From beyond the nearest shoulder of land sounded suddenly some gigantic and hoarse whistle, an ear-shattering roar of warning and urgency. There was shouting and a stir of movement; the wagons and Red Cross vans began to pull out to one side; and over the brow of the hill, hurtling into sight, huge, unbelievably swift, roaring upon its whistle, tore a great, gray-painted motor lorry, packed with khaki-clad infantrymen. It was going at a hideous speed, leaping its tons of weight insanely from rock ridge to traffic-churned slough in the road; there was only time to note its immensity and uproar and the ranked faces of the men swaying in their places, and it was by, and another was bounding into sight behind it. A hundred and odd of them, each with thirty men on board--three battalions to reinforce the threatened left wing--a mighty instrument of war, mightily wielded. It was Russia as she is today, under way and gathering speed. At Rennenkampf's headquarters at Wirballen, where formerly one changed trains going from Berlin to Petersburg, one sees the fashion in which Russia shapes for war. Here, beneath a little bridge with a black and white striped sentry box upon it, its muddy banks partitioned with rotten planks into goose-pens, runs that feeble stream which separates Russia from Germany. Upon its further side, what is left of Eydtkuhnen, the Prussian frontier village, looms drearily through its screen of willows--walls smoke-blackened and roofless, crumbling in piles of fallen brick across its single street, which was dreary enough at its best. To the north and south, and behind to the eastward, are the camps, a city full, a country full of men armed and equipped; the mean and ugly village thrills to the movement and purpose. On the roof of the schoolhouse there lifts itself against the pale Autumn sky the cobweb mast and stays of the wireless apparatus, and in the courtyard below and in the shabby street in front there is a surge of automobiles, motor cycles, mounted orderlies--all the message-carrying machinery of a staff office. The military telephone wires loop across the street, and spray out in a dozen directions over the flat and trodden fields; for within the dynamic kernel to all this elaborate shell is Rennenkampf, the Prussian-Russian who governs the gate of Germany. [Illustration: GEN. PAUL PAU Commanding one of the French Armies (_Photo from Underwood & Underwood._)] [Illustration: GEN. D'AMADE Commanding One of the French Armies (_Photo from Bain News Service._)] Here is the brain of the army. Its limbs go swinging by at all hours, in battalions and brigades, or at the trot, with a jingle of bits and scabbards, or at the walk, with bump and clank, as the gun wheels clear the ruts. It is the infantry--that fills the eye--fine, big stuff, man for man the biggest infantry in the world.