through a
tangle of wagons--army wagons pushing one way and distracted peasants
the other--over a pontoon across the narrow Bug and on into the town.

A city of sixty-five thousand people, with the exception of a church or
two and houses that could almost be counted on one's fingers, was a
waste of gaping windows and blackened chimneys. The Russians' purpose
was not altogether clear, for the town was their town, and its
destruction at this time of the year could not seriously embarrass a
well-provisioned, confident enemy, but they had, at any rate, wiped it
off the map. Not a woman, a child, a glimmer of peaceful life; only
smouldering ruins, the occasional abandoned rifles and cartridge-boxes
of the army that had retired, and the endless wagon-trains of the army
pursuing them.

All the dust through which we had ridden since morning seemed to have
gathered over that dismal wreck. It was a fog in the streets, on which
darkness was already settling--streets without a lamp or a sound except
that from the onflowing trains. Through this dust we tried to find the
headquarters of the Sixth Army Corps. To its commander our passes took
us and without him we had no reason for being in Brest-Litovsk. Nobody
knew where the Sixth was. Two Hungarian officers, hurrying by in a
commandeered carriage, shouted back something about the "church with a
blue cupola"; somebody else said "near the schnapps factory"; a beaming
young lieutenant, helping to disentangle wagon-trains at the main street
comers, said that the Sixth had marched at three that morning. We had
driven all day with nothing to eat but a bit of war bread and chocolate,
we were black with dust, there was not a crumb in the place that did not
belong to the army, and we sat there in the thickening dusk, almost as
much adrift as a raft in mid-ocean,

The two armies--wagon-trains, that is to say--were crossing each other
at that corner. The Germans were going one way, the Austro-Hungarians
the other--tired, dust-covered horses and men, anonymous cogs in the
vast machine, which had been following the man ahead since the day
before, like enough, and might go on into another day before they could
make camp.

Young Hungarian officers greeted one another gayly, and exchanged the
day's adventures and news; young Germans rode by, slim, serious, and
self-contained. Now the stream would stop as one line tried to break
through the other, puzzled drivers would yank their horses