ed between them innumerable hamlets of only two or three houses,
and a small town or two. Most of them are empty now; the German army
that leans its back on the Vistula's fortresses has cleared this country
like a dancing floor for its work. It has rearranged it as one
rearranges the furniture in a room; whole populations have been
transported, roads broken, bridges blown up, strategically unnecessary;
villages burned. Nothing remains on the ground that has not its purpose
assigned--not even the people, and their purpose has been clear for
some time past. The Russians have been over this ground already, and
fell back from it after their defeat between Osterode and Allenstein.
Their advance was through villages lifeless and deserted and over empty
roads; the retreat was through a country that swarmed with hostile life.
Roads were blocked with farm carts, houses along their route took fire
mysteriously, signaling their movement and direction, and answered from
afar by other conflagrations; bridges that had been sound enough before
blew up at the last moment. What the Belgians were charged with, and
their country laid waste for, all East Prussia is organized to do daily
as an established and carefully schooled auxiliary to the army.

A few days since there arrived a prisoner, driven in on foot by a
mounted Cossack, sent back by the officer commanding the reconnoissance
party which had captured him. He came up the street, shuffling at a
quick walk to keep ahead of the horse and the thin, sinister Cossack--an
elderly farmer, in work-stained clothes, with the lean neck and pursed
jaws of a hard bargainer. In all his bearing and person there was
evident the man of toilsome life who had prospered a little; in that
soldier-thronged street, in his posture of a prisoner with the Cossack's
revolver at his back, he was conspicuous and grotesque. His eyes, under
the gray pent of his brows, were uneasy, and through all his commonplace
quality and his show of fortitude there was a gleam of the fear of death
that made him tragic. He had been found on his farm doing nothing in
particular; it was out of simply general suspicion that the Russian
officer had ordered him to be searched. The result was the discovery of
a typewritten paper, giving precise instructions as to how a German
civilian in East Prussia must act toward the enemy--how to signal
movements of infantry, of cavalry, of artillery; how to estimate the
numbers of a body of men,