ome
rusty kettle or coffee-pot, and once a woman, standing in the ruins of
her house, of which only the chimney was left, calmly cooking her
dinner.

New Alexandria, a pleasant little town, grown up round an old chateau,
and used as a sort of summer resort by Warsaw people, was nothing but
blackened chimneys and heaps of brick. The Russians had burned
everything, and the inhabitants, who had fled into the pines, were just
now beginning to straggle back. Some had set up little stands in front
of their burned houses and were trying to sell apples, plums, pears,
about the only marketable thing left; some were cleaning brick and
trying to rebuild, some contented themselves with roofing over their
cellars. And while we were observing these domestic scenes, the army,
which had taken the outer forts by assault the preceding night, was
marching into burning Brest-Litovsk.

It was another day before the motors came and we could get under way and
whirl through such a cross-section of a modern army's life as one could
scarcely have seen in the west of Europe since the Germans first came
rolling down on Paris. No suburban warfare this; none of that hideous,
burrowing, blowing up, methodically squashing out yard after yard of
trenches and men. This was war in the grand old style--an army on the
march, literally, down roads smoky with dust and sunshine, across
bridges their own pioneers had built, a river of men and horses, wagons
and guns, from one hazy blue horizon to another.

And all these men had come from victory and knew they were marching to
it. How far they were going none could tell, but the gods were with
them--so might the Grand Army have looked when it started eastward a
hundred years ago. Men and horses had been pouring down that road for
weeks--on each side of the macadam highway the level, unfenced fields
were trampled flat. It was fully one hundred and twenty miles, as the
motor road ran, to Brest-Litovsk, and there was scarce a moment when, if
we were not in the thick of them, we were not at least in sight of
wagons, motors, horses, and men. And, of course, this was but the rear
of the army; the fighting men proper were up in front. The dust hung
like fog in the autumn sunshine. Drivers were black with it; in the
distance, on parallel roads, it climbed high in the still air like smoke
from burning villages. And out of this dust, as we whizzed on, our
soldier chauffeur, whistle in mouth, shrieking for