northern Hungary in the afternoon, rolled slowly up across Silesia and
into Russian Poland in the night, and came at noon to Radom, only
sixty-five miles south of Warsaw. Hindenburg had been here in October,
1914, when he invaded Poland to draw off the Russians from Galicia, then
the Russian offensive had rolled over the place. The Russians had held
it all the winter; now they were a hundred and fifty miles eastward--
beyond the Vistula and the Bug--"boog," not "bug," by the way--and just
hanging to the edge of Poland.

The war had scarcely touched Budapest and Vienna--scarcely touched the
ordinary city surfaces, that is to say. In hotels and cafes, streets
and parks, life flowed on almost as brightly as ever. Farther north, in
the Hungarian towns and villages, life still went on as usual, but one
felt the grip of war--you might not go there nor move about without a
military pass. Beyond Radom, where now in the pleasant park the very
literary Polish young people were strolling, reading as they walked,
there was, so to speak, no ordinary life at all--only the desert of war
and the curious, intense, and complicated life of those who made it.
Our car was hitched to a long transport-train--for it would be another
two days before the automobiles would come back for us from the front--
and we rode into this deserted Polish country toward Ivangorod.

It had all been fought over at least twice--railroad stations and farm
buildings burned, bridges dynamited, telegraph-poles cut down. The
stations now were mere board shelters for a commandant and a soldiers'
lunch-room; the bridges, timber bridges flung across by the pioneers;
and the sawed-off telegraph-poles, spliced between railroad rails to
save cutting new ones, were stuck back into the ground like forks. The
Russians had a rather odd way of burning stations and leaving the rails,
the important thing, intact, but here and there they had neatly
destroyed them for miles by exploding a cartridge under the end of each.

The country is level here--fields interspersed with dark pine forests,
planted in the European fashion, to be grown and harvested like any
other crop--parks of living telephone-posts, thick as the quills of a
porcupine. And through these pines and across the fields were the
eternal Russian trenches, carefully built, timber-lined, sometimes
roofed and sodded over, with rifle holes under the eaves. Barbed-wire
entanglements, seven rows deep sometimes, tr