Past us, as we sweated there, the slow but surer wagon-trains ploughed forward.  One, a German train, stopped beside us to bait their horses—­ officers of the Landwehr or Landsturm type, who looked as if they might be, as doubtless they were, lawyers, professors, or successful business men at home.  They were from a class who, with us, would generally be helpless in the field, yet these bronzed, bearded, thoughtful-looking men seemed just as familiar with the details of their present job as with the work they had left behind.

Ever since we had crossed into Poland this sober, steel-gray stream had been mingling with and stiffening our lighter-hearted, more boyish, blue-gray stream of Austrians and Hungarians.  Here were men who knew what they were doing, believed in it, and had the will to put it through.  One thought of Emerson’s “Earnest of the North Wind” whenever they came in sight.

Those who talk of “frightfulness” and get their notions of German soldiers from the vaporings of sedentary publicists, who know no more of them than may be seen through the pipe smoke of their own editorial rooms, are destined to a melancholy awakening.  You may prefer your own ways, but you cannot make them prevail by blackguarding the other man’s weaknesses; you must beat him where he is strong.

Lies and the snobbish ridicule with which our magazines and papers have been full, run off men like these like water off a duck.  These men are in earnest.  They have work to do.  No one who has heard them singing the “Wacht am Rhein” through the starlight of garrisoned towns all the way from the Channel to the Carpathians, will talk of their being “stolid”; but they have, it is true, no coltishness.  They are grown up.  And this discipline of theirs does not mean, as so many people seem to think it does, being compelled to do what you don’t want to do.  It means doing what you are told to do as well as it possibly can be done, no matter how small it is nor who is looking on—­a sense of duty which makes every switchman behind the lines act as if he were Von Hindenburg.  The thing of theirs, this will-power and moral earnestness, is one of the things that last—­something before which the merely frivolous has always gone down and always will.

The road down which we were going was, in a general way, the path already taken by the Austrian and Hungarian troops which had stormed the outer works at Kobilany two days before and been the first to enter the town.  What happened was much like what had happened at Ivangorod.  A German corps crossed the Bug to north and south and closed in on the rail-road, the Sixth Austro-Hungarian Corps under Corps General of Infantry Arz attacked the centre.  The Russians sent the entire civil population eastward, removed their artillery and everything of value they could take, and set fire to the city.  There was a brief artillery preparation to which the Russians, who all through this retreat appeared to be short in ammunition and artillery, replied for a time; then the outer forts were stormed, and when the Sixth Corps entered the burning city the Russians, except for the rear-guard prisoners, were gone.