"The soldiers themselves go on from battlefield to battlefield, from one scene of carnage to another. They see their regiments dwindle to nothing, their officers decimated, three-fourths of their comrades dead or wounded, and yet each night they gather about their bivouacs apparently undisturbed by it all. One sees them on the road the day after one of these desperate fights marching cheerfully along, singing songs and laughing and joking with one another. This is morale and it is of the stuff that victories are made. And of such is the fiber of the Russian soldier, scattered over these hundreds of miles of front to-day. He exists in millions and has abiding faith in his companions, in his officers, and in his cause."
TERRIFIC FIGHTING IN MIDWINTER
Writing of the desperate fighting in Poland in midwinter when the Germans made a tremendous effort to pierce the Russian lines on the Bzura and Rawka front, with Warsaw as their objective point, an American correspondent, Mr. John F. Bass, said: "The fighting was terrific. The detonations of the cannon came in such rapid succession that they sounded like giant machine guns and the windows of the dressing stations for the wounded shook as if from an earthquake. It was not possible to distinguish individual gun explosions from the Battle of the infantry fire. All were mingled in one inarticulate battle shriek. At night, as in a furious thunderstorm, the darkness was pierced with the unintermittent flashes of the guns, while sickly green rockets shed a ghastly light over the fighting lines. The wounded brought in filled the hospitals to overflowing.
"It was estimated by the Russians that the Germans lost 60,000 men. I was told by an officer that the bodies of German soldiers were piled up before the Russian trenches in many of the assaults so high that German shells bursting among them threw mangled pieces of human beings into the trenches among the Russians.
"At night, under the glare of search-lights, the undulating mass of wounded made efforts to extricate themselves. Then, toward 2 o'clock in the morning, they moved no more." The winter cold had done its deadly work.
FRENCH MAKE GAINS IN MARCH
In the Champagne country of northern France the month of March was marked by almost continuous fighting of the fiercest character. French advices from Chalons-sur-Marne on March 29 were to the effect that 11,000 German dead had been taken from the trenches won by the French in the previous twenty days and that the total German losses during that time in the Champagne district exceeded 50,000 in killed, wounded and prisoners.
STIRRING EVENTS OF THE SPRING
All through the month of April the days were crowded with important occurrences east and west along the battle lines. The Russian movement across the Carpathians was pressed with vigor and some of the fiercest fighting of the war resulted, as the combined German and Austrian troops resisted the Russian advance into Hungary.
Early in the spring the British forces gained a notable victory at Neuve Chapelle in the western theater of war. Then the German forces in Flanders were heavily reinforced until it was estimated that they numbered not less than half a million men, gathered for the purpose of smashing the line of the Allies at the strategic point where the British and the Belgian troops were in touch with one another. Here, for three days, the Germans succeeded in pushing forward, driving a wedge for several miles into the line of the allied armies of England, France and Belgium. And here, too, the Canadian division of the British army covered itself with glory and once more demonstrated the value to the British empire of the "lion's whelps." On one notable occasion, destined to be recorded in history as a red-letter day for Canadian arms, the gallant fellows from the great Dominion "saved the situation," to quote from the report of Field Marshal French, by a splendid charge, during which they recaptured from the Germans four of their field guns that had been lost the day before.