anguage between him and some of his
polyglot men was the English he had learned in school and they had
picked up in America.

We slept on commandeered mattresses that night on the floor of a vacant
house, with a few Hungarian hussars still singing over the victory in
the back yard, and got up to find the crowded town of the night before
as empty as the old camp-ground the day after the circus.

We strolled through some of the empty streets and into the citadel,
where a handful of German soldiers were guarding a placid, tan-colored
little herd of Russian prisoners; recrossed the pontoon bridge, as
crowded as it had been the afternoon before, and then stopped at
Kobilany fort on the way back to Ivangorod.

The brief Austrian fire had been accurate. There were shell holes
inside the fort, along the parapet, and one frightful bull's-eye, which
had struck square on the inner concrete rim and blown chunks of
concrete, as well as its own steel, all over the place. The rifle-men
left in this embrasure were killed at a stroke, and their blood remained
freshly dried on the stones. Of various uncomfortable places I have
seen in the war this was one--left behind in an open concrete fort to
cover the retreat of artillery, and wait with a pop-gun rifle until the
enemy decided that his artillery had "silenced" you and that it was time
to storm.

One outer angle of the fort had been blown up and the rest was to have
been dynamited, but a nimble Pole, fearing that he might be blown up,
too, before the order came to retire, had, so we were told, cut the
electric wire. Just why Brest-Litovsk was given up must be left for
those who have had a more comprehensive view of all the causes behind
the Russian retreat. It was plain to any one, however, that although
this outer fortress had been taken by storm and a certain amount of
damage done to the attacking force by mines laid in front of it,
scarcely more than nominal resistance, considering the original
preparations, had been made.

Again we whirled down the Ivangorod road, through a stream of wagons and
peasants' carts almost as thick as the day before. We took a new road
this time, but the deserted trenches still crossed the fields, and
creeping up toward them, behind trees, through the greasy, black mud of
pasture-land, were those eloquent little shelters, scarcely more than a
basketful of earth, thrown up by the skirmishers as they ran forward,
dropped and dug themselves in.