The Land of Deepening Shadow: Germany-at-War

by D. Thomas Curtin

I spent the following day trying to obtain permission to pass the cordon of sentries outside the city, but I received only the advice to go back to Berlin and apply at the Auswartiges Amt (Foreign Office). I did not wish to wait in Berlin until this campaign was over; I wished to follow on the heels of the army through the ruined land and catch up to the fighting if possible. American correspondents had done this in Belgium. I myself had done it with the Austrians against the Serbs, and I succeeded in East Prussia, but not through Berlin.

I was well aware that Germany was making a tremendous bid for neutral favour. I had furthermore heard so much of Russian atrocities that I was convinced that the stories were true; consequently I decided to play the role of an investigator of Muscovite crime. I won Herr Meyer of the Wolff Telegraph Bureau, who sent me along with his card to Commandant von Rauch, who at first refused to let me proceed, but after I had hovered outside his door for three days, finally gave me a pass to go to Tapiau, the high-water mark of the Russian invasion.

That night, "by chance," in the Deutscher Hof, I met the black-bearded official who had arrested me on the boat, and I told him that I had permission to go to Tapiau next morning. When he became convinced, that I was a professional atrocity hunter who believed that the Russians had been brutal, his hospitality became boundless, and over copious steins of Munich beer he described the invaders in a manner which made Gladstone's expose of the Turks in Bulgaria, the stories of Captain Kidd, and the tales of the Spanish Inquisition seem like essays on brotherly love. He was particularly incensed at the Russians because they had destroyed Allenburg, for Allenburg was his home. One of the stories on which he laid great stress was that a band of Cossacks had pillaged the church just outside of Allenburg on the road to Friedland, after they had driven sixty innocent maidens into it and outraged them there.

A train of the Militar-Personenzug variety bore me next morning through a country of barbed wire, gun emplacements and fields seamed with trenches to Tapiau, a town withered in the blast of war. Two ruined bridges in the Pregel bore silent testimony to the straits of the retreating Germans, for the remaining ends on the further shore were barricaded with scraps of iron and wood gathered from the wreckage.

Landsturm guards examined my pass, which was good only for Tapiau and return. I decided to miss the train back, however, and push on in the wake of the army to Wehlau. Outside of Tapiau I was challenged by a sentry, who, to my amazement, did not examine my now worthless pass when I pulled it from my pocket, but motioned me on.

The road ran through eye-tiring stretches of meadows pockmarked with great shell holes full of black water. I came upon the remains of an old brick farmhouse battered to dust in woods which were torn to splinters by shell, bullet and shrapnel. The Russians had bombarded Tapiau from here, and had in turn been shelled in the trenches which they had dug and chopped in the labyrinth of roots. Among the debris of tins, cases, knapsacks and cartridge clips were fragments of uniforms which had been blown off Russian bodies by German shells, while on a branch above my head a shrivelled human arm dangled in the light breeze of September.

I left the sickening atmosphere of the woods behind and pushed on to Wehlau, a primitive little town situated on the meadows where the Alle flows into the Pregel. Here my troubles began. Soldiers stared at me as I walked through crooked, narrow streets unevenly paved with small stones in a manner that would bring joy to the heart of a shoe manufacturer. The sun sank in a cloudless blaze behind a line of trenches on a gentle slope above the western shore when I entered the Gasthof Rabe, where I hoped to get a room for the night.

I had no sooner crossed the threshold, however, than I was arrested and brought to the Etappen-Commandant in the Pregelstrasse. I fully expected to be placed under arrest or be deported, but I determined to put up the best bluff possible. A knowledge of Germans and their respect for any authority above that invested in their own individual selves led me to decide upon a bold course of action, so I resolved to play the game with a high hand and with an absolute exterior confidence of manner.

Instead of waiting to be questioned when I was brought into the presence of the stern old officer, I told him at once that I had been looking for him. I informed him that Herr von Meyer and Commandant Rauch in Konigsberg were in hearty sympathy with my search for Russian atrocities, but although I succeeded in quieting any suspicions which the Commandant may have entertained, I found winning permission to stay in Wehlau an exceedingly difficult matter.

Orders were orders! He explained that the battle was rolling eastward not far away and that I must go back. To add weight to what he said he read me a set of typewritten orders which had come from Berlin the day before. "Journalists are not allowed with the army or in the wake of the army in East Prussia. . . ." he read, in a tone which indicated that he considered the last word said.