I was for a quick breakfast.
"Oh, no, Mr. Fox. There is much time. The battle will endure all day."
Nevertheless I hurried the Rittmeister to breakfast downstairs in the Europiski Hotel. Quantities of black coffee, served in long glasses, platters of white buns coated with some tasteless powder, suspiciously Russian, and Ober-Lieutenant Lieckfeld of the Eighth Battery of the First Guards, joined us—a handsome, healthy skinned, smiling man, who spoke a fair English. He told us what an officer had seen on the road back from Augustowo this morning.
"Just this side of Augustowo," explained Lieckfeld, "the Captain saw a Russian gun that had been hit by one of our shells. The horses and men were all killed and the carriages smashed. The Captain said they looked very bloody and all sort of mixed."
This was the kind of war I had seen for years in pictures—the war of de Neuville and Verestchagin. I wonder if the officers noticed my impatience to be on the road to Augustowo. And then the Rittmeister did a significant thing. Drawing his Browning, he drew the clip from the magazine to see that it was full.
"And now," he said, "we go to Augustowo," adding with a tantalizing smile, "Do you wish?"
"Don't kill any Russians," Lieckfeld called after us and chuckled.
Following the Petersburg Prospeckt, a wide unpaved highway, obviously the Main Street of gray, squat housed Suwalki, our motor bumped out on the road to Augustowo—a road of frozen brown snow in the middle of a dreary snow covered plain and tunneling ahead into a green forest of pine. We passed a huddle of miserable huts and a great Russian church with bulb shaped cupolas, slender minarets and a dome gleaming with gold. We passed the deserted garrison barracks, places of filth, in which the Germans would not live. We ran along a line of pretty pale blue fence palings; and then we saw the boys. They seemed to be playing a game. A little fellow, whose round fur hat and brown pea jacket was typical of his chums, was poking at something with a stick. Greatly excited, he called the boys, who seemed to be looking for something across the road in the snow. Stridently he called to them.
"That boy is saying," explained Tzschirner who understands Russian, "that he has found another one."
And we saw that the youngster was poking the snow away from a big bearded man in a sheepskin coat. The game the boys of Suwalki were playing was hunting the dead....