XII The War on the Russian Frontier
In the East, the war is different. With Hindenburg’s army against the Russians, I saw a kind of warfare utterly different from the solid lines of the West. To portray to the most minute detail what is daily transpiring there, I wrote down all the impressions gained in a single day and night. It was near Tauroggen, a stricken village across the Russian frontier that I saw this war of the East; it was at Tauroggen that Prince Joachim, the youngest of the Emperor’s sons, led the Germans in the storm.
The diary follows:
11:50 A. M., Tilsit—We have slept late, for we came to Tilsit in the small hours, a weary ride across the snow swept plains from Suwalki. Back there in the pine woods of Augustowo, Von Eichorn’s young troops are hammering away at the new army that the Grand Duke has rushed to brace the crumbling front. But we have seen the fighting there, and this morning Rittmeister Tzschirner has promised to show me the war in the north, where the Memel line is protecting Von Eichorn’s northern flank.
“We shall journey to one of our outposts in Russia,” proposes Tzschirner, and his eyes light hopefully. “There may be fighting there.”
Our motor goes barking through the pretty streets of Tilsit, which, by two hours’ fighting in the fall, the German soldiers saved from the Russian torch. We cross the winding Memel, where a century ago Napoleon and the Czar met on a canopied pontoon to sign the Peace of Tilsit, while the hills behind us at Engelsberg bristled with the cannon of France; we cross vast river-plains shimmering with snow and mount to the pine fringed hills beyond, where now are strewn the soldiers of another Czar, who thought to march the road to Berlin; and chugging along a wayside strewn with their smashed entanglements, we come to Piculponen. Across the silent stretches of snow there comes the clear scattering cracks of carbines.
“A Russian patrol!” remarks Tzschirner, and he unbuttons his holster, while our red haired mechanician removes the caps from the rifles. “One can never tell,” continues Tzschirner, “down which road their patrols may ride.”
This puzzles me. “But how can they get through the German lines?” I asked him.
“There is no line, as in the West. We have driven the Russians from East Prussia, but there are many roads down which their patrols can sneak from a frontier village and run back to the troops.”
“Could they come down this road?” I asked.
“We hold it to Tauroggen, where we must go, but we have no trenches from Tauroggen to Woynuta, and between these points are cross roads by which they could raid this highway. But if those shots we heard were Cossacks, I do not think they will come here. They are not brave, the Cossacks.”
We see that beyond, to the left, an old brick church hides among the pines.
“We shall go there,” suggests the Rittmeister. “Do you wish?”
I am wondering why we should waste time on a church when Russian patrols are shooting up the countryside, when Tzschirner says:
“This church is where Queen Louise of Prussia took refuge from Napoleon in 1807.”
With the dutiful air that one assumes upon examining an historical landmark, we scramble up the bank toward the church.
“Walk slowly,” the Rittmeister said, as we picked our way through a snow covered graveyard, “or you may not see and kick a grenat. They explode very easily.”
At once we cease thinking of the church of Piculponen as Queen Louise’s retreat. We are walking amid a charnel patch of opened graves and tombs that are the gaping craters of shells.
“The Russians tried to hold a position here,” remarks Tzschirner.
We turn the corner of the church and see the Russian trenches dug between the graves. We see the great windowed walls shattered with shrapnel and shell. We gaze down into an awful hole where a grenat has plunged into a grave. The fragments of the casket are blown into the black mud, and there are other fragments too, fragments a chalky white, for the grave is old; and fragments of brown Russian coats. Nearby stands a white marble cross. “Ruhig sanft,” it says, “Rest in Peace.” The plains of the Memel, as we leave the churchyard, brooding in the white peace of the snow and under the Engelsberg lies Tilsit, vaguely as in a mirage, its slender steepled churches, the spires of a dream.
1:08 P. M. We are climbing a long brown slope of road that has been dug from out of the drifting snow. A kilometer from Piculponen we turn out to pass a clanking column of gray transports, plodding on toward the front. Noticing a wagon loaded with barbed wire, I said to Tzschirner: “What will you do, make this position at Tauroggen permanent? The entanglements are going up.”
“Ah, yes, for a time. It is best always to be prepared,” and he smiles.
In this clear, cold air our exhaust is barking in loud exaggeration, but as we crest the hill near the huddled houses of Kamstpauriken, we hear a foreign sound. Somewhere across the snows rifles are firing.
“The Russian patrols are very active this morning,” Tzschirner is saying.
“How far off is that shooting?” I ask.
“About a mile. On a road which is parallel to this.”
“How many in a patrol?” I was thinking that we were five—Gelbricke, who must drive the car; Seyring, the red-haired mechanician, who could use a carbine; Tzschirner, with his Browning automatic; Corey, with a fountain pen, and I with a camera.
“They are very many, the Russians,” Tzschirner was saying. “They never ride a patrol under twenty men. It is dangerous,” continues Tzschirner with the air of one doing his duty by saying that, although I knew he was spoiling for a scrap.
“We may be surrounded; but I do not think. Naturlich, there is the chance. You wish?”
“Rittmeister, these Russians would have to use the road and we could see them coming in time.”
“Oh, no,” Tzschirner says quickly. “They often ride over the fields; it is very good for patrol, the country here.”
“What grand little comforter,” I murmur.
Tzschirner looks around and grins. “I will protect you.”
I feel he has been quietly laughing at me, until from behind a distant snow capped ridge I see a black belch of smoke.
“They have burned a village,” exclaims Tzschirner.
Together we run through the snow in the direction of the smoke, until a hillock gives us a vantage point of the surrounding country. We can see the flames now, streaking through the smoke and above the snowy hills, black clouds stain the cold blue sky.
“Remain here,” calls Tzschirner, who is fumbling with his map. “It is little more than a kilometer from here to the village.” And while he studies his map I watch the flames through my binoculars.
“That is the village of Robkojen,” he presently announces. “See,” and he points to it on the Staff map, where even the little summit upon which we stand is marked.
The glasses bring to me a huddle of cottages in flames. It reminds me of a moving picture I have seen—a Western picture with tiny horsemen on a distant ribbon of road. I can see the Russians; their uniforms are different from the brown coated droves I have seen. They are dark uniforms and the horsemen wear tall dark hats. Tzschirner has put his glasses on them. “Cossacks,” he mutters. “Soon our men will be there.”
Taking the hint, I swing the glasses down the road, that twists like a black swing through the snow to Robkojen. And even then I can discern a tiny movement. It grows to a rush of horses. “They are coming!”
The finish of a Derby has not this thrill. Can the Germans come up fast enough? Through the smoke I can see a sudden panic. Between two flaming cottages a horse is pivoting; one seems to be rearing. The Germans are drawing nearer. “They are Uhlans!” And then as in a stampede there breaks from behind the smoking village a line of horses that go galloping in black silhouette across the snow. The Uhlans are taking up the pursuit.
Tzschirner’s air is one of intense disgust.
“I say, you the Cossacks would not fight. They ended their fighting when they burned the village. They always sneak across the frontier, burn the homes of a few poor people, terrify old men, women and their children by killing a few, and then running like dogs.”
“Do they always run, Rittmeister?”
“Immer, unless they are greater than our cavalry by six to one,” with a sneer, he adds. “I think Russia needs them best for murdering the Jews.”
Behind us the dried cottages are flaming like tinder and across the fields from Robkojen a woman, her arms filled with bundles, and leading a child, sinks almost to her knees in the snow. It seems as if she has fled a hell of fire to gain an empty world.
1:45 P. M. “Only a few days ago the Russians ran down this road, taking their dead with them.”
We have caught up with the awful refuse of battle. Near Szillutten we see that which no longer horrifies—the slain dead; and then the bloody road of retreat, where German shells split the Russian ranks, and lumped the road with things in brown that only the wheels of the heavy guns can flatten down; a furrowing of frozen ruts, shining with the pounding of transports, the packed snow broken, here and there, to reveal stiff objects, bits of brown cloth matted with flesh.
Burned Laugszargen shows its black walls, and as we cross the frontier we see the red and black striped white posts lying shattered in a ditch beside. And it seems a symbol of these days when frontiers seem but things to be smashed. We are passing through Posheruni, the silent houses echoing back our motor in a hollow, dismal sound.
We enter a woods, the tall pines crowding close to the road; and it seems as though the road has been the path of a storm, as if lightning has struck one upon another of the trees here, for torn white they seem to have fallen into each other’s branches, leaning like stricken things, while finding those whom they sought, the shells have daubed them red and flung up bits of torn cloth into their shattered boughs, there to hang, perhaps, as a signal that the black winged birds might see. And passing through the forest of death, we come upon a German battery, hidden behind mounds of clay that are covered with evergreen. The soldiers are fussing about the long, gray barrels. And we have not gone half a kilometer further, when we smile at the guile of this German army; for there in a field to the right of the road is a dummy battery. We count four black logs lying between four sets of farm cartwheels, and each with its little circular shield of earth—a shield deliberately built low, though, so that from afar the Russian observer would not fail to see what seemed to be a gun; and signaling his batteries waste thereafter the ammunition. The road slopes down toward the sunken stream of the Eserina. The burned bridge lifts its skeleton posts in a warning. We get out and see that the German engineers have bent the road to the right, leading it down over a bed of wire-lashed saplings, across a string of planks, and thence up over more dirt-covered saplings to the main road again.
“It is better,” suggests Tzschirner, “that we leave the auto.” And as the motor bounces over the lashed saplings and takes the bridge, a company hurrying to Tauroggen comes swinging on its heels; for we are getting into Russia now, and near the line of battle, and there can be no delay. We hurry after the car.
“Please, that bridge,” and Tzschirner indicates the charred piles; “it saved the Russians. By burning it, they delayed our advance an hour.”
“Your engineers changed the course of the road, bending it around that burning bridge, in one hour?”
“Oh, yes,” and Tzschirner is almost apologetic; “our pioneers would have finished the work in much less than an hour, but the Russians fired on them with shrapnel,” and then as if remarking the weather, he added, “Fifteen were killed.”
The car chugs on. A great blue bulbed cupola shows above the trees and we rattle across the Jura.
“The Russians tried to destroy this bridge, too,” Tzschirner is explaining, “but we came too fast for them and drove them up into Tauroggen, where they endeavored to stand.”... Our motor is panting up the hill past the Russian church and turns into the village of Tauroggen.
“We put the artillery on them,” continues Tzschirner, and we pass rows of narrow, squalid houses, chipped with shrapnel, “and they took Tauroggen by storm. There was street fighting and then, picking up their dead, they ran with them through the village, across the field to the woods,” and Tzschirner waves his hand down the road toward a patch of pines, “and they’re in the woods now.”
We turn into a muddy street where the fighting must have been hot, for the way is littered with cartridge belts and guns and on a pale blue picket fence Russian accouterments dangle like unclean things hung out in the sun.
“If you will excuse me,” says the Rittmeister, “I shall speak with Ober-Lieutenant Hoffman.”
We find Ober-Lieutenant Hoffman quartered in a clean looking hut, distinguished by a shingle, hand-lettered with that official looking KOMMANDO. After he has conversed with the Ober-Lieutenant, Tzschirner brings him into the motor and we drive through Tauroggen in the direction the Russians have fled. We have put the last outlying house behind us and at a suggestion from Ober-Lieutenant Hoffman the motor is stopped. “It is better,” explains Tzschirner, “that the auto remain here. It gives too large a target.”
With a strange feeling, almost of superiority, for not thirty feet ahead, what appears to be a first line trench is filled with soldiers, we walk towards them down the road. Over there, a quarter of a mile, across the barren field where the Russians dragged their dead, are the woods, and skulking there are the Russians—the soldiers maintain a nervous vigil. Not a sound breaks the strain, only the clatter of axes, as far to the right the soldiers are clearing a zone for the enfilading fire of the machine guns. And as we walk past the trench and approach the last outpost this tension is communicated to us. We walk through the barricade—a ladder tangled with wire, that slides between two broken carts on either side of the road. We scarcely notice the two sentries who walk twenty paces from the barricade toward the woods, wheel and return. We are watching the woods—that great green semicircle across the field where the Russians are hiding.
Apparently that thought never occurs to Tzschirner. Being a good soldier, he does not indulge his imagination when he is in uniform. He and Ober-Lieutenant Hoffman are walking along, chatting easily as they might on some fine February day along the Linden. As the sentries stride by I catch the words, “Wagner ist mehr wichtig,” and a little excited, the sentry with the beard cries: “Quatch! Strauss ist wunderbar!” Apparently to decide the merits of Wagner and Strauss is more absorbing than the Russians.
A little bewildered, I walk on. Down where the road divides the woods into a limitless vista of green, I think I see something move. It is about 600 meters away and I focus my glass. Four Russian soldiers sitting on a log, a little fire, and in the middle of the road something that, while indistinguishable, suggests a menace. And even as I watch I see a tree sway and I can hear it fall as it crashes across the road, falling like a barricade.
“Look! Look! The Russians!”
And the Rittmeister turns with an amused smile. How commonplace are the Russians, anyway! How incidental to those officers who have seen so many dead that even the living are not to be feared.
“In the middle of the road,” I announced, “there is a machine gun. It is pointed this way.”
Tzschirner and Ober-Lieutenant Hoffman are discussing some military problem. Tzschirner begins to trace in the road with his sword some formation that is beyond my pen.
“Those Russians,” I am saying without putting down the glasses, “appear to be leaving their seats on the log. I think they are showing sudden interest in the gun.”
Demonstrating his problem in the mud, Tzschirner turns to me.
“This is the road to Riga. Follow it and we reach that fortress. As we are now midway between the German and Russian lines, I do not think it wise that we go further. Of course, if you would care to storm the Russians in the woods, we shall go on. Do you wish?”
I do not wish. Nervy little Tzschirner, one of the gamest men to straddle a horse in this war, has taken us quite far enough. We begin our walk back to the German lines, turning our backs with difficulty upon those silent woods.
“If the Russians should fire,” Tzschirner says seriously, “throw yourself at once on the road. The balls will pass over you.”
A simple remedy, indeed!
“Strauss,” the passing sentry is objecting, “is all chaos.”
“Why not?” his bearded comrade defends. “Salome is the music of destruction.”
Glancing back toward the woods, I see a flock of black birds fly leisurely across the field, and alighting, wait. Wait for what? Had the Ober-Lieutenant told them that darkness would bring the Russian attack?
“And now, if you like, we shall go to my quarters,” says the Ober-Lieutenant, to whom Tzschirner has delivered me. “I am sorry you will not find them very comfortable.”
It is as ever, the diffidence of these Prussian officers, putting you a little ill at ease. Self-consciously assuring the Ober-Lieutenant that to be comfortable is my last desire, we walk down a lane of the bluish walled cottages, turning in at the frame structure which is denoted headquarters. As we enter a rather barren room, three orderlies, who appear to be transcribing reports, briefly stiffen in their chairs and go on writing. The gray, iron-bound officers’ chest by the window makes a good seat and the Ober-Lieutenant in telling me that having had conscience, many of the natives of Tauroggen fled with the coming of the Germans, leaving their loot behind.
“Loot!” I interrupted. “I do not understand.”
“Pardon me, but I forgot,” and the Ober-Lieutenant called an orderly. “Here in Tauroggen,” he said after consulting the report, “we recovered household belonging to the German frontier villages of Laugszargen, Meddiglauken and Augswilken.”
“No matter how fast his flight,” I observe, “the Russian soldier still has time to transport his loot.”
The Ober-Lieutenant smiles. “But in this time it was not the soldiers. We have learned that the civilians of Tauroggen followed the Russian soldiers across the frontier, stealing from houses, and then sneaking back with their booty to Tauroggen.”
Clicking his heels in a salute a young lieutenant comes in. He and the Ober-Lieutenant begin speaking; such hurried German is too much for me. I note the monocle the young lieutenant is wearing. What affectation on the firing line! Clicking his heels to the Lieutenant, bowing to me, the young lieutenant hurries out. The Ober-Lieutenant is drumming his fingers on the table top.
“Ober-Lieutenant,” I remark with a smile, “will that young lieutenant wear his monocle if there’s a battle?”
The Ober-Lieutenant’s gravity dispels a jest. “I imagine he will always wear that monocle,” he says. “The Lieutenant had his eye shot out in Belgium.” He reaches for a map. “Please pardon me,” he smiles. Quite distinctly now I can hear the shots.
“I had hoped,” says the Ober-Lieutenant, studying the greenish black dotted patch that means on his map, the woods, “that there would be no engagement here until to-morrow. I wanted to finish our entanglements to-day.”
I wonder if our going past the outposts has brought forth the Russians’ nervous fire. That seems also to have occurred to the Ober-Lieutenant.
“They might have thought that we were reconnoitering for a night attack,” and then abruptly, “Let us go out.”
As we pass between the houses a bullet goes snaggering off a roof. It would seem to be a last wild shot for as we turn up the road to the outpost, everything is still. In the little cemetery to the left of the barricade, I see soldiers, squatting behind the tombstones; the great wooden cross suggests an incongruous peace. Calling the sentries who but a time ago, we heard discussing Wagner and Strauss, the Ober-Lieutenant taxes them with questions. They salute and hurry behind the cart, which they have turned blocking the road. “Any wounded?” calls the Ober-Lieutenant down the trench.
“Nur Russlanders!” The soldiers laugh and slip fresh clips into their guns.
“Alles ruhig,” the Ober-Lieutenant is saying as we walk along the line, apparently scornful of the Russians that the pines will not let him see. “Only nervousness, that shooting.”
“You do not believe there will be an attack?”
He shakes his head. “I think not.”
But across the belt to the woods, I see the black winged birds, slowly flying and waddling over the ground.
7:30 P. M. During dinner the Ober-Lieutenant has avoided all shop talk. No such food as in the West, here—just a stew of white beans and beef and thick bread, carved off a big black loaf. The thoughtful looking Colonel produces a flask of cognac, and we are finishing with cigarettes, when an under officer reports.
“Both lights are in position,” I heard the Colonel say and dismissing the under officer, he seems absorbed in the end of his cigarette. In this barren room, where the candles are scattering strange shadows on the unpainted walls you become conscious of an unspoken army. The Ober-Lieutenant who is talking Nietzsche with me; seems not to have his mind upon it; when appealed to, the Colonel joins in with monosyllables. The orderlies who this afternoon were making reports, are gone but in the corner by the window, a soldier sits with a field telephone in his lap; slowly he writes upon a pad.
“In America,” the Ober-Lieutenant is saying, “you have taken too seriously our academic thinkers. Will you believe it, that until we heard about the book from England, not a thousand of my countrymen had read Bernhardi. Suppose we were to judge America by some of the things published there?”
I can see his point. A mad buzz from the telephone jerks us up with a start. With the air, of something expected, fulfilled, the Colonel rubs the fire off his cigarettes.
“What is it?” he calls.
The soldier’s manner is decisive. “Patrols report men massing from the woods in the road.”
Gulping down the cognac, the Colonel gives a detailed order; the soldier telephones it to some one at the outpost. The Ober-Lieutenant looks inquiring. “You would like to see?” he asks. As we hurry out of the room, a soldier with a rifle, runs down the street. It is dark. The low roofed houses are smothered in a thickening loom of woods and sky. In a window a candle burns but to the end of the street it is dark. The door of the last house is open and I hear a mumbling monotone of prayer. The flash of a pocket torch shows an ancient Hebrew kneeling in the open door. From his shoulders hang a brown vestment of prayer and caught full, his patriarchal, wrinkled face seems almost divine in the halo of the torch. On the heavy air a rifle cracks.
We are running forward. From the woods come a scattered sound, as of monstrous frogs croaking in the night; a bullet sucks in a whistle as it passes by. To the left of the road, behind the little cemetery, is a hut where we will be reasonably safe. Leaving the road and running along the edge of the trees, so as to keep the hut between us and the direct fire we press on. I never knew the sound of bullets could so aid one’s speed....
The firing has become general now and as we peer around the edges of the hut ahead and to our right, I can hear the soldiers moving in the trench. It is too dark to see much. Nearby I can discern crouched shadows running through the night and above the place of graves, the great brown cross makes its stiff gesture of peace.
Where are the Russians? Way down among the trees, I see the occasional flashes of their fire. But this is only an exchange of shots. The Germans are not bothering to reply, only with spasmodic shots, I think of the black winged birds; has the noise frightened them away?
Still there is a tension that seems to be tightening. Down in the trench I see the flash of an officer’s lamp; it is like a firefly. Other fireflies, glimmer toward the right of the line, flashing and going out. Somewhere in the darkness a young voice laughs nervously.
Where are the Russians? They may be crossing the open field for from the woods the shots no longer come. Everything is silent, everything but the orders that are being given in hushed but distinct tones—almost you think, as though the damp wind might pick up some secret and bear it to the Russian hordes. Where are they? This silence seems interminable.
And then one hears the faint scuffling of their feet; and out of the silence of the night comes a roar as of animals let loose, and across the fields we can see a vague moving mass. They are firing now but they are making as much noise with their voices as with their guns. To hoarse throaty yells they storm up the road. It occurs to me that they are like the Chinese whose idea of war is making a noise. Their bullets are raining through the pines and falling like hail on the houses beyond.
“Why don’t your men open fire?”
“It is too soon,” whispers the Ober-Lieutenant. Why did he have to whisper?
And then I see the Russians. I see them in the great blinding flash of dusty light. I see them revealed as pausing, blinking things, to whom the searchlights point with fingers of pitiless white. I see them—while all about me becomes the clamor of guns—stumble and fall; they stagger and crawl as if the long dusty flashes were lightning, striking them down; and wherever the white fingers point, there death comes; and their hoarse throaty shouts, become the wails of death; and that open belt between the pines becomes lumpy with men, while the night grows horrid with the rattle of rifles and the quick croaking beat of the guns.
They are being slaughtered out there; they are as bewildered as animals, blinking, then dying, in the glare of the lights that they knew not could come. And now the lights are throwing their dusty glimmer on the distant trees.
“They are retreating!” The Ober-Lieutenant still talks in a whisper.
And, as sweeping this way and that, making their monstrous gestures over the moaning field, the searchlights hold up as targets the scattering Russian retreat; as one after another shadowy form I see cross a beam of light only to fall, and the crash of the rifles seems to have become an unceasing din and in the sweeping flashes of white I see the piles upon the field.
The Ober-Lieutenant gives his opinion of it. “Very fine,” he says. “There are many dead.” And then, as if after all, this were the important thing, he adds: “To-morrow, I think we can build our entanglements.”
7:00 A. M. I have slept little. All night I thought I heard groans from afar. Toward dawn I imagine I hear a screech, but of course it cannot be that.... When we take coffee in the candlelight, the Colonel seems to have lost the distraction he showed at dinner. He laughs and jokes.... It is rapidly growing light when I climb up on the transport that is to take me to Tilsit.... Down over the pines, the black winged birds are flying—a screech? One wonders.