But then anything is possible in this war.
From Lötzen to Lyck, by rail is twenty-five kilometers; in times of peace, the average passenger train takes little more than half an hour. In times of war, the run of a heavy supply train such as ours, is about an hour. We left Lötzen before seven; four hours and Lyck was still away. Rattling along, jumping the switches into sidings while coaches filled with troops rushed clanking past, faintly luminous phantoms in the snowy night, stopping at one little station after another, the weirdest ride of my life, even before we came to Iucha.
The village of Iucha, typical of that section of East Prussia which is known as Masurenland, hides behind the trees half a mile from the railroad. There being forty minutes before our train would leave, we gratefully accepted Julius the station master's invitation to visit his house. It would be cozy there. "Just up the track aways," he said. Imagining a comfortable half hour of lounging on some pillowed German chair, we followed the station master who led the way with a lantern. Outside his house, a squat two floor, stone structure, I noticed in the yard, a sofa, from which the plush cover had been removed. "A frugal man," I thought; "saving it no doubt for something else."
We followed him into the house. Nauseated by a stench we stared bewildered into a room. In the lantern's light, it was a place of pillage and filth. Torn papers made soft the floor, the walls seemed ragged with torn pictures, hanging shredlike from their frames—torn plush covers from old chairs, torn curtains—everything torn, broken or slashed.
"The Russians," he remarked, "they lived in my home," and I thought his eyes filled. "I lived here fifteen years. My boy was born here."
Following the station master into the room where the Russians had eaten, I saw the little brass meat cans of the Russian commissary, strewn around the floor amid an overpowering clutter of cooked meat and decaying vegetables. I opened a little closet in the wall and stood looking at something that my electric torch picked out on the floor. It was a pair of cow's hoofs, cut off a little below the knees. Probably left there until they got ripe enough to be cooked in a stew.
We found every room in that little home destroyed and filthy, and as we made our way across the snow to the village, we felt certain that we were to look upon even more depressing scenes. Little Iucha, a pretty place on a crest of the rolling country, we found to be utterly and wantonly devastated. We learned there was no fighting in Iucha, yet home after home we found destroyed. We visited the shop of G. Geydon, and found all the goods missing from his shelves, all the counters smashed, all his business papers torn and strewn on the floor. We went into another store, where amid a ruin of splintered wood, stood the owner's safe, blown open as by cracksmen.
In another house, a private dwelling, we entered a room that the Russian officers must have used as a council chamber, for chairs were drawn around one end of a long table. Beside the table, on the floor, I noticed a Russian map of this section of Germany. Here in this room, beyond doubt, the staff officers were in conference when the alarm rang through the town—"The Germans are coming!" Everywhere were signs of the panic in which they had fled.
"On that hill over there," said the station master, pointing across the snow, "the Russians had a trench. The morning after they retreated, we went up there and found it filled with loot and the dead bodies of three good women of the village whom they had taken up there, outraged, and slain."