ON THE HEELS OF THE RUSSIAN RETREAT
The Russians were retreating! In Pschoor's our waiter told us; on the Linden great pennants began to appear; an hour and Berlin had bedecked itself in flags.... The Russians were retreating! In front of the newspaper offices the crowds stood twenty deep, their faces turned to a bulletin which said that Hindenburg was driving the enemy from East Prussia. Magically, vendors selling little photographic buttons of the German hero, swarmed on to the streets. "Bilder von Hindenburg! Bilder von Hindenburg!"
The great cafés which an hour ago had been empty, were suddenly filled. The air was tense with excitement. At every table the "beer strategists" were discussing this newest of great victories, which they were calling a second Tannenberg. Unable even to get a place of vantage from which to overlook this ecstasy of patriotism, I returned to Adlon just in time to receive a message from a blue-coated page boy; Major von Herwarth, of the General Staff, wanted me at the telephone.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Fox," the Major was saying. "I am very happy to say that everything has been arranged and that you start to-night for the East." Thanking Major von Herwarth, who has done everything in his power to help every open-minded American correspondent locate the facts, I hurried to my room to get my luggage together.
And an hour later we were completing arrangements for the most amazing piece of reporting done in this war. With the cooperation of the Foreign Office, the Staff had decided to permit Herbert Corey and myself to send collaborated reports from the front to America. Subsequently filed at different points on the battle line, they went by military telegraph into Germany, thence by the regular Government lines to Berlin, thence by the great wireless to Sayville, Long Island. Only a limited number of words a day are sent by the transatlantic wireless but the Foreign Office gave us one hundred and fifty of these which is why thirty-seven American cities read as swiftly as science could bring it to them, the truth of the terrific smash of Hindenburg's army.
That night, my only luggage, a change of clothing wrapped in a sleeping bag—for we had been cautioned to reduce what we had brought to the barest necessities—I went at eleven to the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof where I met the officer who was to take me to the front. I found Baron von Stietencron, a captain in the 5th Regiment of the Prussian Guards, the crack infantry of Germany, to be a light spirited devil-may-care type of officer, gifted with a touch-and-go sense of humor, high strung and imaginative. Since the war he had let a reddish beard grow around his chin but one could see he was young and never happy in the field unless he was leading a charge. Indeed, later that night I learned that Baron von Stietencron had been shot through the throat when the Germans stormed at St. Quentin!
Troops swarmed on the platform; new recruits going out to fill the gaps in the line, officers rejoining their regiments. The train for Königsberg glided into the arc lighted shed; we managed to get a first class compartment.
"I tried to get sleeping accommodation," apologized Baron von Stietencron, who spoke good American, "but we were too late."
To the waving and calling of good-bys, the train glided past the pallid faces of soldiers' loved ones, and clanking over the switches, turned its headlight towards the Eastern night. It was near three before any of us thought of sleeping. In that short space of time we came to know Baron von Stietencron amazingly well. And I heard some things of war that made my blood run cold.
"The Russians are in retreat now at this point," explained the Baron, tracing his finger over one of those marvelously minute staff maps. "We arrive at Königsberg in the morning and from there we shall go south to Lyck. It was at Lyck that the first big engagement of the battle took place."