"There is no line, as in the West. We have driven the Russians from East Prussia, but there are many roads down which their patrols can sneak from a frontier village and run back to the troops."
"Could they come down this road?" I asked.
"We hold it to Tauroggen, where we must go, but we have no trenches from Tauroggen to Woynuta, and between these points are cross roads by which they could raid this highway. But if those shots we heard were Cossacks, I do not think they will come here. They are not brave, the Cossacks."
We see that beyond, to the left, an old brick church hides among the pines.
"We shall go there," suggests the Rittmeister. "Do you wish?"
I am wondering why we should waste time on a church when Russian patrols are shooting up the countryside, when Tzschirner says:
"This church is where Queen Louise of Prussia took refuge from Napoleon in 1807."
With the dutiful air that one assumes upon examining an historical landmark, we scramble up the bank toward the church.
"Walk slowly," the Rittmeister said, as we picked our way through a snow covered graveyard, "or you may not see and kick a grenat. They explode very easily."
At once we cease thinking of the church of Piculponen as Queen Louise's retreat. We are walking amid a charnel patch of opened graves and tombs that are the gaping craters of shells.