Shalkotoff had about eighty waggons and carts under his command, all loaded with provisions which had come from Vilna, where there was a magazine. He was travelling by march-route, the railway-lines being fully occupied by troop trains, and in the conveyance of wounded men and prisoners. Every night we camped in the mud by the roadside, unless buildings or houses were available, which was not often the case. For the Germans had destroyed so many of these that what were left were crowded by homeless people herded together in dreadful misery, starving, and possessed of nothing but what they stood in. We passed through some districts, however, in which a German had not been seen; and in others they had not been so brutal as the generality of their countrymen. Nor are all Germans equally cruel. At a place called Mirno, near Jedvabno, we met a band of 200 prisoners being marched to the railway-station at Setshutchin for conveyance into the interior. Several of them were officers, and one, a captain, expressed his disgust at the brutality of his countrymen. He said it came to him as a terrible revelation that Germans could be so cruel and wicked, and he was as much astonished at it as any person in the world. Others, of all ranks, at different times, expressed much the same opinion. Perhaps nothing hurt Russian feeling more than the desecration of their churches. The Germans too often evinced a bigotry and irreverence for things that most people consider sacred similar to that which disgraced our own Cromwellians three centuries ago. They stabled their horses in the churches, littered the floors of the sacred edifices with filth, and broke the images. Such conduct is deplorable; nothing can be more revolting than to hurt a people through its religion, whatever we may think of its bigotry and idolatry. Besides, the indomitable bravery of the Greek and Romish priesthood in this deplorable war must ever command the admiration of all right-thinking men; and this alone should have protected them from insult.