lieved in it, and had the will to put it
through. One thought of Emerson's "Earnest of the North Wind" whenever
they came in sight.

Those who talk of "frightfulness" and get their notions of German
soldiers from the vaporings of sedentary publicists, who know no more of
them than may be seen through the pipe smoke of their own editorial
rooms, are destined to a melancholy awakening. You may prefer your own
ways, but you cannot make them prevail by blackguarding the other man's
weaknesses; you must beat him where he is strong.

Lies and the snobbish ridicule with which our magazines and papers have
been full, run off men like these like water off a duck. These men are
in earnest. They have work to do. No one who has heard them singing the
"Wacht am Rhein" through the starlight of garrisoned towns all the way
from the Channel to the Carpathians, will talk of their being "stolid";
but they have, it is true, no coltishness. They are grown up. And this
discipline of theirs does not mean, as so many people seem to think it
does, being compelled to do what you don't want to do. It means doing
what you are told to do as well as it possibly can be done, no matter
how small it is nor who is looking on--a sense of duty which makes every
switchman behind the lines act as if he were Von Hindenburg. The thing
of theirs, this will-power and moral earnestness, is one of the things
that last--something before which the merely frivolous has always gone
down and always will.

The road down which we were going was, in a general way, the path
already taken by the Austrian and Hungarian troops which had stormed the
outer works at Kobilany two days before and been the first to enter the
town. What happened was much like what had happened at Ivangorod. A
German corps crossed the Bug to north and south and closed in on the
rail-road, the Sixth Austro-Hungarian Corps under Corps General of
Infantry Arz attacked the centre. The Russians sent the entire civil
population eastward, removed their artillery and everything of value
they could take, and set fire to the city. There was a brief artillery
preparation to which the Russians, who all through this retreat appeared
to be short in ammunition and artillery, replied for a time; then the
outer forts were stormed, and when the Sixth Corps entered the burning
city the Russians, except for the rear-guard prisoners, were gone.

We swung past a freight yard littered with over-turned cars,