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.

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 l