New Alexandria, a pleasant little town, grown up round an old chateau, and used as a sort of summer resort by Warsaw people, was nothing but blackened chimneys and heaps of brick.  The Russians had burned everything, and the inhabitants, who had fled into the pines, were just now beginning to straggle back.  Some had set up little stands in front of their burned houses and were trying to sell apples, plums, pears, about the only marketable thing left; some were cleaning brick and trying to rebuild, some contented themselves with roofing over their cellars.  And while we were observing these domestic scenes, the army, which had taken the outer forts by assault the preceding night, was marching into burning Brest-Litovsk.

It was another day before the motors came and we could get under way and whirl through such a cross-section of a modern army’s life as one could scarcely have seen in the west of Europe since the Germans first came rolling down on Paris.  No suburban warfare this; none of that hideous, burrowing, blowing up, methodically squashing out yard after yard of trenches and men.  This was war in the grand old style—­an army on the march, literally, down roads smoky with dust and sunshine, across bridges their own pioneers had built, a river of men and horses, wagons and guns, from one hazy blue horizon to another.

And all these men had come from victory and knew they were marching to it.  How far they were going none could tell, but the gods were with them—­so might the Grand Army have looked when it started eastward a hundred years ago.  Men and horses had been pouring down that road for weeks—­on each side of the macadam highway the level, unfenced fields were trampled flat.  It was fully one hundred and twenty miles, as the motor road ran, to Brest-Litovsk, and there was scarce a moment when, if we were not in the thick of them, we were not at least in sight of wagons, motors, horses, and men.  And, of course, this was but the rear of the army; the fighting men proper were up in front.  The dust hung like fog in the autumn sunshine.  Drivers were black with it; in the distance, on parallel roads, it climbed high in the still air like smoke from burning villages.  And out of this dust, as we whizzed on, our soldier chauffeur, whistle in mouth, shrieking for room, appeared pontoon trains—­big steel scows on top, beams underneath, cut, numbered, and ready to put together; trains of light farm wagons, wide at the top, slanting toward the middle, commandeered from all over Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the war and driven, some by soldiers, but oftener by civilians with the yellow Austrian bands on their arms; heavy ammunition wagons drawn by four horse; with a soldier outrider astride one of the leaders, and from time to time columns of reserves, older men for the most part, bound for guard duty, probably, shuffling along in loose order.  Round and through these wagon-trains, in a swirl of dust, rumbled and swayed big motor-trucks, and once or twice, scattering everything with a lilting “Ta-te...  Ta-da” the gray motor, the flash of scarlet, pale blue, and gold, and the bronzed, begoggled, imperial visage of some one high in command.