This was the kind of war I had seen for years in pictures--the war of de Neuville and Verestchagin. I wonder if the officers noticed my impatience to be on the road to Augustowo. And then the Rittmeister did a significant thing. Drawing his Browning, he drew the clip from the magazine to see that it was full. "And now," he said, "we go to Augustowo," adding with a tantalizing smile, "Do you wish?" "Don't kill any Russians," Lieckfeld called after us and chuckled. Following the Petersburg Prospeckt, a wide unpaved highway, obviously the Main Street of gray, squat housed Suwalki, our motor bumped out on the road to Augustowo--a road of frozen brown snow in the middle of a dreary snow covered plain and tunneling ahead into a green forest of pine. We passed a huddle of miserable huts and a great Russian church with bulb shaped cupolas, slender minarets and a dome gleaming with gold. We passed the deserted garrison barracks, places of filth, in which the Germans would not live. We ran along a line of pretty pale blue fence palings; and then we saw the boys. They seemed to be playing a game. A little fellow, whose round fur hat and brown pea jacket was typical of his chums, was poking at something with a stick. Greatly excited, he called the boys, who seemed to be looking for something across the road in the snow. Stridently he called to them. "That boy is saying," explained Tzschirner who understands Russian, "that he has found another one." And we saw that the youngster was poking the snow away from a big bearded man in a sheepskin coat. The game the boys of Suwalki were playing was hunting the dead.... The woods opened up; a funeral stillness closed in. A Uhlan on patrol passed at a canter. Tzschirner gave a command and the motor stopped. "_Laden_," he said, and while the red haired mechanician was loading the two carbines strapped to the car, Tzschirner said, "The battle is continuing. Russians cut off from their regiments are in the woods. They are fugitives. They are hungry and if they see us, they'll shoot. I must say you this." We began to take an interest in the woods. We saw that the slender trunks of the pines gave poor concealment to a man but in the snow we discerned many tracks. Somewhere in their depths a rifle cracked. Tzschirner stopped the car. We listened; everything was still. We drove on. We came upon an abandoned howitzer and in the snow a magnum of unexploded shells, a great stain that had turned black, and a yellow mound of fresh clay. "A gun position," said Tzschirner briefly. "Our soldiers made advance too rapidly for the Russians to retreat."