"Before them stretches a new country. Broader plains, lower ranges of hills than in Galicia. To the right and left, as far as the eye reaches, fields, meadows, and swamps. Here and there, windmills. Immense forests, different from those they knew at home: pines, oaks, and birches, all mixed together, with some ash-trees and poplars, only slightly cut down and low of growth. The retreating Russians have tried everywhere to burn down forest and field, but have destroyed in most places only narrow strips and small spots that look now like islands: there the trees have been bared of their foliage in the middle of the summer as if it were the early spring, and the pines are red and brown like beech trees in the winter time. Every few miles trenches and shelters had been cut into the landscape and ran across field and forest, hills and valleys, masterpieces of their kind, cunningly hidden, partly untouched. Alongside the road there were many, many soldiers' graves, singly or sometimes combined into small cemeteries. The Russians bury their dead with devotion. Double-armed Greek crosses betray their burial places.... But not always did they find time during their retreat. Occasionally a penetrating odor of decay announces the fact that some of their dead had to be deprived of burial. Then, very rarely only, indeed, one comes across black, swollen corpses, so terribly gnawed and disfigured by millions of small crawling animals, that all individuality, all humanity, has been destroyed. "The advance moves on for miles on curious roads. Are these still roads? There is no foundation. Just cuts have been made into the ground, which is sandy here and muddy there and again swampy. During dry weather they take turns in being dusty like the desert, or hard as stone or gently yielding; during rain they are without exception unreliable, spiteful, dangerous. The burden of the uninterrupted transport traffic escapes to the left and to the right farther and farther into the edges of the fields, cutting off continuously new widths of wheel tracks so that roadways are formed 150 to 300 feet wide, which narrow down only at bridges or fords by sheer necessity. All bridges, even those that have been spared by the Russians, have to be solidly renewed and supported, for they had never been intended for such demands. Across furrows and deeply cut wheel tracks, across loose footbridges, through puddles that are more like ponds, and through deep holes, motorcars--fast automobiles and gigantic motor trucks--rush and rumble madly, from time to time helplessly sinking down into the mud and mire till relays of horses and the force of the next detachment pushing forward on its way rescues them and they are off again."