Running almost due south from Königsberg, the railroad enters Masurenland where swamps and lakes still hold the Russian dead of those terrible August days, when Tannenberg turned East Prussia red. There the empty yellowish fields, undulating from hillock to gully, across the picture that the car window framed, bristled but five days before with Russian lines. There at Korschen where we changed cars, they had burned the station. There we saw on flat cars, ready to be pulled to some point behind the front, three black painted motors that the Russians had abandoned in their flight; coupled to them a heavy truck, bearing a long German howitzer; beside that a Belgian freight car, marked Louvain. Somehow it seemed quite natural that they all should be there--the Russian motors, the Belgian car, the German gun.
It was just as we were leaving Korschen that a smiling slender young man who wore glasses, bowed outside the compartment door, and said: "You're an American, aren't you?" And when I told him yes, he said: "I am too." He went on to say that he was from Passaic, and I found myself recalling Gus Schwing of Newark, the Lieutenant Brevet whom we had met in Brussels and wondering if all the Americans in the German army came from New Jersey.
"I am an architect in Passaic," he said. "I happened to be in Germany on August 3rd. Before coming to America I had served my time in the army, but I, being born in Germany, offered my services at the outbreak of war to the government. They are using me to go behind the army, building up what has been destroyed. I have just come from France where we're rebuilding everything behind our battle line."
Captain von Stietencron, who had noticed my amazement, smiled and added, "In France and Belgium our soldiers planted the fields with a winter crop, last fall, and they're planting an autumn crop now."
Which seems to be a case of harvesting machines following the howitzers. At Stürlack where the railroad strikes due east for Lötzen we were made to feel the growing intimacy of the front, by being shunted on a side while troop trains rumbled by for an hour. It being four o'clock then and not having been able to eat since morning, the Baron led a foraging expedition into a track-side farmhouse, which resulted in more wurst and heavy black bread. I can still see the expression in that old farmer's eyes as, opening the cottage door, he saw the Baron outside. It was as if the gray officer's cape, hanging over the Baron's broad shoulders, at once made him in the eyes of that old man, something superhuman and to be idolized. And I did not wholly understand this until I learned that the Russians had spent a rioting night in the farmer's house and that thenceforth to him, the German troops had become avengers and deliverers.