I had been in another captured city, with the besieged then, and when I think of Antwerp it is of the creepy, bright stillness during the bombardment—­the autumn sun, the smell of dead leaves, the shuttered streets, without a sound except when a shell came screaming in from the country or, a block or so away, there was a detonation and some facade came rumbling down.  But when I think of Brest-Litovsk it will be of dust—­dust like fog and thickened with the smoke and twilight—­and that strange, wild, creaking stream of wagons fighting through it as they might have fought in the days when Europe was young and whole races of men came pouring over the frontiers.

We started off finally on foot through streets silent as the grave—­not a person, not a lamp, not so much as a barking dog, as queer and as creepy as some made-up thing in a theatre.  Once we stumbled past a naked and dismembered trunk set up beside a doorway—­a physician’s manikin that chance or some sinister clown had left there.  Once—­and one of the strangest sounds I ever heard—­behind the closed up-stair shutters of an apothecary’s shop, whose powders and poisons were strewn over the sidewalk, a piano haltingly played with one finger.

At last a light, an open door, a sentry—­and this was, indeed, theatrical—­a lighted room and a long table set with candles, flowers, and wine.  The commander of the Sixth Corps had just been decorated with the order “Pour le merite” and he and his officers were dining before taking up the march.  He welcomed us in the true Hungarian style, grabbed me by the arms and asked if I was hungry, apologized for their frugal war-time fare, told how splendidly his men had behaved, had a word and a place for every-body, as if we were all old friends.

There were three rooms full of officers, and every-one half rose and bowed in military fashion as we made our way between the tables to our seats at the end of the third.  An amiable young signal-officer who had been at his telephone some thirty kilometres away when the city was taken and was off at three next morning, sat opposite me and told with great spirit how the only common language between him and some of his polyglot men was the English he had learned in school and they had picked up in America.

We slept on commandeered mattresses that night on the floor of a vacant house, with a few Hungarian hussars still singing over the victory in the back yard, and got up to find the crowded town of the night before as empty as the old camp-ground the day after the circus.

We strolled through some of the empty streets and into the citadel, where a handful of German soldiers were guarding a placid, tan-colored little herd of Russian prisoners; recrossed the pontoon bridge, as crowded as it had been the afternoon before, and then stopped at Kobilany fort on the way back to Ivangorod.