Bernard Pares

“ We travelled in the midst of troops all hurrying forward to participate in the taking of Kielce. They moved slowly along the road in straggling groups like an enormous family on its way to a huge picnic, but the unity of each regiment is never lost and the most remarkable impression which one receives is that of destination—of movement to "the appointed place." Every artificial barrier was little more than an occasion for thought and effort: the Russian peasant, everywhere accustomed to obstacles of this kind, has all sorts of ready and resourceful ways of surmounting them ”

“ It is a common experience for a man to be five to eight days in the trenches in pouring rain, almost, or sometimes altogether without food, then perhaps to rush on the enemy, to fall and see half his comrades fall, but the rest still going forward, to lie perhaps through a night, and then to the hospital to lose a limb: and yet, spite of the reaction, such men are not only patient and affectionate to all who do anything for them, but really cheerful and contented, often literally jovial and always in no doubt of the ultimate issue.
There are no two accounts of the spirit in the Russian army. ”

“ Nothing will remain with me longer than these endless irregular lines of big, sleepy, almost stupid-looking faces moving at a walk which might last for ever, and all in one direction and all with set eyes, a people that lies down to sleep at the roadside, that breakfasts off stale biscuit soaked in water, that carries nothing but what it can put to a hundred uses, that will crouch for days without food in flooded trenches, that can die like flies for an idea, and is sure, sooner or later, to attain it, a people that never complain, a brotherhood of men. ”

“ It was a blazing line of fire and smoke, the twin yellow and white bursts of the Austrian shrapnel being almost lost in the white or black smoke of the German artillery. We travelled very slowly and for a good part of the day; officers and men were full of vexation at having to retire before troops which they felt themselves capable of beating with any equal conditions: among themselves there prevailed a simple good humour. ”

“ These are the simple thoughts that are in most people's minds here—the more so the nearer one is to the front. There one finds least of all doubt of the blessings of peace, and least of all doubt of the need to go to the end, and of the certainty of the final result. But Russia has done and is doing a giant's task, and one will meet cripples at every turn for many a year to come.
My friends possessed an interesting little book in a black paper binding which they kindly lent to me. It was the song-book of the German army, which, with a soldier's Prayer-book, is carried in every German knapsack. ”

“ The telephone gave word of my coming to the staff of the regiment, to which I was piloted over the marsh by a soldier. The Germans shoot at almost any mark, or, even, at hazard, in the darkness; but very few are wounded in this way—this day none, and the day before only one. Scouts go out from time to time and sometimes find a searchlight turned on them. It is a waiting position.
The colonel, a good-looking young man of great simplicity and vigour, entertained me at supper, and we talked late into the night. Everywhere one feels the winning spirit. ”

“ In all some eight hundred shells must have been lodged on the hill on this day, and in the evening a large hut on the top lit up like an illuminated fairy castle.
No fewer shots were fired the next day, and when I was later able to get to this ground, it was all harrowed up with enormous holes even in the gullies that ran crosswise through the hill itself. The men crouched in the trenches where death threatened any exposed movement and the falling shells often carried the works away wholesale, wounding and killing large numbers. ”

“ Halfway up, we took an "easy" in the mud hut of a superior officer. We sat together in the straw with our toes to the stove, and, as is often the case, the talk was not about the war at all, but about the human things that most interest the Russian mind: about the characters in Russian literature and the future of Russia. Naturally there is also a good deal now to be said about England; and nowhere more than in the trenches does one notice how every one wishes to give us the best word, just as the guest receives the best of the fare. ”

“ All day long we sat in our earth hut or passed crouching along the trenches visiting the different points of observation. What a difference a few inches make! At each more exposed point no care seemed enough. The whole day bullets passed above us, sometimes singing—or as George said "wailing"—about fifteen yards off, but most of them embedded themselves in our hill, sometimes kicking away with a ricochet or exploding. Often there were sharp salvos from several rifles at once aimed mostly at the loopholes where our sharpshooters lay ready; men were shot through the forehead in this way. ”

“ It is only the heavy rains that have saved the retreating Austrians from further losses. The roads are so broken up and so deep with mud that any quick movement is impossible. This gives the occasion for a useful rest. The cold weather—and it is freezing now—will be welcomed on this side; and the Russian winter kits, which have already been served out, are immeasurably better than the thin blue greatcoats of the draggled and demoralised Austrians. ”

“ Russia, the big brother of the Slavs and his own hereditary enemy, stands at his door. The protecting glacis of Galicia has been torn away and Peremyshl, the road out and the road in, has fallen. Even on the south there is a victorious enemy, the Serbian, who has just claims on some of his territory. To east, the sky is equally cloudy for him. Transylvania, a mountain barrier whose loss would leave him defenceless on this side, has a large Rumanian population, which his oppressive policy has driven to its natural affinities; and Rumania seeks the realisation here of her traditional ambitions. ”

“ Wiggins goes through the letters found in the enemy's trenches, and his staff is competent to deal with all the Babel of languages of Austria. Wiggins interrogates the prisoners and fixes the movements of the enemy's troops; there is a delightful caricature of him, standing like a wild boar at bay, among a crowd of gaping Austrians. Wiggins looks after the aeroplanes; and sometimes goes himself on the most perilous of scouting expeditions. ”

“ Along the drenched road and fields came numberless batches of blue Austrian uniforms, prisoners, usually escorted only by one brown Russian. I had a lot of talk with some of these. "Miserabel" was their word for their condition before capture. All were sick of the war, "even the Hungarians now, though at first they liked it." "The main thing," said one, "is that people should not go on killing each other: nothing else counts. As to territory, it's all one to me to what State my home belongs; I only want to earn my living." ”

“ Another, when he is brought in for operation, is only taken up with the thought that he meets in the operating room an Austrian officer to whom he has attached himself as guide and friend. Anything else that is human comes before any thought of self. I am quite certain that one of the greatest things that this war is doing is its revelation to Europe of the simple goodness of the Russian peasant in the person of the Russian soldier. He is more than the unconscious hero of the moment. ”

“ I decided to walk, and set out along the railway. The night was dark, and the only light was from the enemy's projectors. There were bridges over deep gullies that called for caution; and every hundred yards or so I was hailed by a sentry; one of them asked naïvely whether I was a Magyar. Anyhow, I reached the station an hour and a half before the train; and in the half-smashed station building I found first an ambulance room, and above it a little band of devoted workers with whom I had lived at another part of the front. ”

“ I came back from a walk in the cornfields to hear that the General invited me to come with him the next day.
At eight in the morning all was movement. We made a vigorous start, and went off at a great pace towards our left flank, the point which I had already visited when with the SS Corps. The General missed nothing. He had a salute in his little high voice for every one: "Good day, sapper," "Good day, cavalier" (to any soldier with the George Cross) ; and men standing far away across the fields drew themselves to sharp attention to anticipate him with their lusty greeting. ”

“ Any number of men run up from their loose ranks to push a motor or cart or transport wagon over a marshy stream, and the travellers call back from their vehicle, "Thank you, brothers." It is like a current that slows up and takes thought against some barrier, but whose general movement seems not even to be checked. ”

“ Groups of men, led by the instinctive enterprise of the more daring, gain one point of vantage after another, each of which forms a pivot for an advance of the whole line. In night attacks the movement can, of course, be more general and more rapid. In any case the last hundred yards or so are covered at a rush; but there is an inevitable pause before the wire entanglements, which in front of the Austrian trenches are generally most elaborate and have to be cut through with enormous scissors under a storm of fire, especially of quick-firing guns. ”

“ Not two hundred yards off, but only to be reached by crossing two deep gullies of mud, lay the lazaret of the division, quartered in a white-walled village school. These quarters, I was told, were luxury compared to most of the ordinary stopping places; but we were in a very different atmosphere from the admirably equipped hospitals further back. The wounded arrive all day in large carts or on foot; they come straight from the First Aid stations, which are close up to the actual fighting line; there are no beds, only pallets of straw, on which the men lie down while waiting their turn. ”

“ In the afternoon I saw a fire light up in some German trenches by the river, and it quickly spread along their lines. A figure like an insect stood out shovelling at the flames and some of our men shot at it; the German passed down the slope but came again, this time going back at a run. The flames spread further until they were at last extinguished from below. We ourselves got nothing except bullets, and none of our men were wounded. ”

“ We could hear each other's breathing in the few seconds while the blaze hung above us. We had all crawled back to the second sentry when the rocket went up again followed by more shots, but this time we had some little shelter. We returned and bade "Good-night" to the Watch and lay for a while in a shelter close by, with a whispered talk of our joint task. On the way up the hill there were more rockets and more shots at us, but we were soon back at the earth hut with its welcome shelter and its friendly host, and the straw screen that served as a door shut on a good night and a sound sleep. ”

“ The enemy makes no counter-moves; his advance sentries stand only just outside his wire entanglements, and creep in and report the moment they see any movement outside; he does not even open fire. The Russian soldier, who here, as elsewhere, has a complete moral and physical superiority, goes out on little night raids, sometimes in small companies, sometimes alone, to hear the conversation of the enemy, which if Slavonic can be readily understood by him, or, still better, to catch a "tongue," that is, to bring home a captive sentinel for information. This is why the enemy's sentries retreat. ”

“ The earth is rich in soil, in water which seems to bubble to the surface as soon as one makes any hole in it, and also in snakes, of which a great number have been found wintering by the Russian soldiers wherever they have entrenched themselves. The streams are broad and clear with beds of stones and pebbles.
One looks in vain for any sign of the plain below. In every direction it is a sea whose waves are hills. This is all the more so because the broad belt of the Carpathians makes an enfolding curve forward and southward, both to left and to right. ”

“ It is best of all that they have risked a desperate advance in the Bukovina and even as far as the Russian frontier, in the hope of dragging Rumania in on their side. The fall of Peremyshl has opened the gates of Hungary and has made possible a movement which threatens vital results on this front. Hungary and Prussia are the two keys to our triumph in this war. The one element in Austria that holds firm to the Prussian alliance is the Magyar; the one statesman in Austria is the Hungarian, Count Tisza, whose estate almost on the crest of the Carpathians is now in Russian hands. ”

“ In these mountains one had at once the feeling of being altogether away from Russia; and the new Russian army notices blending with the earlier Polish and Hungarian inscriptions suggested the atmosphere of a big adventure. All along the beautiful slopes there was the look of a huge Russian picnic, soldiers sitting at rest in great [Pg 179] boyish crowds very much as in peace time the peasants do on the sloping banks of the Volga. The bright dresses of the Ruthenian women and the almost theatrical picturesqueness of their men-folk touched the whole with novelty. ”

“ Every one is clear that there can be no stopping half-way with the task unfinished; and the task, as it presents itself to the average man or woman, is that the crisis thrust upon us must not occur again. I say "thrust upon us" because, with average people even perhaps more than in official circles, and with the peasant more than all, there is the strongest feeling that peace has been wilfully disturbed by Germany, and that Russia was left no option but to hit back as hard as she could. ”