"We must go toward Raygrod if you would visit with the battery," explained Tzschirner. "Perhaps the road will not be good, all the way. I hope, yes."
From east and south rolled the thunder of the guns and across the street from a muddy yard that was strewn with Russian dead, I saw five German soldiers, picking the caked dirt from their boots and singing a song. And as we left behind the last squalid house of Augustowo I saw a squad of smiling soldiers crowding around a captured Russian field kitchen. But the odor that assailed my nostrils was not of steaming food; in the road nearby lay the carcass of a horse.
There opened a great grayish plain, serried with hastily thrown up trenches, filled with melting snow and the lying, the kneeling and the sitting dead; a wilderness of sky closed in, grayish like the earth, and across it an aeroplane came, the black crosses painted beneath its wings, crosses of death—for would not the bombs fall?—and it cackled away, the bird of destruction toward the eastern sky. Through Naddamki and Koszielny, into a brief dense forest, and we drove toward Bauszcke to the growing clamor of the guns.
"It is better," said Tzschirner, "that we leave our auto in Bauszcke and proceed on foot. To Tayno we must journey five kilometers. It grows dangerous and the auto might be observed by the Russians."
Leaving the car on the highway to Raygrod—Seyring, the red haired mechanician begging in vain to be allowed to come—we tramped through the snow and mud of a narrow Russian road toward Tayno.
"I must tell you," was Tzschirner's note of warning, "this is very dangerous. The Russians no longer have any orders. They are everywhere, little bodies cut off from their commands and trying to escape. You must remember there exists no line like the West here. Everything is movement."
Still the only Russians we had seen were dead or prisoners, so we went on. Two Uhlans passed at a trot, turning from right to left with alert eyes.
"Ist der weg frei?" called Tzschirner.
"Jawohl. Alles ruhig!"
Satisfied, the Rittmeister thought we could go on. The grumble of the guns became clearer; a grenat burst not half a mile away, emitting its terrifying grinding yelp, and staining the air with an ugly spume of brownish smoke. The road turned, skirting a pond, the Drengstwo See, beyond it a grove of pines above which shrapnel was breaking in beautiful billowing clouds. And then just ahead, reverberating in a bowl in the rolling ground, I heard four crashing reports, first two, then two more; and wisps of grayish smoke rose in the air and as quickly thinned away. Hurrying up the road and into the hollow, we joined the battery. Four 10.5 field pieces, set in pairs with thirty feet between, the battery was shelling a Russian position on the Bobr. Moving with a feverish ordered haste, the black striped gunners drew the empty copper jackets of the shrapnel, returned each to its oiled cloth case, and glancing toward an officer who was kneeling beside a tree, seemed waiting for something. I saw that the officer had a telephone clamped over his ear, and then two slender wires, which led from this to another tree, festooned from one to the other like the tendrils of a vine, He was furiously scribbling in a despatch book that rested on his knee and once he looked up to fling some words to the orderly standing by. Whatever they were, these words seemed to fire the orderly with a purpose, for, leaping toward the battery, he called: "Bischen rechts. Vierzig metres tiefer!"