THE GUARDIAN OF THE LINE—HERO TALE OF LITHUANIA
Told by Frederic Lees
One of the most remarkable facts connected with the war on the Russian front is the large number of women who have distinguished themselves by conspicuous bravery, sometimes in the actual fighting-line, but more often in a civilian capacity. This story deals with the ordeal undergone by a humble railway-crossing keeper's wife in Lithuania, as told in the Wide World Magazine.
I—"THE LONELIEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD"
One morning in April, 1915, Stephania Ychas, the wife of the keeper of a railway-crossing to the north of the Lithuanian town of Shavli, felt the saddest and loneliest woman in the world. Do what she could, she found it impossible to rid herself of the feeling that a catastrophe was imminent—that the terrible war into which her country had been plunged meant the end of all things. Poor Lithuania! Once so fair a place, now so desolate a wilderness!
Stephania's duties, in these troubled times, kept her continually on the qui vive. At all hours of the day—and latterly during many of the night—she had to be in and out of her little house, in order to see that the rails were clear, or to note the numbers of the troop trains as they swept past towards the north. Backwards and forwards, from her door to the telephone, fixed against the wall on the right-hand side of a little window through which she could overlook a big sweep of the line in the direction of Shavli, she went, welcoming the never-ending succession of trainloads of soldiers, wounded, or mere war material passing on to the new line of defence, and reporting their progress to the railway and military authorities.
Day after day, night after night, the great retreat of the Russian forces continued, until, single-handed as she was, Stephania Ychas was almost dropping with fatigue. A hundred times she told herself that human flesh and blood could never stand such a strain. It was not the fatigue alone which was crushing her. Added to her physical tortures were mental ones, the feeling of being alone, so horribly alone, and the knowledge that the enemy, as announced by the retreat and the nerve-racking booming of the guns, was rapidly advancing on Shavli, and that until Russia had had time to recover, the hated Teutons would inevitably overrun Lithuania as far as Vilna. At night her brain was filled with pictures of burning farms, ravaged orchards, and indescribable scenes of brutality such as she knew the German soldiers had been guilty of in Belgium and Poland.
A dozen times a day, dizzy and sick at heart, she had been on the point of staggering to the telephone to inform the commander of a neighbouring station that she could continue no longer. But a sense of duty had held her back. When it came to a point of renunciation, her stout Lithuanian heart said "Nay," and she recalled the parting from her husband and his final adjurations.
Buried in thought, while waiting for a train which has just been signalled from Shavli, she recalled the morning when Michael Ychas, suddenly called to the Colours, had left her. It seemed like an eternity since those days of the mobilization.