America's War for Humanity

by Thomas Herbert Russell

ON THE EASTERN FRONT

On the eastern front of the stupendous battle line in March the most sanguinary fighting of the war occurred. Losses on both sides were appalling, while the gains in territorial acquisition amounted to little or nothing.

Describing the enormous losses on both sides in Poland, a neutral observer, Mr. Stanley Washburn, said in the American Review of Reviews:

"The German program contemplated taking both Warsaw and Ivangorod and the holding for the winter of the line between the two formed by the Vistula. The Russians took the offensive from Ivangorod, crossed the river, and after hideous fighting fairly drove Austrians and Germans from positions of great strength around the quaint little Polish town of Kozienice. From this town for perhaps ten miles west, and I know not how far north and south there is a belt of forest of fir and spruce. Near Kozienice the Russian infantry, attacking in flank and front, fairly wrested the enemy's position and drove him back into this jungle. The Russians simply sent their troops in after them.

"The fight was now over a front of perhaps twenty kilometers; there was no strategy. It was all very simple. In this belt were Germans and Austrians. They were to be driven out if it took a month. Then began the carnage. Day after day the Russians fed troops in on their side of the wood. Companies, battalions, regiments, and even brigades, were absolutely cut off from all communication. None knew what was going on anywhere but a few feet in front. All knew that the only thing required of them was to keep advancing.

"Yard by yard the ranks and lines of the Austrians were driven back, but the nearer their retreat brought them to the open country west of the wood the hotter was the contest waged. The last two kilometers of the woody belt are something incredible to behold; there seems hardly an acre that is not sown like the scene of a paperchase—only here with bloody bandages and bits of uniform. Men fighting hand to hand with clubbed muskets and bayonets contested each tree and ditch. The end was, of course, inevitable. The troops of the dual alliance could not fill their losses, and the Russians could. "At last came the day when the dirty, grimy, bloody soldiers of the Czar pushed their antagonists out of the far side of the woodland—and what a scene occurred in that open bit of country with the quaint little village of Augustowo at the crossroads! Once out in the open the hungry guns of the Russians, so long yapping ineffectively without knowing what their shells were doing, had their chance. Down every road through the forest came the six-horse teams with the guns jumping and jingling behind, with their accompanying caissons heavy with death-charged shrapnel, and the moment the enemy were in the clear these batteries, eight guns to a unit, were unlimbered on the fringe of the wood and pouring out their death and destruction on the wretched enemy now retreating hastily across the open. And the place where the Russians first turned loose on the retreat is a place to remember.

"Dead horses, bits of men, blue uniforms, shattered transport, overturned gun-carriages, bones, broken skulls, and grisly bits of humanity strew every acre of the ground.

ENORMOUS LOSSES ON BOTH SIDES

"A Russian officer who seemed to be in authority on this gruesome spot volunteered the information that already they had buried at Kozienice, in the wood and on this open spot, 16,000 dead. Those that had fallen in the open and along the road had been decently interred, as the forests of crosses for ten miles along that bloody way clearly indicated, but back in the woods themselves were hundreds and hundreds of bodies that lay as they had fallen. Sixteen thousand dead means at least 70, casualties all told, or 35,000 on a side if losses were equally distributed. And this, figured on the basis of the 16,000 dead already buried, without allowing for the numbers of the fallen that still lie about in the woods. And yet here is a battle the name of which is hardly more than known in America, yet the losses on both sides amount to more than the entire army that General Meade commanded at the Battle of Gettysburg.

"He who has the heart to walk about in this ghastly place can read the last sad moments of almost every corpse. Here one sees a blue-coated Austrian with leg shattered by a jagged bit of a shell. The trouser perhaps has been ripped open and clumsy attempts been made to dress the wound, while a great splotch of red shows where the fading strength was exhausted before the flow of life's stream could be checked. Here again is a body with a ghastly rip in the chest, made perhaps by bayonet or shell fragment. Frantic hands now stiffened in death are seen trying to hold together great wounds from which life must have flowed in a few great spurts of blood. And here it is no fiction about the ground being soaked with gore. One can see it,—coagulated like bits of raw liver, while great chunks of sand and earth are in lumps, held together by this human glue. Other bodies lie in absolute peace and serenity. Struck dead with a rifle ball through the heart or some other instantly vital spot. These lie like men asleep, and on their faces is the peace of absolute rest and relaxation, but of these alas! there are few compared to the ones upon whose pallid, blood-stained faces one reads the last frantic agony of death.