imes they
are awful; on this particular occasion they were full of large holes
made by shells and covered with thick swampy mud that had been snow the
week before. It delayed us so much that we did not get to Skiernevice
till late that night.

Skiernevice is a small town, important chiefly as a railway junction, as
two lines branch off here towards Germany and Austria north-west and
south-west. The Tsar has a shooting-box here in the midst of beautiful
woods, and two rooms had been set apart in this house for our Column.

We arrived late in the evening, secretly hoping that we should get a
night in bed, and were rather rejoiced at finding that there were no
wounded there at all at present, though a large contingent was expected
later. So we camped in the two rooms allotted to us: Princess, Sister
G., and myself in one, and all the men of the party in the other. No
wounded arrived for two or three days, and we thoroughly enjoyed the
rest and, above all, the beautiful woods. How delicious the pines smelt
after that horrible Lodz. Twice a day we used to go down the railway
line, where there was a restaurant car for the officers; it seemed odd
to be eating our meals in the Berlin-Warsaw International Restaurant
Car. There was always something interesting going on at the station. One
day a regiment from Warsaw had just been detrained there when a German
Taube came sailing over the station throwing down grenades. Every man
immediately began to fire up in the air, and we ran much more risk of
being killed by a Russian bullet than by the German Taube. It was like
being in the middle of a battle, and I much regretted I had not my
camera with me. Another day all the debris of a battlefield had been
picked up and was lying in piles in the station waiting to be sent off
to Warsaw. There were truck-loads of stuff; German and Russian
overcoats, boots, rifles, water-bottles, caps, swords, and helmets and
all sorts of miscellaneous kit.

We often saw gangs of prisoners, mostly Austrian, but some German, and
they always seemed well treated by the Russians. The Austrian prisoners
nearly always looked very miserable, cold, hungry, and worn out. Once we
saw a spy being put into the train to go to Warsaw, I suppose to be
shot--an old Jewish man with white hair in a long, black gaberdine,
strips of coloured paper still in his hand with which he had been caught
signalling to the Germans. _How_ angry the soldiers were with him--one
gave him