,
however, we were told, on a building used by the Russians to store
ammunition, and the building had simply disappeared. There was nothing
left but a crater sixty or seventy feet across and eighteen to twenty
feet deep.

We trailed westward, through Tarnow, where the great drive first broke
through, and on to the pleasant old university city of Cracow on the
frontier of the Poland of which it was once the capital, and to which it
belonged until the partition of 1795. It was toward Cracow that the
Russians were driving when they first started for Berlin, and they were
but a stone's throw away most of the winter. We got to Cracow on the
Emperor's birthday and saw a military mass on the great parade-ground
with the commandant of the fort standing uncovered and alone facing the
altar, behind him his staff, and perhaps a hundred yards behind them and
stretching for a quarter of a mile down the field, the garrison. At the
intervals in the mass the whole garrison fired salutes, the volleys
going down the field, a battalion at a time, now and then reinforced by
the cannon on Kosciusko Hill.

Cracow is Polish in atmosphere and feeling, and even in the few hours we
were there one heard a good deal of Polish hopes and ambitions. The
independence which Russia was to grant must come now, it would appear,
from some one else. The Poles want a king of their own, but apparently
they preferred to be under the wing of Austria rather than of Germany.
The Germans, who had laid rather a firm hand on the parts of Poland they
had occupied, might not fall in with this notion and one could detect
here one of those clouds, "no bigger than a man's hand," which
dramatists put in the first act, and which often swell to interesting
proportions before the final curtain goes down.

Chapter XVI

In The Dust Of The Russian Retreat

Warsaw had fallen, and Ivangorod, and the centre of the German and
Austro-Hungarian armies, sweeping across eastern Europe like beaters
across a prairie, was now before Brest-Litovsk. This was the apex of
this central triangle of Russian forts, a city and a rail-road centre as
well as a fortress, and the last strongly fortified place on the direct
road to Moscow. It seemed as if the Russians must make a stand here,
and even though we were four or five days getting there, the heavy
artillery was not yet up, and there might still be time.

We wound through the green hills and under the ruined castles of