"Why," said Tzschirner gently, "do you fear us?"
When she spoke it was without looking up. "Our soldiers," she said, losing her fear, "told me you were devils, so I thought if I made the cross you could not pass it. They told me you would burn my house and kill me."
"And you will not be killed, Madame," said Tzschirner, touching his hat. "I promise you."
We left her looking after us in a bewildered way and when we climbed into the motor she fled up the road.
"They have bad minds, the Russians," remarked Tzschirner. "They know what they have made in East Prussia."
And then near Szczobra we overtook the "clean up squad." We saw them advancing, as in extended order, the teeth of a great comb, cleaning woods, fields and ponds, of the dead. We saw segments of the line abruptly stop, and come together and begin digging in the snow.
"How," I asked Tzschirner, "did they miss the dead we saw along the road?"
"They have not been there," he explained. "They first work where considerable actions have occurred; then they take up the more isolated points of the line."
All this time the grumble of the guns had grown more distinct. We were nearing Augustowo. A horde of prisoners stolidly shuffled and I saw that their hands and faces were black with the battle. The German light wounded commenced to straggle along, holding a white bound hand, or unconcernedly handling a cheap cigar while the other arm hung cradled in a sling. I thought they all looked tired but their step was alert. And always the roll of the guns grew louder, monstrous drums insanely beating their Miserere from somewhere beyond the tops of the pines.
Finding at Szczobra a field bakery, we ate. Seated around an empty box with two officers of the commissary, we ate from deep tin dishes filled with a stew of white beans and beef; there were chunks of a brown bread made from Russian meal. And the floor almost in the long shed that the engineers had built in a night, was covered with loaves of the brown bread baked fresh in the twelve oven transports outside; while at the other end of the shed, white aproned bakers were mixing their dough.
"They are all volunteers," the commissary officer was saying. "By trade they are bakers and when war broke out they at once put themselves at the disposal of the government. I am sorry," he went on, "that I cannot give you better bread, but here in Russia," and he shrugged.