“PUTTING ONE OVER” ON THE RUSSIANS
Granville Fortescue, who visited the Russian trenches in Poland, related in the Illustrated London News a story of how the Germans, to use a slang phrase, “put one over” on the too-confiding Russians. “This happened,” he wrote, “at a portion of the line where the positions ran so close that the men could communicate by shouting. It was around Christmas, and the Germans invited the Russians to come over for a hot cup of new coffee just received from home. The Russians replied to this invitation, shouting: ‘Come over and try our tea. It’s a special gift from the Czar.’
“The Germans then put up the white flag, and said that they would send over fifteen men to try the tea if the Russians would send over the same number to sample their coffee. The plan was carried out. When the fifteen Germans appeared in the Russian trench, the hosts remarked to one another that if these were a sample the enemy would not hold out long. They were a sick-looking lot. Suddenly the Germans pulled down their white flag and commenced firing. Then the Russians found that they had exchanged fifteen good soldiers for fifteen typhus patients.
“It is easy to believe that the Russian soldier could be imposed upon in this way. Although extremely courageous, he is very simple-minded with it all, and certainly trusting. He is a splendid physical specimen. In the trail of trench warfare this is the great desideratum. Then, the Russians of the type that are drafted into the army have all their life been accustomed to privation and exposure. For this reason they are the only troops that I have seen who can stick six days and nights on end in a trench, under constant small arms and shell fire, with the temperature below zero, and after a day’s rest be as good as ever. The Russians never grumble.”
CHAPTER XX
A VIVID PICTURE OF WAR
[THE BATTLE OF NEUVE CHAPELLE] — [A SURPRISE PREPARED] — [“HELL BROKE LOOSE”]—[A HORRIBLE THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES] — [TRENCHES FILLED WITH DEAD] — [HOARSE SHOUTS AND THE GROANS OF THE WOUNDED] — [INDESCRIBABLE MASS OF RUINS RUINS] — [“SMEARED WITH DUST AND BLOOD.”]
One of the most vivid word-pictures of what war means in all its horror was told by an eye-witness of the battle of Neuve Chapelle in which the British soldiers dislodged the Germans from an important position. He said:
“The dawn, which broke reluctantly through a veil of clouds on the morning of Wednesday, March 10, 1915, seemed as any other to the Germans behind the white and blue sandbags in their long line of trenches curving in a hemicycle about the battered village of Neuve Chapelle. For five months they had remained undisputed masters of the positions they had here wrested from the British in October. Ensconced in their comfortably-arranged trenches with but a thin outpost in their fire trenches, they had watched day succeed day and night succeed night without the least variation from the monotony of trench warfare, the intermittent bark of the machine guns—rat-tat-tat-tat-tat—and the perpetual rattle of rifle fire, with here and there a bomb, and now and then an exploded mine.