"_Langsam_ Gelbricke," called Tzschirner to the chauffeur, and then the Rittmeister drew his pistol and sat with his hand on the trigger, a precaution which until now I had never seen a German officer take in the tensest situations of the Eastern or Western front. From Jamine, the roar of the guns broke through the cold rain in a monotone of clamor, but more distinct became the rattle of rifles among the pines. A bullet kicked up the dirty snow. At that moment I glanced toward the edge of the trees at the left, where I saw a Russian lying on his back in the snow. He wore a brown army coat with red shoulder straps, sewed with the yellow numerals of his regiments. His gun was leaning against a tree and I thought that it had been torn from his hands or placed there. For with upraised arms, rigid in the struggle with death, his clawing hands seemed to have been turned to stone. At the same time, with odd irrelevance, there flashed into my mind the remembrance of the lead soldiers that I had played with as a boy--a soldier whose gun I had broken off and whose arms I had bent, to signify his death. And I thought of the lead soldier until we passed a yellow haired Finn, whose hands were folded on his great chest, as though a comrade had fixed him for burial before fleeing among the firs. Now the crack of the rifles came closer and with more frequency, and we began to see blood upon the snow, and then a big red hole around which fragments of clothing and fragments of stiff things were strewn. "A shell burst there," remarked Tzschirner. A few paces on we came upon a dead horse from whose flanks a square chunk had been cut, presumably by a fugitive who, with this first food of days, had crept into the woods. All around we could never see the men who were shooting or the dim outlines of their human targets. And then, from out of the trees, a German soldier came stumbling, and fell limply into the snow. Jumping out while the car was in motion, our red haired mechanician ran toward him. "Dead," called Seyring, throwing up his hands. Tzschirner seemed to come to a decision. "I think," he said, "that this is as far as we had better go. You have seen it. It is the same." "But, Captain," I urged, "isn't there some place from which we could see an artillery position?" "You would go into the woods," bantered Tzschirner. "I will take you, but it is very dangerous." "No, Captain," I said. "We would like to see the battlefield from the position of one of your batteries in action." "That is possible," said Tzschirner. "But we must return to Augustowo and journey by another road."