Austro-Hungarian and German armies. They came on over all the roads:
infantry, artillery, cavalry, engineering troops, supply detachments,
and in between, impatiently puffing, the automobiles of the higher
staff officers, everybody eager to enter the big fortress and to get
hold of the big booty.

"But what a disappointment! From far off clouds of dust and smoke
announced the fate of this famous fortress. The bridges across the Bug
had all been destroyed, those of steel blown up and the wooden ones
burned. Only slowly separate small units managed to cross on temporary
narrow bridges to the citadel. Everything else crowded together on
both sides of the road and spread out into the fields, filling the
flat surrounding country as far as the eye could reach with one
single, immense, many colored war camp: groups of horses, field
kitchens, resting infantrymen, innumerable white backs of wagon after
wagon.

"Whoever managed to enter Brest-Litovsk saw for the first time a big
city devastated and ruined as pitilessly as formerly only villages had
been made to suffer. Hundreds and hundreds of houses, once human
habitations, now smashed down to their very foundations, or mangled so
as to have lost all meaning, ruins containing nothing but broken
stones and ashes and at the best here and there a stair banister,
suspended in midair. And all destruction had not been wrought as a
result of a long siege and its continuous assaults of gunfire and
shells. In one night, at the command of the Russian authorities, this
Russian city had been laid waste. Only about one-quarter of it had
remained entirely or partly habitable. Only in the citadel were there
left supplies of any great amount. There quite some quantities of
flour and canned food, weapons and munitions, war and railroad
equipment, had escaped the well-prepared explosion, and had been saved
only because there had not been enough time to complete the work of
destruction and to explode all the mines that had been laid. A happy
exception among this horrible riot of wholesale destruction was found
occasionally in the case of some few estates of the Polish nobility.
In some way they escaped here and there and were passed by without
suffering demolition and despoliation in spite of the fact that the
villages near which they were usually located were almost always
masses of smoking ruins. The manor houses of some of these estates
often became the temporary lodging of some division or