And here you could see the amount of trouble that can be made by blowing up a railroad bridge.  First, of course, a new timber bridge has to be flung across, and the Vistula is a good two hundred yards wide here and the river was high.  Up ahead the army was fighting forward, dependent, for the moment, on what came across that bridge.  A train arrives, hundreds of tons of freight which normally would roll across the river in a few puffs of a cigarette.  The cars must be opened, each box and sack taken out by hand, carried down a bank, loaded into a wagon; the wagons creep over the pontoons, struggle through the sand on the other side, then each piece must be unloaded and put on a train again.

An axle breaks, the returning line waits an hour for the other to cross, a sixty-foot pine log for the new railway bridge wedges fast in turning a corner and stops everything—­you must imagine them at it all day, sweating and swearing in all the dialects of the dual monarchy—­all night, with fagged horses and drivers dazed with sleep, in the blaze of a search-light reaching out over the river.  Meanwhile a tall timber railroad bridge was creeping across.  There was no pile-driver engine, and at each cluster of piles fifteen or twenty Russian prisoners, in their brown service uniforms, hung to as many ropes—­“Heave... whack!  Heave... whack!”—­in quaint retribution for what a few sticks of dynamite had done a fortnight before.

A thousand fresh Hungarian troops had just come in next morning, and were waiting for their coffee, when the word came by field-telephone that a Russian flier was dropping bombs about twenty kilometres away.  It was fine hunting-ground—­men, horses, stores, and the new bridge—­but he sailed away, and we drove a dozen miles up the Vistula to New Alexandria, burned during the enveloping movement on Ivangorod.

All along the way were trenches, telltale yellow lines of sand winding among the pines, gun positions, barbed wire, and every now and then a big plane-tree, with ladders running up to an artillery observation platform.  I climbed up one of them on cleats worn by Russian boots for a look at the Vistula and the string of Red Cross barges, filled with wounded, going up the river.  The children hereabout, at any rate, will revere the Russians, for their pioneers had carried that winding stairway up to the very tip-top of the tree in a manner only seen in dreams or picture-books.

All the farmhouses had been burned, and the peasants were just returning.  We passed several tired mothers with babies in shawls hanging from their shoulders and little boys trudging behind with some rusty kettle or coffee-pot, and once a woman, standing in the ruins of her house, of which only the chimney was left, calmly cooking her dinner.