The road tunneled through a vista of trees. We passed another peasant family--a father and a mother bearing packs, three children, one carrying a bird cage in which there was no bird. They too were on the heels of the retreat, only they were going back to the homes which they had fled in those terrifying November days when the Russians had overrun the land ... going back to what? The sledge had stopped. A scrawny girl held the cow by a rope. As our searchlight glared into their faces, the children, piled among the household goods, frowned and blinked. The man was holding the horse. The woman was staring off into the night. Our gaze followed hers. Our headlight was shining on a roofless house with charred windows as the empty sockets of a skull and revealed the outlines of a jagged wall that had been the barn, and a huddle of fence palings and soft earth, once the garden. The woman who sat with her children on the loaded sledge, must have sobbed--although we could not hear it above the motor's din--for the man holding the horse turned, and the girl holding the cow turned, and the frowning, blinking children turned in her direction. And after we had passed we looked back and they were standing there in the same postures, transfixed, gazing at the blackened chaos once their home. * * * * * There are many villages between Kowahlen and the frontier--the villages of Lukellen, Drosdowen and Mierunsken. But to-day they are only names by which may be characterized certain works of Russian arson. Not a house did we find intact on this road to the frontier, not a home but that was ashes or if of stone whose walls were black. Not even the church at Mierunsken had escaped the torch. In a few moments more we were in Russia. We did not need the striped frontier posts to confirm this; nor the holes and lumps, that marked the end of German road building. Something more significant revealed to us that at last we had come to the land of the Bear. For we passed through two villages but a kilometer apart and in these not a house had been burned, not even a fence smashed; they were Amt and Filipowa, in the Czar's domain. "Rittmeister," I asked, "did German soldiers follow the Russians down this road?" "All the way to Suwalki," replied Tzschirner. "German soldiers," I persisted, "who passed through Goldap and all those villages to the frontier." "Naturlich. That was the line of advance." I was silent. "Rittmeister, you have wonderful discipline in your army." Tzschirner seemed surprised. "Why?" "I cannot understand," I said, "how your soldiers, seeing what the Russians had done to East Prussian villages, could refrain from taking vengeance on the first Russian village they entered." I think the Rittmeister was a little offended. "We are soldiers," he said with dignity; "not criminals." He paused and perhaps guessing that Belgium was in my mind, "We only make war on non-combatants when they make war on us."