We crept slowly forward till we came up with the second of the two advanced sentries, a young man crouched on his knee with rifle loaded and ready. Here we stayed a little time, with now and then the lowest whisper, and in front of us the rushing river, beyond which were the sentries of the enemy; sky and air were clear. We crept on to the forward sentry on the bank, and were crouching beside him when a rocket went up in front of us beyond the river followed by a blaze of light and then a second and a third. "Lie down, your nobility," whispered my companion, and we lay as still as we could together while four rifle shots cracked at us. We could hear each other's breathing in the few seconds while the blaze hung above us. We had all crawled back to the second sentry when the rocket went up again followed by more shots, but this time we had some little shelter. We returned and bade "Good-night" to the Watch and lay for a while in a shelter close by, with a whispered talk of our joint task. On the way up the hill there were more rockets and more shots at us, but we were soon back at the earth hut with its welcome shelter and its friendly host, and the straw screen that served as a door shut on a good night and a sound sleep.
February 23.
All day long we sat in our earth hut or passed crouching along the trenches visiting the different points of observation. What a difference a few inches make! At each more exposed point no care seemed enough. The whole day bullets passed above us, sometimes singing—or as George said "wailing"—about fifteen yards off, but most of them embedded themselves in our hill, sometimes kicking away with a ricochet or exploding. Often there were sharp salvos from several rifles at once aimed mostly at the loopholes where our sharpshooters lay ready; men were shot through the forehead in this way.
In the afternoon I saw a fire light up in some German trenches by the river, and it quickly spread along their lines. A figure like an insect stood out shovelling at the flames and some of our men shot at it; the German passed down the slope but came again, this time going back at a run. The flames spread further until they were at last extinguished from below. We ourselves got nothing except bullets, and none of our men were wounded. There was no excitement and practically no reply.
It was considered that the enemy was wasting his powder, in a nervous fear of attack.
But all the day we saw, from our vantage-point, shell after shell raining on neighbouring positions. At one time attention was given to the high ground behind us, and a large hut in which I had halted the night before went up in flames, and in a few minutes seemed to have disappeared altogether. However, only a cow was killed, and except for two huts I found the position unchanged when I passed back here in the evening. No wonder that our own artillery did not deign to reply till the evening, when it lighted up a big flame in a small town beyond the river.
Southward across the flat ground which we had traversed in the dark the cannonade was more furious and had more meaning. Here there was a projecting bluff where our front came close up to the river before receding sharply from it and taking an altogether different direction. This was doubly an angle. It was a salient landmark in the curve of the whole Russian line from a western front against Germany to a southern front against Austria, and was therefore one of the points from which the conquering Russian march through Galicia threatens the junction of the two allies. The lie of the ground made it still more a challenge to the enemy, as the advanced trenches on this side were opposed to a fire from both sides and even partly from the rear. On this devoted hill the enemy's artillery, strongly reinforced, poured an unending torrent of shells. We could see them burst almost without interruption—the heavy explosive shell for driving the men from their shelter followed by the two shrapnels for catching them in the open. In all some eight hundred shells must have been lodged on the hill on this day, and in the evening a large hut on the top lit up like an illuminated fairy castle.
No fewer shots were fired the next day, and when I was later able to get to this ground, it was all harrowed up with enormous holes even in the gullies that ran crosswise through the hill itself. The men crouched in the trenches where death threatened any exposed movement and the falling shells often carried the works away wholesale, wounding and killing large numbers.
A wounded officer, much loved by his men, was asked by them what they could do to pay the enemy back, and he answered, "Sit and Wait."
This time the cannonade was not, as so often with the Austrians, simply a nerve-stricken discharge of ammunition. When the hill, and especially the line of our trenches, had been covered with shell, and the defenders had been long enough reduced to a condition of paralysis and impotence, a whole division of the gallant Tirolese advanced on the projecting angle of the line. These are the best troops that Austria has left, and they were opposed to parts of two Russian regiments. They ensconced themselves at night in rifle pits on a lower ridge of the hill, and forcing their way up found lodgment in a small wood and even occupied some disused trenches only fifty yards from the Russians. They planted a flag; and the fire of their artillery, which was this day wonderfully accurate, continued to pound the Russians over the heads of the Tirolese infantry. An attempt was made to break through the Russian line at the point of the angle, which was also the junction of the two defending regiments.