"Here one sees where a dozen men had a little fort of their own, and fought furiously with the enemy a few feet away in a similar position. Day after day it went on, and day after day troops were poured into the Russian side of the wood, and day and night the continuous crack of rifle fire and the roar of artillery hurling shells into the wood could be heard for miles. . . . The forest looks as though a hurricane had swept through. Trees staggering from their shattered trunks, and limbs hanging everywhere, show where the shrapnel shells have been bursting. Yard by yard the ranks and lines of the enemy were driven back, but the nearer their retreat brought them to the open country west of the wood the hotter the contest became; for each man in his own mind must have known how they would fare when, once driven from the protecting forest, they attempted to retreat through the open country without shelter. "The state of the last two kilometres of the wooded belt is hard to describe. There seems scarcely an acre that is not sown like the scene of a paper-chase; only the trail here consists of blood-stained bandages and bits of uniform. Here also there was small use for the artillery, and the rifle and the bayonet played the leading part. Men, fighting hand to hand with clubbed muskets and bayonets, fought from tree to tree and ditch to ditch. . . . "But at last the day came when the dirty, grimy, blood-stained soldiers of the Tsar pushed their antagonists out of the far side of the belt of woodland. . . . Once out in the open, the hungry guns of the Russians got their chance. Down every road through the wood came the six-horse teams, with the guns jumping and jingling behind, with their accompanying caissons[162] heavy with shrapnel. The moment the enemy were in the clear, these batteries, eight guns to a unit, were unlimbered on the fringe of the wood, and were pouring out their death and destruction on the wretched enemy, now retreating hastily across the open." * * * * * The Russians, as perhaps you know, are a deeply religious people. A soldier thus tells us how he went into battle during an assault:-- "Our hearts were beating wildly. I felt a choking sensation in my throat, and my spirit boiled up within me. I heard myself shouting, and in my brain something was urging me to 'run, run' against the enemy. Some one in the front ranks began to sing the majestic hymn, 'O Lord, save Thy people.' Before he had finished the first line the rear ranks have taken it up and continued it, 'And bless Thine heritage.'