Once we passed a big Austrian mortar, covered with tarpaulin, by the side of the road, and again two big 20-centimetre guns, which had not had time to get up to Brest-Litovsk.  This is where you find the heavy artillery nowadays, quite as likely as in a fort, on some hard highway, where it can easily be moved and sheltered, not behind concrete, but some innocent-looking apple-tree.  Each fence corner was chalked with letters and numbers intelligible to the drivers, who passed that way; each bridge, down to the few boards across a ditch, had been examined by the pioneers, rebuilt if necessary, and a neat little sign set up on it, telling whether or not the heavy artillery could safely cross.  Flowing back toward this huge, confident, onrushing organism, the peasants—­ timid, halting, weary, and dust-covered, with wagons heaped with furniture, beds, hay for the horses, with the littlest children and those too old to walk—­were returning to the charred ruins of their homes.  They, too—­like the grass—­had their unconquerable strength.

The same patience and quiet courage which had struck me in Antwerp as peculiarly Belgian, was here again in these Poles, Slovaks, and Ruthenians, whose boys, perhaps, were fighting with the armies which had driven the Belgians out.  You would see peasant mothers with their children hanging from their shoulders—­women who had been tramping for days, perhaps, and might have days yet to tramp before they reached the heap of charred bricks that had once been a home.  Nearly all had a cow, sometimes pulling back on its halter and filling the air with lamentation, sometimes harnessed with the horse to the family wagon.  They had their pet dogs and birds, the little girls their kittens; from the front of one wagon poked the foolish head of a colt.  Babies scarcely big enough to sit up crammed their little fingers into their eyes to shut out the dust; bigger children, to whom the ride would be, no doubt, the event of their lives, laughed and clapped their hands, and old men on foot took off their caps, after the fashion of the country, and bowed gravely as we whirled past.  It seemed as if it were we who should do the saluting.

From the fields, as we whirled into and out of layers of air, sharply, as one does in a motor, came now the odor of ripe straw, now a whiff of coffee from a “goulash cannon,” steaming away behind its troop like the calliope in the old-fashioned circus, and now and then, from some thicket or across a clover field, the sharp, dismaying smell of rotting flesh.  The countryside lay so tranquil under the August sun that it was only when one saw a dead animal lying in an open field that one recalled the fire that, a few days before, must have crisscrossed this whole country, as now, doubtless, in constant cavalry fights and rear-guard skirmishes, it was crisscrossing the country up ahead.

Half an hour short of Brest-Litovsk an unfinished bridge turned us off into a potato field.  The soft ground had long since been pounded flat, as the army, swinging round to the north, had crossed on a pontoon a mile or two lower down.  The motor plunged, snarled, and stopped, and again, as we shovelled in front and pushed behind, we knew why armies burn bridges behind them.