troops of the dual alliance could not fill
their losses, and the Russians could. "At last came the day when the
dirty, grimy, bloody soldiers of the Czar pushed their antagonists out
of the far side of the woodland--and what a scene occurred in that
open bit of country with the quaint little village of Augustowo at the
crossroads! Once out in the open the hungry guns of the Russians, so
long yapping ineffectively without knowing what their shells were doing,
had their chance. Down every road through the forest came the six-horse
teams with the guns jumping and jingling behind, with their accompanying
caissons heavy with death-charged shrapnel, and the moment the enemy
were in the clear these batteries, eight guns to a unit, were unlimbered
on the fringe of the wood and pouring out their death and destruction on
the wretched enemy now retreating hastily across the open. And the place
where the Russians first turned loose on the retreat is a place to
remember.

"Dead horses, bits of men, blue uniforms, shattered transport,
overturned gun-carriages, bones, broken skulls, and grisly bits of
humanity strew every acre of the ground.

ENORMOUS LOSSES ON BOTH SIDES

"A Russian officer who seemed to be in authority on this gruesome spot
volunteered the information that already they had buried at Kozienice,
in the wood and on this open spot, 16,000 dead. Those that had fallen in
the open and along the road had been decently interred, as the forests
of crosses for ten miles along that bloody way clearly indicated, but
back in the woods themselves were hundreds and hundreds of bodies that
lay as they had fallen. Sixteen thousand de