It was dusk when we rolled into Ivangorod and into the thick of that vast and complicated labor which goes on in the rear of an advancing army—all that laborious building up which follows the retreating army's orgy of tearing down—bridge builders, an acre or two of transport horses, blacksmiths and iron-workers, a semi-permanent bakery, the ovens, on wheels, like thrashing-machine engines, dropping sparks and sending out a sweet, warm, steamy smell of corn and wheat. It never stopped, this bakery, night or day, and the bread was piled up in a big tent near by like cord-wood.
And here you could see the amount of trouble that can be made by blowing up a railroad bridge. First, of course, a new timber bridge has to be flung across, and the Vistula is a good two hundred yards wide here and the river was high. Up ahead the army was fighting forward, dependent, for the moment, on what came across that bridge. A train arrives, hundreds of tons of freight which normally would roll across the river in a few puffs of a cigarette. The cars must be opened, each box and sack taken out by hand, carried down a bank, loaded into a wagon; the wagons creep over the pontoons, struggle through the sand on the other side, then each piece must be unloaded and put on a train again.
An axle breaks, the returning line waits an hour for the other to cross, a sixty-foot pine log for the new railway bridge wedges fast in turning a corner and stops everything—you must imagine them at it all day, sweating and swearing in all the dialects of the dual monarchy—all night, with fagged horses and drivers dazed with sleep, in the blaze of a search-light reaching out over the river. Meanwhile a tall timber railroad bridge was creeping across. There was no pile-driver engine, and at each cluster of piles fifteen or twenty Russian prisoners, in their brown service uniforms, hung to as many ropes—"Heave… whack! Heave… whack!"—in quaint retribution for what a few sticks of dynamite had done a fortnight before.
A thousand fresh Hungarian troops had just come in next morning, and were waiting for their coffee, when the word came by field-telephone that a Russian flier was dropping bombs about twenty kilometres away. It was fine hunting-ground—men, horses, stores, and the new bridge—but he sailed away, and we drove a dozen miles up the Vistula to New Alexandria, burned during the enveloping movement on Ivangorod.
All along the way were trenches, telltale yellow lines of sand winding among the pines, gun positions, barbed wire, and every now and then a big plane-tree, with ladders running up to an artillery observation platform. I climbed up one of them on cleats worn by Russian boots for a look at the Vistula and the string of Red Cross barges, filled with wounded, going up the river. The children hereabout, at any rate, will revere the Russians, for their pioneers had carried that winding stairway up to the very tip-top of the tree in a manner only seen in dreams or picture-books.
All the farmhouses had been burned, and the peasants were just returning. We passed several tired mothers with babies in shawls hanging from their shoulders and little boys trudging behind with some rusty kettle or coffee-pot, and once a woman, standing in the ruins of her house, of which only the chimney was left, calmly cooking her dinner.
New Alexandria, a pleasant little town, grown up round an old chateau, and used as a sort of summer resort by Warsaw people, was nothing but blackened chimneys and heaps of brick. The Russians had burned everything, and the inhabitants, who had fled into the pines, were just now beginning to straggle back. Some had set up little stands in front of their burned houses and were trying to sell apples, plums, pears, about the only marketable thing left; some were cleaning brick and trying to rebuild, some contented themselves with roofing over their cellars. And while we were observing these domestic scenes, the army, which had taken the outer forts by assault the preceding night, was marching into burning Brest-Litovsk.
It was another day before the motors came and we could get under way and whirl through such a cross-section of a modern army's life as one could scarcely have seen in the west of Europe since the Germans first came rolling down on Paris. No suburban warfare this; none of that hideous, burrowing, blowing up, methodically squashing out yard after yard of trenches and men. This was war in the grand old style—an army on the march, literally, down roads smoky with dust and sunshine, across bridges their own pioneers had built, a river of men and horses, wagons and guns, from one hazy blue horizon to another.
And all these men had come from victory and knew they were marching to it. How far they were going none could tell, but the gods were with them—so might the Grand Army have looked when it started eastward a hundred years ago. Men and horses had been pouring down that road for weeks—on each side of the macadam highway the level, unfenced fields were trampled flat. It was fully one hundred and twenty miles, as the motor road ran, to Brest-Litovsk, and there was scarce a moment when, if we were not in the thick of them, we were not at least in sight of wagons, motors, horses, and men. And, of course, this was but the rear of the army; the fighting men proper were up in front. The dust hung like fog in the autumn sunshine. Drivers were black with it; in the distance, on parallel roads, it climbed high in the still air like smoke from burning villages. And out of this dust, as we whizzed on, our soldier chauffeur, whistle in mouth, shrieking for room, appeared pontoon trains—big steel scows on top, beams underneath, cut, numbered, and ready to put together; trains of light farm wagons, wide at the top, slanting toward the middle, commandeered from all over Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the war and driven, some by soldiers, but oftener by civilians with the yellow Austrian bands on their arms; heavy ammunition wagons drawn by four horse; with a soldier outrider astride one of the leaders, and from time to time columns of reserves, older men for the most part, bound for guard duty, probably, shuffling along in loose order. Round and through these wagon-trains, in a swirl of dust, rumbled and swayed big motor-trucks, and once or twice, scattering everything with a lilting "Ta-te… Ta-da" the gray motor, the flash of scarlet, pale blue, and gold, and the bronzed, begoggled, imperial visage of some one high in command.
Once we passed a big Austrian mortar, covered with tarpaulin, by the side of the road, and again two big 20-centimetre guns, which had not had time to get up to Brest-Litovsk. This is where you find the heavy artillery nowadays, quite as likely as in a fort, on some hard highway, where it can easily be moved and sheltered, not behind concrete, but some innocent-looking apple-tree. Each fence corner was chalked with letters and numbers intelligible to the drivers, who passed that way; each bridge, down to the few boards across a ditch, had been examined by the pioneers, rebuilt if necessary, and a neat little sign set up on it, telling whether or not the heavy artillery could safely cross. Flowing back toward this huge, confident, onrushing organism, the peasants— timid, halting, weary, and dust-covered, with wagons heaped with furniture, beds, hay for the horses, with the littlest children and those too old to walk—were returning to the charred ruins of their homes. They, too—like the grass—had their unconquerable strength.