"I think," he said, "that this is as far as we had better go. You have seen it. It is the same."
"But, Captain," I urged, "isn't there some place from which we could see an artillery position?"
"You would go into the woods," bantered Tzschirner. "I will take you, but it is very dangerous."
"No, Captain," I said. "We would like to see the battlefield from the position of one of your batteries in action."
"That is possible," said Tzschirner. "But we must return to Augustowo and journey by another road."
The rifles were cracking not two hundred meters away—so the Rittmeister said—as the car turned and raced down the road to Augustowo. We passed a rumbling ammunition train; and the soldier sitting beside the driver of the first car was munching on a huge chunk of black bread. We noticed more of the fresh dead as we came to a lonely shack set in a little clearing among the pines. I saw outside the door a fallen man who, like a wild animal, had crawled to some hidden place to die. Always guns were booming in the direction of Jamine, their song rolling over the sky an immeasurable travail. Here among the pines, to the right and to the left, the ruthless game of tracking and shooting went on with a cracking sound, and the snow became more cluttered with coats, and I counted furry, shaggy Russian hats until I could count no more. If a bird still lived in that forest, it did not sing; only the black winged birds with the gray bellies of carrion were there, hovering cautiously above the trees with weird instinct that a grewsome feast was near. As we left the great green forest, and rushed the grade toward the bridge over the canal made by the German engineers, we suddenly stopped and our red haired boy of a mechanician got out and lifted a dark object which barred the way and which had not been there when we crossed the bridge before. I saw him dragging at a German soldier whose feet grotesquely bobbed against the boards, and he was careful, the red haired boy, to lay the soldier at the extreme edge of the bridge, as if to make certain that no wagon would pass over him; he was very careful of that, was the red haired boy. But when he was through I saw that the soldier's head dangled over the bridge as though needing but a push to flop into the muddy canal below....
The Battle
We had left the forest, where the rifles croaked and chugged again between the pale blue houses of Augustowo.
"Chausee nach Raygrod?" cried the Rittmeister to the sentry by the Kommandant office.
"Links gehen!" was the reply.