II—"I REMEMBER ... A HORRIBLE TALE"
I remember one such pile of ruins, which I saw not far from the road leading to Jaroslav. This ruin remained permanently fixed in my memory by reason of a horrible tale connected with it.
Some time ago there lived on a farm a well-to-do Galician gardener. When the war broke out he was drafted into the army. He went forth, leaving behind him a wife and three small children. Shortly following his departure, troops commenced appearing in the immediate neighborhood. At first came small detachments, but these were quickly followed by more formidable bodies. In a short time lines of trenches were dug on both sides of the farm and real warfare began.
The firing was continuous. The family sought safety in the corners of their hut. They hid in the cellar under the heaps of beets and potatoes, but the children soon became accustomed to the hissing of bullets and lost all fear of them.
The wounded soldiers, for the most part Austrians, began crawling toward the farm. There they bound up their wounds. The children looked on and sometimes gave aid, holding with their tiny fingers the blood-soaked cotton, or winding long and transparent bandages around the wounded limbs. They became accustomed to pain and to the groans of the dying, and in their naive and simple way rendered all the help of which they were capable.
At night, when darkness fell and when firing from both sides would cease, the Austrian relief workers would come, place the wounded on long and unsteady stretchers, and carry them to the rear. On one occasion the wounded sent the eldest girl to the pond to fetch some water. She stayed away for a long, long time. Later she was found lying on the grass with a bullet in her slender little shoulder. The pails lay near her empty.
During the night she, too, was placed on a stretcher and was carried away. With her went the mother and the rest of the children. From that night on the farm remained forsaken.
The wounded, however, continued crawling to the hut, their numbers increasing from day to day. At times the litter bearers could not manage to look into the farm, and the wounded lay for days at a stretch without aid.