Our guide was quite delighted and smiled and clicked his heels cheerfully as he ushered us into the little room of the officer commanding the regiment in the trenches just ahead of us. Even as he greeted us, the telephone rang in the little low-ceilinged room of the cottage, and he excused himself as he went to reply to it. In a few minutes he came back with an annoyed expression on his face. “These unpleasant Austrians,” he said in disgust. “They are always up to their silly tricks. They have been shelling some Red Cross carts on the road. I have just ordered the howitzer battery in our rear to come into action and we shall see if we cannot give them a lesson in manners.”
After a few pleasantries he asked what it was that we would most like, and I replied in my stock phrases, “Observation points and trenches, if you please.” He stood for a moment studying the tip of his dusty boot; evidently he was not very eager about the job. However, he shrugged his shoulders and went back to the telephone, and after a few minutes conversation came back and said to us: “It is a very bad time to go into our trenches, as we have no covered ways, and in the daytime one is seen, and the enemy always begin firing. It is very unsafe, but if you are very anxious I shall permit one of you to go forward, though it is not convenient. When the enemy begin to fire, our batteries reply, and firing starts in all the trenches. The soldiers like to fight, and it doesn’t take much to start them.”
Put in this way none of us felt very keen about insisting. So we all compromised by a visit to a secondary position, which we were told was not very dangerous, as the enemy could only reach it with their shell fire and “of course no one minds that,” as the officer casually put it. We all agreed that, of course, we did not mind that, and so trooped off with the Colonel to the trenches and dug-outs where the troops who were not in the firing line were in immediate reserve.
The group of dug-outs was flanked with trenches, for, as the Colonel informed us, “Who knows when this position may be attacked?” And then he added, “You see, though we are not in the direct view of the enemy here, they know our whereabouts and usually about this time of day they shell the place. They can reach it very nicely and from two different directions. Yesterday it became so hot in our house that we all spent a quiet afternoon in the dug-outs.” He paused and offered us a cigarette, and as he did so there came a deep boom from our rear and a howitzer shell wailed over our heads on its mission of protest to the Austrians about firing on Red Cross wagons. A few seconds later the muffled report of its explosion came back across the valley. A second later another and another shell went over our heads. The Colonel smiled, “You see,” he said, “my orders are being carried out. No doubt the enemy will reply soon.”
His belief was justified. A moment later that extremely distressing sound made by an approaching shell came to our ears, followed immediately by its sharp report as it burst in a field a few hundred yards away. I looked about at the soldiers and officers around me, but not one even cast a glance in the direction of the smoke drifting away over the field near by. After wandering about his position for half or three-quarters of an hour, we returned to the cottage. It consisted of but three rooms. The telephone room, a little den where the officers ate, and a large room filled with straw on which they slept at night, when sleeping was possible.
Here we met a fine grey-haired, grizzled Colonel, who, as my banker friend informed me, commanded a neighbouring regiment, the — Grenadiers. He is one of our finest officers and is in every way worthy of his regiment, the history of which stretches back over two centuries. The officer himself looked tired and shabby, and his face was deeply lined with furrows. We read about dreadful sacrifices in the Western fighting, but I think this regiment, which again I regret that I cannot name, has suffered as much in this war as any unit on any Front. In the two weeks of fighting around Cracow alone it has dwindled from 4,000 men to 800, and that fortnight represented but a small fraction of the campaigning which it has done since the war started. Again and again it has been filled to its full strength, and after every important action its ranks were depleted hideously. Now there are very few left of the original members, but as an officer proudly said, “These regiments have their traditions of which their soldiers are proud. Put a moujik in its uniform and to-morrow he is a grenadier and proud of it.”
The Colonel, who sat by the little table as we talked, did not speak English, but in response to the question of a friend who addressed him in Russian, he said with a tired little smile, “Well, yes, after ten months one is getting rather tired of the war. One hopes it will soon be over and that one may see one’s home and children once more, but one wonders if——” He paused, smiled a little, and offered us a cigarette. It is not strange that these men who live day and night so near the trenches that they are never out of sound of firing, and never sleep out of the zone of bursting shells, whose every day is associated with friends and soldiers among the fallen, wonder vaguely if they will ever get home. The trench occupied by this man’s command was so exposed that he could only reach it unobserved by crawling on his stomach over the ridge, and into the shallow ditch that served his troops for shelter.
Leaving the little farm we drove back over the road above which we had seen the bursting shells on our arrival, but our own batteries, no doubt, had diverted the enemy from practice on the road, for we made the 3 versts without a single one coming our way.
It was closing twilight when we started back for the head-quarters that we had left in the early morning. The sun had set and the peace and serenity of the evening were broken only by the distant thunder of an occasional shell bursting in the west. From the ridge over which our road ran I could distinctly see the smoke from three different burning villages fired by the German artillery. One wonders what on earth the enemy have in mind when they deliberately shell these pathetic little patches of straw-thatched peasant homes. Even in ordinary times these people seem to have a hard life in making both ends meet, but now in the war their lot is a most wretched one. Apparently hardly a day passes that some village is not burned by the long range shells of the enemy’s guns. That such action has any military benefit seems unlikely. The mind of the enemy seems bent on destruction, and everywhere their foot is placed grief follows.
The next morning for several hours I chatted with the General and his Chief of Staff, and found, as always at the Front, the greatest optimism. “Have you seen our soldiers at the Front?” is the question always asked, and when one answers in the affirmative they say, “Well, then how can you have any anxiety as to the future. These men may retire a dozen times, but demoralized or discouraged they are never. We shall win absolutely surely. Do not doubt it.”