"Oh, yes," and Tzschirner is almost apologetic; "our pioneers would have finished the work in much less than an hour, but the Russians fired on them with shrapnel," and then as if remarking the weather, he added, "Fifteen were killed." The car chugs on. A great blue bulbed cupola shows above the trees and we rattle across the Jura. "The Russians tried to destroy this bridge, too," Tzschirner is explaining, "but we came too fast for them and drove them up into Tauroggen, where they endeavored to stand." ... Our motor is panting up the hill past the Russian church and turns into the village of Tauroggen. "We put the artillery on them," continues Tzschirner, and we pass rows of narrow, squalid houses, chipped with shrapnel, "and they took Tauroggen by storm. There was street fighting and then, picking up their dead, they ran with them through the village, across the field to the woods," and Tzschirner waves his hand down the road toward a patch of pines, "and they're in the woods now." We turn into a muddy street where the fighting must have been hot, for the way is littered with cartridge belts and guns and on a pale blue picket fence Russian accouterments dangle like unclean things hung out in the sun. "If you will excuse me," says the Rittmeister, "I shall speak with Ober-Lieutenant Hoffman." We find Ober-Lieutenant Hoffman quartered in a clean looking hut, distinguished by a shingle, hand-lettered with that official looking KOMMANDO. After he has conversed with the Ober-Lieutenant, Tzschirner brings him into the motor and we drive through Tauroggen in the direction the Russians have fled. We have put the last outlying house behind us and at a suggestion from Ober-Lieutenant Hoffman the motor is stopped. "It is better," explains Tzschirner, "that the auto remain here. It gives too large a target." With a strange feeling, almost of superiority, for not thirty feet ahead, what appears to be a first line trench is filled with soldiers, we walk towards them down the road. Over there, a quarter of a mile, across the barren field where the Russians dragged their dead, are the woods, and skulking there are the Russians--the soldiers maintain a nervous vigil. Not a sound breaks the strain, only the clatter of axes, as far to the right the soldiers are clearing a zone for the enfilading fire of the machine guns. And as we walk past the trench and approach the last outpost this tension is communicated to us. We walk through the barricade--a ladder tangled with wire, that slides between two broken carts on either side of the road. We scarcely notice the two sentries who walk twenty paces from the barricade toward the woods, wheel and return. We are watching the woods--that great green semicircle across the field where the Russians are hiding.