Men of the Gonogoriski Regiment.
Afterwards the Colonel ordered a review of the two battalions, and in company formation they passed by with their bayonets at the charge and with every eye fixed on the commander, while every officer marched at the salute. I have never seen a more impressive body of men. Dirty and shabby, with faces tanned like shoe leather, and unshaven, they marched past, the picture of men of action. In each face was the pride of regiment and country and the respect of self. As they passed, company after company, the beaming Colonel said to me, “When my men come at the charge the Austrians never wait for them to come into the trenches. They fire on us until we are within ten feet and then they fall on their knees and beg for quarter.” As the writer looked into these earnest serious faces that passed by, each seamed with lines of grim determination and eyes steeled with the hardness engendered by war, he felt an increased respect for the Austrian who waited until the enemy were within ten feet. Somehow one felt that a hundred feet start would be an insufficient handicap to get away from these fellows when they came for one with their bayonets levelled and their leather throats howling for the blood of the enemy.
After the infantry we inspected the machine-gun batteries of the regiment, and with special pride the Colonel showed us the four captured machine-guns taken from the Austrians in the recent action, together with large quantities of ammunition. After the machine-guns were examined, the heroes of the St. George’s Cross, decorated in the recent battle, were brought forward to be photographed. Then the band played the air of the regiment, while the officers of the regiment joined in singing a rousing melody which has been the regimental song for the 125 years of its existence. Then, preceded by the band, we went to the Colonel’s head-quarters, where lunch was served, the band playing outside while we ate.
The head-quarters of the Colonel were in a schoolhouse hurriedly adapted to the needs of war. Our table was the children’s blackboard taken from the walls and stretched between two desks, the scholars’ benches serving us in lieu of chairs. The only thing in the whole establishment that did not reek of the necessities of war was the food, which was excellent. The rugged Colonel, lean as a race horse and as tough as whipcord, may in some former life when he was in Moscow have been an epicure and something of a good liver. Anyway the cooking was perfection.
In conversation with a number of the men who sat at table, I heard that their regiment had been in thirty-four actions since the war had started. The Colonel himself had been wounded no less than three times in the war. One Captain of the staff showed me a hat with a bullet hole in the top made in the last battle; while the Lieutenant-Colonel laughingly told me that they could not kill him at all; though he received seventeen bullets through his clothes since the war started he had never been scratched in any action in which he had been engaged. The tactical position of a Colonel in the Russian army is in the rear, I am told, but in this regiment I learned from one of the officers, the Colonel rarely was in the rear, and on more than one occasion he had led the charge at the very head of his men.
AN AFTERNOON AT THE “POSITIONS”
CHAPTER X
AN AFTERNOON AT THE “POSITIONS”
Dated:
Somewhere in Poland,
June 2, 1915.
Provided with carriages we left our hospitable Colonel for the front trenches 4 versts further on. As we were near the Front when we were at regimental head-quarters it was not deemed safe to take the motor-cars any further, on account of the clouds of dust which they leave in their wake.