The brief Austrian fire had been accurate.  There were shell holes inside the fort, along the parapet, and one frightful bull’s-eye, which had struck square on the inner concrete rim and blown chunks of concrete, as well as its own steel, all over the place.  The rifle-men left in this embrasure were killed at a stroke, and their blood remained freshly dried on the stones.  Of various uncomfortable places I have seen in the war this was one—­left behind in an open concrete fort to cover the retreat of artillery, and wait with a pop-gun rifle until the enemy decided that his artillery had “silenced” you and that it was time to storm.

One outer angle of the fort had been blown up and the rest was to have been dynamited, but a nimble Pole, fearing that he might be blown up, too, before the order came to retire, had, so we were told, cut the electric wire.  Just why Brest-Litovsk was given up must be left for those who have had a more comprehensive view of all the causes behind the Russian retreat.  It was plain to any one, however, that although this outer fortress had been taken by storm and a certain amount of damage done to the attacking force by mines laid in front of it, scarcely more than nominal resistance, considering the original preparations, had been made.

Again we whirled down the Ivangorod road, through a stream of wagons and peasants’ carts almost as thick as the day before.  We took a new road this time, but the deserted trenches still crossed the fields, and creeping up toward them, behind trees, through the greasy, black mud of pasture-land, were those eloquent little shelters, scarcely more than a basketful of earth, thrown up by the skirmishers as they ran forward, dropped and dug themselves in.

We came to Radom and turned southward again.  There were people, smoke coming from cottage chimneys, goose-girls with their spotless and absurdly peaceful geese, once a group of peasants—­young men and barefooted girls—­sitting on the grass resting from their work in the fields.  As the train passed one of the boys flung his arm round the neck of the tanned young nymph beside him, and over they rolled, fighting like good-natured puppies.  They were the very peasants we had seen dragging through the dust of the Brest-Litovsk road and this the same country, though it looked so strangely bright and warm and full of people.  War had blown over it, that was all, and life, which is so much stronger than the strongest field-marshal, which can be bent, beaten down, and crushed some-times, like the grass, was growing back again.

The End