"Yard by yard the ranks and lines of the Austrians were driven back, but the nearer their retreat brought them to the open country west of the wood the hotter was the contest waged. The last two kilometers of the woody belt are something incredible to behold; there seems hardly an acre that is not sown like the scene of a paperchase--only here with bloody bandages and bits of uniform. Men fighting hand to hand with clubbed muskets and bayonets contested each tree and ditch. The end was, of course, inevitable. The troops of the dual alliance could not fill their losses, and the Russians could. "At last came the day when the dirty, grimy, bloody soldiers of the Czar pushed their antagonists out of the far side of the woodland--and what a scene occurred in that open bit of country with the quaint little village of Augustowo at the crossroads! Once out in the open the hungry guns of the Russians, so long yapping ineffectively without knowing what their shells were doing, had their chance. Down every road through the forest came the six-horse teams with the guns jumping and jingling behind, with their accompanying caissons heavy with death-charged shrapnel, and the moment the enemy were in the clear these batteries, eight guns to a unit, were unlimbered on the fringe of the wood and pouring out their death and destruction on the wretched enemy now retreating hastily across the open. And the place where the Russians first turned loose on the retreat is a place to remember. "Dead horses, bits of men, blue uniforms, shattered transport, overturned gun-carriages, bones, broken skulls, and grisly bits of humanity strew every acre of the ground. ENORMOUS LOSSES ON BOTH SIDES "A Russian officer who seemed to be in authority on this gruesome spot volunteered the information that already they had buried at Kozienice, in the wood and on this open spot, 16,000 dead. Those that had fallen in the open and along the road had been decently interred, as the forests of crosses for ten miles along that bloody way clearly indicated, but back in the woods themselves were hundreds and hundreds of bodies that lay as they had fallen. Sixteen thousand dead means at least 70, casualties all told, or 35,000 on a side if losses were equally distributed. And this, figured on the basis of the 16,000 dead already buried, without allowing for the numbers of the fallen that still lie about in the woods. And yet here is a battle the name of which is hardly more than known in America, yet the losses on both sides amount to more than the entire army that General Meade commanded at the Battle of Gettysburg.