The owner viewed his loss philosophically.  “When we have placed a war indemnity upon Russia I shall be paid in full,” he declared in a voice of supreme confidence.

My guides never gave me an opportunity to talk alone with the few civilians in the place, and at the sausage and beer lunch the conversation was based on the “wanton destruction by the beasts of an innocent town.”

After they had drunk so much beer that they both fell asleep I slipped quietly away and went about amid the ruins.  I came upon human bodies burned to a crisp.  Heaps of empty cartridge shells littered the ground, which I examined with astonishment for they were Russian, not German, shells, and must have been used by men defending the town.

I met a pretty girl of seventeen drawing water at a well, who had remained during the three weeks that the Russians were there to care for her invalid father, and had not suffered the slightest insult.  Yet all my informants had told me that the Russians had spared none of the weaker sex who had remained in their path.

Further investigations had revealed that the Russians had not fired a shot upon the town, but that the Germans had destroyed it driving them out.

I entered a little Roman Catholic church in the undamaged section of the town and noted with interest that nothing had apparently been disturbed—­this the more significant since the Russians hold a different faith.

I walked back towards the river and strolled through the neat, well-shaded, churchyard to the ruins of the large church, the dominating feature of the town.  It was clear from what was left that the lines of the body and the spire had been of rare beauty for such an insignificant place as Allenburg.

“Too bad!” I remarked to a white-haired old man who was sitting on a bench mournfully contemplating the ruins.

“Sad, so sad!” he said in a voice full of grief.  “And it seems sadder that it had to be done by our own people,” he added.

“Were you here during the fighting?” I asked.

“I was,” he answered.  “I would rather die than leave this place, where I was born and where I have always lived.”

I returned to the anxious guides add told them that I had visited the ruins of the church.

“A destruction which could serve no military purpose,” declared the man in brown.  “You see the methods of the people Germany is fighting.”

I expressed a desire to seek only one more thing, the church on the road to Friedland which had been destroyed by the Russians after the sixty maidens had been driven into it.  We went to it, but, alas! it had not been disturbed in the least.  I somehow felt that my guides saw the lack of destruction with genuine regret.  The big man with the black beard was at a loss to reconcile the story he told me at Konigsberg with the actual facts found on the spot.

“Somebody must have made a mistake,” was all he said.