Lies and the snobbish ridicule with which our magazines and papers have been full, run off men like these like water off a duck. These men are in earnest. They have work to do. No one who has heard them singing the "Wacht am Rhein" through the starlight of garrisoned towns all the way from the Channel to the Carpathians, will talk of their being "stolid"; but they have, it is true, no coltishness. They are grown up. And this discipline of theirs does not mean, as so many people seem to think it does, being compelled to do what you don't want to do. It means doing what you are told to do as well as it possibly can be done, no matter how small it is nor who is looking on--a sense of duty which makes every switchman behind the lines act as if he were Von Hindenburg. The thing of theirs, this will-power and moral earnestness, is one of the things that last--something before which the merely frivolous has always gone down and always will. The road down which we were going was, in a general way, the path already taken by the Austrian and Hungarian troops which had stormed the outer works at Kobilany two days before and been the first to enter the town. What happened was much like what had happened at Ivangorod. A German corps crossed the Bug to north and south and closed in on the rail-road, the Sixth Austro-Hungarian Corps under Corps General of Infantry Arz attacked the centre. The Russians sent the entire civil population eastward, removed their artillery and everything of value they could take, and set fire to the city. There was a brief artillery preparation to which the Russians, who all through this retreat appeared to be short in ammunition and artillery, replied for a time; then the outer forts were stormed, and when the Sixth Corps entered the burning city the Russians, except for the rear-guard prisoners, were gone. We swung past a freight yard littered with over-turned cars, through a tangle of wagons--army wagons pushing one way and distracted peasants the other--over a pontoon across the narrow Bug and on into the town. A city of sixty-five thousand people, with the exception of a church or two and houses that could almost be counted on one's fingers, was a waste of gaping windows and blackened chimneys. The Russians' purpose was not altogether clear, for the town was their town, and its destruction at this time of the year could not seriously embarrass a well-provisioned, confident enemy, but they had, at any rate, wiped it off the map. Not a woman, a child, a glimmer of peaceful life; only smouldering ruins, the occasional abandoned rifles and cartridge-boxes of the army that had retired, and the endless wagon-trains of the army pursuing them.