By eight o’clock it had grown perceptibly cooler.  We now had time to collect our impressions and look about us.  The Russians had left many dead on the field, and at the barbed-wire entanglements which our sappers had constructed as an obstacle to their advance, their bodies lay heaped upon each other, looking not unlike the more innocent bundles of hay lying in the field.  We could see the small Red Cross parties in the field climbing over the horribly grotesque tumuli of bodies, trying to disentangle the wounded from the dead and administer first aid to them.

Enthusiasm seemed suddenly to disappear before this terrible spectacle.  Life that only a few hours before had glowed with enthusiasm and exultation, suddenly paled and sickened.  The silence of the night was interrupted only by the low moaning of the wounded that came regularly to us.  It was hideous in its terrible monotony.  The moon had risen, throwing fantastic lights and shadows over the desolate landscape and the heaped-up dead.  These grotesque piles of human bodies seemed like a monstrous sacrificial offering immolated on the altar of some fiendishly cruel, antique deity.  I felt faint and sick at heart and near swooning away.  I lay on the floor for some time unconscious of what was going on around me, in a sort of stupor, utterly crushed over the horrors about me.  I do not know how long I had lain there, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps half an hour, when suddenly I heard a gruff, deep voice behind me—­the brigadier, who had come around to inspect and to give orders about the outposts.  His calm, quiet voice brought me to my senses and I reported to him.  His self-assurance, kindness, and determination dominated the situation.  Within five minutes he had restored confidence, giving definite orders for the welfare of every one, man and beast alike, showing his solicitude for the wounded, for the sick and weak ones, and mingling praise and admonition in just measure.  As by magic I felt fortified.  Here was a real man undaunted by nervous qualms or by over-sensitiveness.  The horrors of the war were distasteful to him, but he bore them with equanimity.  It was, perhaps, the first time in my life that I regretted that my artistic education had over-sharpened and overstrung my nervous system, when I saw how manfully and bravely that man bore what seemed to me almost unbearable.  His whole machinery of thinking was not complicated and not for a moment did qualms of “Weltschmerz” or exaggerated altruism burden his conscience and interfere with his straight line of conduct which was wholly determined by duty and code of honor.  In his private life he was an unusually kind man.  His solicitude for his subordinates, for prisoners, and for the wounded was touching, yet he saw the horrors of the war unflinchingly and without weakening, for were they not the consequences of the devotion of men to their cause?  The whole thing seemed quite natural to him.  The man was clearly in his element and dominated it.