"Whoever managed to enter Brest-Litovsk saw for the first time a big city devastated and ruined as pitilessly as formerly only villages had been made to suffer. Hundreds and hundreds of houses, once human habitations, now smashed down to their very foundations, or mangled so as to have lost all meaning, ruins containing nothing but broken stones and ashes and at the best here and there a stair banister, suspended in midair. And all destruction had not been wrought as a result of a long siege and its continuous assaults of gunfire and shells. In one night, at the command of the Russian authorities, this Russian city had been laid waste. Only about one-quarter of it had remained entirely or partly habitable. Only in the citadel were there left supplies of any great amount. There quite some quantities of flour and canned food, weapons and munitions, war and railroad equipment, had escaped the well-prepared explosion, and had been saved only because there had not been enough time to complete the work of destruction and to explode all the mines that had been laid. A happy exception among this horrible riot of wholesale destruction was found occasionally in the case of some few estates of the Polish nobility. In some way they escaped here and there and were passed by without suffering demolition and despoliation in spite of the fact that the villages near which they were usually located were almost always masses of smoking ruins. The manor houses of some of these estates often became the temporary lodging of some division or even some army corps staff. For they filled one of the chief requirements for such headquarters: a sufficiency of many large, light rooms which permitted to combine the necessary offices with the officers' quarters under the same roof. Every high command needs a number of offices for its various branches of service, in war as well as in peace. At that, war demands a hundredfold measure of ready cooperation and punctual working together. What happens from early in the morning, far into the night and often throughout the night in these offices during the course of a lively action on the battle field is nothing more or less than administrative activity as it is known to us and practiced in peace, but of a degree of activity, responsibility, and decision, of an importance and variety as times of peace do not demand from an army officer.