It is sufficient to say that I put spurs to my horse, and for the mile that lay exposed in the moonlight my little animal almost flew while the Count pounded along a close second just behind me. A mile away we reached the welcome shadows of a small bunch of trees, and as I rode into the wood I was sharply challenged by a guttural voice, and as I pulled my horse up on his haunches a wild-looking Cossack took my bridle. Before I had time to begin an explanation, the Count came up and the sharp words of the challenge were softened to polite speeches of welcome from the officer in command.

We were in the front line trench or rather just behind it, for the road lay above it while the trench itself was between it and the river where it could command the crossing with its fire. Here as elsewhere, I found men who could speak English, the one an officer and the other a man in charge of a machine gun. This man had been five years in Australia and had come back to “fight the Germans,” as he said. For an hour we sat up on the crest of the trench under the shadow of a tree, and watched in the sky the flare of a burning village to our right, which was behind the Russian lines, and had been fired just at dark by Austrian shells. I found that all the Russians spoke well of the Austrians. They said they were kindly and good-natured, never took an unfair advantage, lived up to their flags of truce, etc. Their opinion of the Germans was exactly the opposite. One man said, “Sometimes the Austrians call across that they won’t shoot during the night. Then we all feel easy and walk about in the moonlight. One of our soldiers even went down and had a bathe in the river, while the Austrians called across to him jokes and remarks, which of course he could not understand. The Germans say they won’t fire, and just as soon as our men expose themselves they begin to shoot. They are always that way.”

Cossacks dancing the Tartars’ native dance.

I have never known a more absolutely quiet and peaceful scene than this from the trench on the river’s bluff. As I was looking up the streak of silver below us, thinking thus, there came a deep boom from the east and then another and another, and then on the quiet night the sharp crackle of the machine guns and the rip and roar of volley firing. It was one of those spasms of fighting that ripple up and down a line every once in a while, but after a few minutes it died away, the last echoes drifting away over the hills, and silence again reigned over the Dniester. The fire in the village was burning low, and the first grey streaks of dawn were tinging the horizon in the east when we left the trench, and by a safer bridle path returned to the castle and took our motor-car for head-quarters which we reached just as the sun was rising.

The positions along this whole front are of natural defence and have received and required little attention. Rough shelter for the men, and cover for the machine guns is about all that any one seems to care for here. The fighting is regarded by these wild creatures as a sort of movable feast, and they fight now in one place and now in another. Of course they have distinctive lines of trenches, though they cannot compare with the substantial works that one finds in the Bzura-Rawka lines and the other really serious fronts in Poland and elsewhere. In a general way it matters very little whether the army moves forward or backward just here. The terrain for 100 versts is adapted to defence, and the army can, if it had to do so, go back so far without yielding to the enemy anything that would have any important bearing on the campaign of the Russian Army as a whole. From the first day that I joined this army, I felt the conviction that it could be relied upon to take care of itself, and that its retirements or changes of front could be viewed with something approaching to equanimity.

WITH A RUSSIAN CAVALRY CORPS

CHAPTER XIX
WITH A RUSSIAN CAVALRY CORPS

On the Dniester,
July 4, 1915.

It would not be in the least difficult for me to write a small volume on my impressions and observations during the time that I was with this particular cavalry corps on the Dniester; but one assumes that at this advanced period in the war, readers are pretty well satiated with descriptive material of all sorts, and there is so much news of vital importance from so many different fronts, that the greatest merit of descriptive writing in these days no doubt lies in its brevity. I will therefore cut as short as possible the account of my stay in this very interesting organization.