Every day the prisoners are gathered together in groups according to their various nationalities for examination. These interrogations, which are of a very systematic kind, obtain very interesting results. Most of the prisoners testify to a shortness of food, not only in the front but in the rear. Letters from home to them speak of the dearness of all food; some necessities cannot even be obtained for money, and different parts of the empire are applying to each other for them in vain. Nowhere is there any spirit left. The only comfort which the officers can suggest is to await some success from the Germans. Some, moreover, describe the officers as being never on view, except to abuse their men, treating them worse than cattle: "So that one does not know whether one is a man or not." Only one Austrian officer so far has been taken in this part with a bayonet wound. It is known that there have been further protests in Bohemia after the taking of Peremyshl, and that the severest repression has been used, also that two Polish regiments have been literally decimated, that is, that every tenth man in them has been shot. One man's brother writes to him that he is called for the first time to the army at the age of forty-eight, and in his part the last call covers those between forty-two and fifty-two. Other new battalions are formed, ninety per cent. of reservists and ten per cent. of wounded who have returned to the colours; in most of them there is now a hopeless mix up of all nationalities. Some describe their training as having only lasted four weeks. In all cases the preoccupation of the commanding officers is regarding retreat.
April 11.
The centre of interest is now in the Carpathians. If Russia could have advanced with success against the strong German positions in East Prussia, she would have secured her right flank, but only as far as the sea, which would still have remained in German hands. On her left, her victories in Galicia have brought her to a very different barrier, which, if passed by her, will certainly remain impassable for the beaten enemy. It is a good thing that the Austrians, continually spurred forward by the Germans, have exhausted themselves in one desperate counter-attack after another on Galicia. It is a good thing that the Germans, realising what the ultimate defeat of Austria must mean to them, have diverted so many of their forces to this side. It is best of all that they have risked a desperate advance in the Bukovina and even as far as the Russian frontier, in the hope of dragging Rumania in on their side. The fall of Peremyshl has opened the gates of Hungary and has made possible a movement which threatens vital results on this front. Hungary and Prussia are the two keys to our triumph in this war. The one element in Austria that holds firm to the Prussian alliance is the Magyar; the one statesman in Austria is the Hungarian, Count Tisza, whose estate almost on the crest of the Carpathians is now in Russian hands. A Russian advance on this side can crush Hungary or cut her from Prussia. It can bring even the Magyar to wish for peace; it can finally put aside all action of Austria; and along the real barrier thus secured to the south, it can facilitate the concentration of the forces of the allies against the main enemy. It is, indeed, good that this effect comes at the time when we are hammering at the gates of Constantinople and opening up an effective advance from our western front.
But the task in the Carpathians is a stupendous one, and it comes when the Russian army has been tried to the full by the tremendous work which it has already gone through. We had in England no adequate army when the war began; we had not reckoned on the shameless violation of Belgian territory or on the obligations of a joint struggle with allies for the independence of Europe. Every one in Russia understands the miracle that we have done in creating so rapidly a really competent continental army on the basis of volunteer service, and every one sees that we were right to defer our blow till the great new instrument was whole and perfected. But it is Russia who has given us time for preparing our action on land; and the sacrifices which this has cost her are heavy indeed. The tremendous impact at Rava Ruska was followed by another prolonged and exterminating effort on the San, and this takes no account of the work which was done in holding the furious attacks of the main enemy in Russian Poland. These efforts put a terrible drain on the Russian resources. While we stood firm on the west, whole Russian regiments were almost annihilated in the victorious storming of one Austrian position after another. In my earlier visits to regiments I have often asked how many men of the first call still remain; sometimes only six of a company were still left, sometimes it was hardly more out of a whole regiment. It was an army already replaced at almost every point which had to attempt the conquest of the Carpathians.
The Carpathians are not the Alps. It might be easier if they were, for there would be fewer positions capable of being defended. They are a belt of high and higher hills some sixty miles or more in breadth, where whole armies can hold line after line. They are full of trees, water and mud. Only one double line of railway runs through them. As they have the shape of a fan spread northwards, the defence can concentrate backward along the various converging passes and can, in a relatively small space, almost block the narrow entrance to the Hungarian plain. But once that final barrier is passed, Hungary is lost. Any counter advance can be blocked without great expenditure of forces, and the conqueror will be free to advance southwards or westwards.
April 12.
At the Staff of the Army I fell in with a number of casual acquaintances who all saluted me as "Mister." There was a keen young flying-man who was now going back to his cavalry regiment, and a colonel sent to take temporary command of an infantry regiment. The talk was in fragments and all of incidents of camp life or engagements. We knew that another advance had been made and that big things were going forward.
All night we travelled by train, with changes and queer moments in the dark when our luggage ought to have been lost but wasn't. In the early morning the Colonel and I were on an engine climbing the Carpathians along a fine double track. We sat like Dean and Archdeacon in little side stalls with our things stacked where there was least coal and bilge, while the engine-driver, a most intelligent man from the Caucasus, explained the difficulties of his work. The rise is a very steep one, and we had a front view of it, passing up long slopes or through strata of yellow rock. In these mountains one had at once the feeling of being altogether away from Russia; and the new Russian army notices blending with the earlier Polish and Hungarian inscriptions suggested the atmosphere of a big adventure. All along the beautiful slopes there was the look of a huge Russian picnic, soldiers sitting at rest in great boyish crowds very much as in peace time the peasants do on the sloping banks of the Volga. The bright dresses of the Ruthenian women and the almost theatrical picturesqueness of their men-folk touched the whole with novelty.
Alighting at a station near the top, I found the usual war crowd and park of waiting army carts, and a brisk-faced intendant who rapped out business-like answers to a running fire of questions from all sides. My own business was to get to General Dobrotin, and it was made easy by the appearance of a plain-faced officer who said, "He's the man who pours cold water over himself in the morning; give him to me; we know him all over the division." I was soon in a formanka—a sort of boat-like cart which works particularly well in the mountains—and making my way up the gorge, at first with a broad shallow river to my left and later branching into the hills. Here in a little gully lay a scattered village; and the notes of a mountain flute were wafted down the slope.
General Dobrotin and his famous division have had far more than their share of the great fighting in this war; and they have been given one critical task after another, because their action has so often been decisive. In no less than three great movements they made the first cut in, and held the ground won as a kind of pivot until the whole operation was successfully completed. It was so at Rava Russka, on the San, and at Muchowka. They had now been transferred to the other flank of our Army.