Where the Cossacks score: a Cavalry Skirmish in the Rear of the Russian Retreat.
(By permission of The Graphic.)
Another correspondent describes what he saw in Warsaw prior to the entry of the Germans. Day and night, he tells us, one heard the muffled roar as factory plant, too heavy or too deeply embedded in concrete to be moved, was blown up. Every fragment of the metal was carried eastwards. The newspapers made their last appearance with a notice that the city was to be abandoned, after which the lino-types were uprooted and the very floors carted away. Police and soldiers visited every printing works and newspaper office, taking away founts of type and dismantling presses. Hardly a ton of copper fittings was left in the city. . . . Warsaw knew no sleep over that week end. Through the streets passed endless columns of carts and lorries heavily laden, and all making for the bridges across the Vistula. You could only distinguish a wagon loaded with millions of roubles in paper money from those containing sacks of potatoes, by the soldiers who sat swinging their legs over the side. Day and night gangs of soldiers were seen stripping league after league of copper telegraph wires from their poles. Church doors flung open revealed the interiors filled with weeping, praying Poles and Russians, amongst whom passed priests in their rich vestments. Aloft in the towers the huge bronze bells had been unslung, lest they should become food for Krupp's furnaces. Not only the bells, but all records and church plate, precious vestments, and ikons,[56] were carted away into the interior. In the Church of the Holy Cross there was a vault, and in it lay the heart of Chopin.[57] The vault was opened, and the precious relic was removed to Moscow. Wherever possible troops were sent out to garner the crops in the surrounding country. Where this was impossible the harvest was destroyed, and villages were burnt to the ground. Thousands of poor were ferried across the Vistula to begin their long tramp eastward.
It is said that after the fall of Warsaw the Kaiser was very much annoyed that the Russian army had been allowed to escape. "We have paid too dearly," he said to his generals, "for the privilege of walking along the streets of Warsaw. Our success has been gained under such a cloud of mourning that at present I cannot think of rewards. You are not little children to be dazzled with a toy while the Russian troops are at liberty. You have secured the cage, but the bird has flown. While the Russian army is free the problem of the war is unsolved."
A Russian journalist tells us that when the Kaiser seized the cage without the bird he began, like Jehu, to drive furiously in the hope of rounding up the retreating enemy. His soldiers were driven remorselessly. The advance guard was ordered not to beat the enemy but to detain him until the arrival of the main body. The leading detachments were hurried along so rapidly that they often lost touch with each other. Along the Vistula, on the bridges and at the fords, sentinels remained unchanged and without food for two or three days at a stretch. They were forgotten, and some of them died at their posts. All this time the Russians made great captures of their pursuers. So many Germans were seized that the captors scarcely knew how to deal with them. The prisoners when questioned said that they had been marching almost without pause for five days and nights. Each morning they were driven forward for three or four hours. Then they had twenty minutes' rest, and were again sent onward until midnight."
Perhaps you will be surprised to learn that a British boy fought with the Russians, and that he rose from the ranks to be an ensign.[58] His name was John Wilton, and he was a frail lad of seventeen when the Tsar gave him permission to serve in the ranks of the famous Petrograd Guards. He became a mounted scout, and took part in every battle in which his corps was engaged. He was one of the scouts who managed to get within eight miles of Cracow. After six months' service he was promoted ensign, and five months later was in command of the mounted scouts of his regiment. On one occasion he very cleverly withdrew his scouts from a position in which they had been ambushed by German cavalry, and got them away with the loss of only one man.
You have read more than once in these pages of women fighting in the Russian ranks. A story from Petrograd tells us that twelve schoolgirls from a Moscow college somehow obtained uniforms, boarded a military train at a roadside station, and thus reached the Austrian frontier. When they left the train for the march towards Lemberg the major discovered them, and ordered them back home; but they persuaded him to let them go on with the army. "We had to have our hair cropped," said one of them, Zoe Smirnoya, a girl of sixteen. "That is what I felt most. My hair was long, and I confess I cried. I've carried it ever since in my haversack."
The girls fought in many of the Galician battles. They never fell out of the ranks, and they shared all the hardships of the campaign. They took men's names, and their comrades treated them kindly. When von Mackensen's big guns swept away the Russian trenches they fell back with the army. An officer asked Zoe, "Were you afraid?" "Of course," she replied; "how could one help? When the big shells burst all around us we could not help crying out. Several of the girls were only fourteen, and in their terror they called for their mothers. For that matter, I think I blubbered too."
During the retreat one of the girls was killed by a shell. "We buried her on the morning after the battle," said Zoe. "We put her in a hurriedly-made grave, and set up a little cross marked with her name. On the morrow we were far away, and now I hardly remember the place where she was buried." Zoe was twice hit, and the second time was left out in the open, but was rescued by stretcher-bearers. She spent a month in hospital, and returned to the firing line as a corporal, wearing the war medal and the Cross of St. George.
Amongst the names that Russians hold in high honour is that of Michaelovna Ivanova, who acted as a nurse under her brother, a regimental surgeon. She insisted on going out to tend wounded even in the midst of a hail of bullets from rifles and machine guns. Her brother and the other regimental officers begged her to seek shelter, but in vain. When all the officers had fallen, the men lost heart for a moment and began to retire. At once the heroic nurse ran in amongst them, rallied them round her, and at their head rushed forward and captured a trench. Unhappily she was struck by a bullet, and died shortly afterwards.
Perhaps you will be surprised to learn that British seamen, with armoured motor cars, were sent out to lend a hand to the Russians. They did not take part in the fighting described in the former chapter, for they only left England late in the year. On 12th December, when they were in the Arctic Ocean on the way to Archangel, they established a record by singing "God save the King" farther north than any British field force on active service had ever been before. We may be quite sure that, under Commander Locker-Lampson, they fully upheld the honour and glory of the British Navy. It is also said that Japanese guns and gunners fought for Russia during the year 1915.