Day by Day with the Russian Army, 1914-15

by Bernard Pares

By this time I was in the earth shelter of an old acquaintance, the commander of the battalion with whom I had passed a night some months before. How changed he was. Always the soldier, he had before looked the smart man of the world. Now he was grimed and tired and had something of the mild and enduring look of a hermit. The water came through our mud hut everywhere. As we sat eating biscuits and chocolate, another acquaintance came in and with almost such a smile as one might have in speaking of a wedding said, "You remember the fair young man; he is dead." I asked after the sallow young officer. "He is dead, too; both were killed when we tried to take the green hill opposite, they are lying out there now." The fair youth just before his death had telephoned "All in order," and he was first wounded in the open and then shot dead while looking through his field-glass. The H's were among the first to move on the Beskides, which they took at the rush. Here, on the further side, they had three tries at the green hill in front of us, two at night and one in the early morning; each time they had won the top, and each time the German troops, which had been brought up in large numbers to the defence of the Carpathians, proved too many for them, and they had to retire, leaving their dead behind. Each attack was made up the stiff ascent in mud knee-deep. Such is the price to be paid for each hill in the Carpathians.

All night the water poured in on my host and myself. We lay so as to avoid, as far as possible, its trickling on the face. At intervals in this unquiet night one saw the soldier servant rise from where he slept bowed on a box and move over our squelching floor of fir boughs to try some new plan to stop the dripping. My host said, "I'm used to it now." However, next morning he had a great inspection of earth shelters, with the result that we moved into the telephone hole. I asked a private if it was better there, and with a glad smile he said, "It's good there and it's good here; as long as we stand here we have got to suffer; soon there'll be peace."

The colonel, whose staff was some way behind, was of the same way of thinking. He used to like to say, "He that endureth to the end shall be saved." He had himself lived for a week in our night quarters, till he was driven out by a shell which fell a yard off and sent a beam flying past his head. Firing went on most of the time, and while I was there shots lodged on or near the trenches and at different points on our path up the Beskides. When I halted to look back from the crest, a man came up at once and said, "You're under fire." I remember the quiet reply of one of the soldiers when he was asked if there were any wounded that day. He said "Not yet."

I found the regimental staff, with the kindest of colonels, in an armoured blockhouse that had guarded the railway tunnel between Hungary and Galicia. I asked him after the two dead officers. The sallow young man was not dead after all. He had led the storming of the Beskides and was the first man into the trenches. "He saved the whole thing for us," said the Colonel, "and I am presenting him for the Cross of St. George."[1]

April 17.

I started off from the General's on a journey of six miles, and I had an object lesson in the difficulties of movement in this region. My orderly, naturally, did not know the names of villages in this part, and thus we found ourselves at a neighbouring station eight miles from my destination. A train was due; but at any station on this line a long halt may be necessary for the collection of all that must be forwarded, whether troops or material. I spent the interval at a local Feeding Point, where I had some acquaintances. Only a soldier-caretaker was there, attending to a young scout-leader who had got a shrapnel wound.

At last the train moved off. I had made a couch of my wraps in a large goods wagon; but I was the only passenger who travelled in comfort. The others were private soldiers, and in the dark they talked freely, and were entirely themselves. One of them was telling sad things of the losses in his regiment, of how the telephone might have saved them, but had broken down. "You won't manage in war without loss," said one of the elder men. "No losses, no victory." Few as they were, his words summed up the difference between sitting in trenches and making ground by attack. They talked on; and as one often notices in these night talks of the Russian privates, there was a kind of sacred simplicity, which left one thinking. I recalled the Austrian private who did not care what country his home belonged to as long as he earned his own living.

Seven hours had passed since I left my starting-point, and I was still a mile and a half from my destination. I decided to walk, and set out along the railway. The night was dark, and the only light was from the enemy's projectors. There were bridges over deep gullies that called for caution; and every hundred yards or so I was hailed by a sentry; one of them asked naïvely whether I was a Magyar. Anyhow, I reached the station an hour and a half before the train; and in the half-smashed station building I found first an ambulance room, and above it a little band of devoted workers with whom I had lived at another part of the front.

This forward detachment of the Red Cross was always keen and united. It worked under fire during a time of retreat, and all its members had the George medal for courage. When I was with them it was a slack time; and the result was that one member of the band after another felt the effects of the previous stress and had to go off to Russia. Now they had struck another period of arduous work, and the absent ones were returning with a few new additions. Work pulls people together, especially out here, and they were making more effort than ever. When I reached their very modest quarters (two rooms: one for the sisters and one for the men), I could not make out where the ambulance rooms ended, because each member's bed in the detachment was occupied by a wounded man or invalid awaiting the evacuation train. Here was an old colonel (they had nursed several here); there was a private, who had won first the George Cross and then a commission. Judging by my own experience, I fully expected the train to be hours late, and thought the detachment would get no sleep till the morning. However, the train drew up, the officers thanked and kissed the gentlemen of the detachment, and the room was clear. I had a warm welcome from my friends, and a bed was found for me.

The next day I had an interesting talk with some cordial officers at the staff of a brigade which had taken 7000 prisoners, or almost the number of its own men, from the enemy since December. In all the regiments in the Austrian army the various nationalities were now hopelessly mixed up. They told me of a Serbian, an officer in an Austrian regiment, who had been court-martialled and transferred for not joining, at a banquet, in toasting the extermination of Serbia. All the Austrians, they said, are now for peace, and the military oath, to which, in this non-national state, the greatest significance is attached, is the only deterrent from wholesale surrender. As always elsewhere at the front, I found the greatest enthusiasm for the work of England in the allied cause.