One German woman, Anne Marie Reimer, the wife of a doctor in East Prussia, served seven months as the driver of an automobile truck, and the result of her experiences is a very interesting book Seven Months on the East Front as a Driver. In this book, she tells how she guided her automobile right up to the firing line. Once, when the fighting was very fierce she did not have her clothes off for four weeks. When the Kaiser came to review her regiment, she passed in review in front of him with the rest of the men. In February, 1915, she was taken with fever contracted by the exposure. Her husband brought her to Berlin. In her book she says that no one knows the unselfishness and the kindness of soldiers toward each other, and she thinks that war has an ennobling influence on the men.
The Russian prisoners in the German prison camp at Zossen went in a body to the German major and asked him to have a Russian prisoner, Nicholas Nisoff, removed from their barracks. He was possessed with the devil, they said, and he was trying to cast a spell over them. The major sent for Nicholas Nisoff, and he came pale and trembling.
"Nicholas Nisoff," said the major, "sit down and tell me what is the matter. What have you done that you are silent all day and cry out all night?"
It was below freezing in the major's barnlike office, but Nicholas had to wipe the perspiration from his brow as he staggered into a seat. He began in broken sentences.
"It happened in Galicia. In the morning we took two hundred Austrian and Hungarian prisoners. We shut them up in different places, and in one hut where thirty of them were, I was detailed on night watch. All night long I paced up and down before the cottage. It was very quiet, but at last I heard a noise. The window was slowly opened and some one jumped to the ground. "Halt!" I cried, "Halt! Or I will fire." The person did not stop, so I fired into the darkness. I took out my pocket lamp to see what kind of a Hungarian I had shot, and there on the ground a slender figure was lying. I looked again. I could not believe what I saw. It was a woman! Her cap had fallen off and her long yellow hair was streaming about her. I felt her heart. It had stopped beating. And I, Nicholas Nisoff, had killed a woman. And since that time I cannot sleep, and in the night she comes to me with her long hair streaming around, and pointing her finger at me she says, 'Nicholas Nisoff! Why did you shoot me?'"
When he had finished, Nicholas again wiped the sweat from his brow and the major wrote down something on a paper. The next day Nicholas was taken away and brought to Berlin where he was given employment on a railroad. He is much happier now, and it is only now and then that the ghost of the Hungarian woman comes to haunt him.
Helene Lichowitz! When they came for Ivan Lichowitz, Helene begged them not to take her husband. He was ill, she said. But it made no difference, and three weeks later he was in the trenches. Once he coughed so violently that he lost consciousness. But when he came to, Helene Lichowitz was bending over him.
"I have come to take care of you," she said. For three weeks they were together. Helene did the same work as a man, and most of Ivan's work too. On a bitter cold day last December there was a night attack by the Germans. The Russians were ordered to charge. Ivan stumbled along blindly, and Helene supported him when she thought that he was going to fall. When they had gone a little way, there was a great roar from the German side, followed by a volley of bullets, shells burst in the air.
In the evening the German ambulance men came to save what they could of the poor creatures lying there. Ivan was dead, but Helene was carried to a field hospital. The German doctor did everything he could to save her, but Helene Lichowitz did not want to live. She said her work was done. In three days she died, holding the hand of the tear-dimmed German doctor.