actory hand,
the slim young volunteer, the genial 'Landwehr' or 'Landsturm' man,
the teacher, schoolboy, student, clerk, and professional soldier.

"Before them stretches a new country. Broader plains, lower ranges of
hills than in Galicia. To the right and left, as far as the eye
reaches, fields, meadows, and swamps. Here and there, windmills.
Immense forests, different from those they knew at home: pines, oaks,
and birches, all mixed together, with some ash-trees and poplars, only
slightly cut down and low of growth. The retreating Russians have
tried everywhere to burn down forest and field, but have destroyed in
most places only narrow strips and small spots that look now like
islands: there the trees have been bared of their foliage in the
middle of the summer as if it were the early spring, and the pines are
red and brown like beech trees in the winter time. Every few miles
trenches and shelters had been cut into the landscape and ran across
field and forest, hills and valleys, masterpieces of their kind,
cunningly hidden, partly untouched. Alongside the road there were
many, many soldiers' graves, singly or sometimes combined into small
cemeteries. The Russians bury their dead with devotion. Double-armed
Greek crosses betray their burial places.... But not always did they
find time during their retreat. Occasionally a penetrating odor of
decay announces the fact that some of their dead had to be deprived
of burial. Then, very rarely only, indeed, one comes across black,
swollen corpses, so terribly gnawed and disfigured by millions of
small crawling animals, that all individuality, all humanity, has been
destroyed.

"The advance moves on for miles on curious roads. Are these still
roads? There is no foundation. Just cuts have been made into the
ground, which is sandy here and muddy there and again swampy. During
dry weather they take turns in being dusty like the desert, or hard as
stone or gently yielding; during rain they are without exception
unreliable, spiteful, dangerous. The burden of the uninterrupted
transport traffic escapes to the left and to the right farther and
farther into the edges of the fields, cutting off continuously new
widths of wheel tracks so that roadways are formed 150 to 300 feet
wide, which narrow down only at bridges or fords by sheer necessity.
All bridges, even those that have been spared by the Russians, have to
be solidly renewed and supported, for they had never been intended f