We swung past a freight yard littered with over-turned cars, through a tangle of wagons—­army wagons pushing one way and distracted peasants the other—­over a pontoon across the narrow Bug and on into the town.

A city of sixty-five thousand people, with the exception of a church or two and houses that could almost be counted on one’s fingers, was a waste of gaping windows and blackened chimneys.  The Russians’ purpose was not altogether clear, for the town was their town, and its destruction at this time of the year could not seriously embarrass a well-provisioned, confident enemy, but they had, at any rate, wiped it off the map.  Not a woman, a child, a glimmer of peaceful life; only smouldering ruins, the occasional abandoned rifles and cartridge-boxes of the army that had retired, and the endless wagon-trains of the army pursuing them.

All the dust through which we had ridden since morning seemed to have gathered over that dismal wreck.  It was a fog in the streets, on which darkness was already settling—­streets without a lamp or a sound except that from the onflowing trains.  Through this dust we tried to find the headquarters of the Sixth Army Corps.  To its commander our passes took us and without him we had no reason for being in Brest-Litovsk.  Nobody knew where the Sixth was.  Two Hungarian officers, hurrying by in a commandeered carriage, shouted back something about the “church with a blue cupola”; somebody else said “near the schnapps factory”; a beaming young lieutenant, helping to disentangle wagon-trains at the main street comers, said that the Sixth had marched at three that morning.  We had driven all day with nothing to eat but a bit of war bread and chocolate, we were black with dust, there was not a crumb in the place that did not belong to the army, and we sat there in the thickening dusk, almost as much adrift as a raft in mid-ocean,

The two armies—­wagon-trains, that is to say—­were crossing each other at that corner.  The Germans were going one way, the Austro-Hungarians the other—­tired, dust-covered horses and men, anonymous cogs in the vast machine, which had been following the man ahead since the day before, like enough, and might go on into another day before they could make camp.

Young Hungarian officers greeted one another gayly, and exchanged the day’s adventures and news; young Germans rode by, slim, serious, and self-contained.  Now the stream would stop as one line tried to break through the other, puzzled drivers would yank their horses back, then some determined section commander would come charging back, fling his horse into the tangle—­wagon tongues jammed into the canopy in front, protestations in German, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, goodness knows what, until at last one line gave way and the other shot forward through the dust again.