his snorting motor with its imperial
double-eagle flag and its sharp-voiced officers muffled in gray coats--
between his peasant's habit of taking off his hat and letting such
people blow by, and his soldier's orders to stop every-thing that
passed. He stopped us, nevertheless, and the pass was laboriously read
in the light of his electric lamp before we went on again.

In the dark and quiet all the countless joints and wheels of the vast
organism were still mysteriously turning. Once, in a cloud of dust, we
passed troops marching toward the front--tired faces, laughing faces--
the shout "Man in the road !" and then the glimpse of a couple of Red
Cross men kneeling by a soldier who had given out on the way; once, in
the black pines, cows driven by two little frightened peasant children;
once a long line of bearded Jews, bound, with packs on their backs, for
what was left of their homes; a supply-train, a clanking battery, and
now and then other motors like ours with shrouded gray figures,
streaking by in a flashing mist of dust.

Next day, swinging southward into another sector of the front, over
beautiful rolling hills, rather like the Genesee Valley, we drummed up a
hill and came out at the top in a village square. It had once been a
white little village clinging to the skirts of an old chateau--the
village of Swirz and Count Lavasan's chateau--and both were now black
and tumbled walls.

In the centre of the square people were singing--a strange little crowd
and strange, mournful singing. We thought at first it was a funeral
service, for the women were weeping as they sang, but as the auto-mobile
swept up beside them, we saw that it was men the women were crowding
round--live men, going away to war.

They were men who had not been called out because the Russians held the
country, and by one of fate's ironies, now that the enemy had been
beaten and driven home, they must go out and fight. At a little table
by the side of the square sat the recruiting officer with his pen and
ledger, and the village school-master, a grave, intelligent-looking
young man, who must have held such a place in this half-feudal village
as he would have done a hundred years ago, was doing his best to glamour
over the very realistic loss of these wives and sweethearts with
patriotism's romance. He sang and obediently they all wailed after him
the old song of scattered Poland--"Poland is not lost" "Yeszcze Polska
me Zginela Poki my zyge