Part 7

From the beginning of the war, Bosnians, who are really Serbians, surrendered in large numbers. Then the Poles began to come in, and now the Bohemians. The Hungarians are sure to go on to the end; but the Roumanian and Italian soldiers of Austria have also come over very easily. In front of Cracow a Russian officer under fire came on a whole number of Bohemians, who were singing the "Sokol" songs and shouted a greeting as they came into the Russian lines.

These wholesale surrenders have, I think, an extremely interesting political significance. When governments turned the whole people into an army, it was clear that the army was also being turned into the people; but it was not clear how the people could express itself when under army discipline. These surrenders, in their general character and in their differences of detail, are a picture of the feelings and aspirations of the various nationalities which are bundled together under the name of Austria.

_January 1, 1915._

At this Staff, as at the General Staff, life was very simple. We all met twice a day for a plain meal without any alcohol; there was plenty of conversation, but it was that of men engaged in responsible work; any news from outside was welcome, especially from the western allies, and there was full appreciation and sympathy for their hard task.

There was plenty of news from other quarters of the Russian front, and one could have a much juster and fuller perspective of how things were going than anywhere behind the army; the two things which stood out even more here than elsewhere were, on the one hand, the immensity of the sacrifices which have been asked and are being cheerfully made by Russia, and, on the other, the sense of quiet confidence as to the ultimate result.

These things were of course talked of here with greater detail. There is a photograph of a battlefield, not with a few straight lines and some scattered dead, but with zigzag lines all close together and simply heaps of Austrian dead (the Russian dead had already been removed). From the attack of one German division on this side, one thousand corpses were counted. The Germans and also the Austrians advance in close column, which may give moral support to the men, but results in terrible losses, as compared with the more individualistic advance of groups of eight to ten on the Russian side. In bayonet fights practically no quarter can be given, and sometimes the men can only use their rifles as clubs. The Austrian army is already no more than a relic of its former self, though it still makes some vigorous moves and covers every retreat with a tremendous cannonade, often resulting in the capture of the guns and men thus left behind. It must not be forgotten that Russia has had to deal with practically all the forces of two of the three allies (Austria and Turkey), as well as with an ever increasing proportion of the forces of the third (Germany). But she is going steadily through with her work, and already it is possible to see more clearly both what has been achieved and how the remainder of the task can be attempted.

After some days in a cottage with some friends, living largely by candle-light and discussing the great social changes which are to be expected in Europe after the war, we were joined by V. S., who had walked in through the thick mud a distance of some twenty miles. V. S. is a young and clever Conservative, who has sat in several Dumas, always a strong and witty enemy of revolution, but never content to sink his conservatism or patriotism in any commonplace formula. He went to the front at the beginning of the war and was wounded in the trenches simultaneously by shrapnel and by bullet. He is now partially recovered and is working energetically for the Red Cross, superintending the removal of the wounded from the front.

V. S. left the neighbouring town in a motor with some Christmas presents for the General. He had only come halfway when his benzine gave out, and, as none was to be got anywhere near, he left the motor with the chauffeur and made the rest of the journey on foot. He had to plough his way through rivers of mud, and when the early night fell he took shelter in a Polish cottage. When he reached us next day he was dead beat and slept for hours.

As soon as his main business was done, we set out together yesterday morning in a long boat-like cart with three horses and a soldier driver; our plan was to find the motor and return to the town, sending back the General's presents in our cart. For some hours we made a sort of slow progress, rolling about in a way that exceeded the North Sea at its nastiest; however, we had time to talk over many subjects that interested us both. We pulled up at the Polish cottage, where V. S. had a most affectionate welcome from the children, and we lunched on bread and milk. We were not out of sight of the cottage when our axle broke; and after finding that there was no smith, and no other cart to be had, we loaded our benzine and chattels on the horses and left the cart at the cottage with a note explaining what was to be done with it.

For several more hours we tramped on in the mud with our pack horses; it was quite impossible to follow the track of the road closely; it was thick with mud too deep to walk through and often the fields were a sort of swamp. At one point we turned in to a Jewish cottage and ate more bread and milk, while our old host asked ceaselessly when the war would end.

At last we found the motor and the chauffeur, and, after a cottage dinner, started on the short remainder of our journey; but we were by no means at the end of our troubles, and this, I was told, was to be expected, because a hare had run across our track. We were going along, dodging the huge and deep ruts in the _chaussée_, when, close up to one of the hugest and deepest, a cart coming the other way compelled us to make a sudden turn, and we were landed on a kind of plateau between two deep holes with our wheels almost off the ground in them.

We had tried almost all the ordinary expedients in vain, when a long train of soldiers began to pass us with artillery. Appeals of "Brothers, come and help us," brought about a dozen of them to our aid, and they performed prodigies of strength, pushing forwards or backwards, and at one point even raising the whole motor from the ground. Sometimes they counted "one, two, three," sometimes they sang a bargee's chanty, and each of them put the best of his wits to our service; but at last, just after one of them had said "Let's do something a bit more together," the officer in command felt it his duty to call them back to their work, and our brown-coated brothers left us in the semi-darkness while the guns boomed a few versts away.

The chauffeur meanwhile had set himself like a hero to raise the motor out of the ruts. V. S. and I found a cottage with a pile of bricks outside, which we took with the explanation "Needed." After several journeys to and fro we collected a little brickyard; and V. S., though his back was paining him, came dragging a huge log and a tree stump to use for leverage. He still found a free hand to shake mine with the words: "A Happy New Year; it finds us hard at work but full of spirits in spite of everything." The new year began well: the lever acted, the chauffeur made a sort of macadam of his own, and we sailed over the obstacle and on to our destination, which we reached at 1.30 a.m.

These are the conditions of weather and roads under which Russia has to press back the enemy; but she never lets him alone, for she knows that on persistent pressure depends the issue on the allied front.

_January 3._

Yesterday I walked out to the lines, which are about four miles out of Tarnow. The railway runs quite straight to the little river which is the Russian front at this point; so I followed the railway embankment, meeting small bodies of troops on the way and a few sentries guarding the bridge over the Biela. It was a beautiful crisp December day, with a blue sky, distant views and a good foothold. To the left lay a long low plateau abutting on the river and crowned with a wooded village and a little church. In front was flat ground, rather marshy, with scattered villages close up to the broken railway bridge. The smoke from burning houses rose at different points to either side of the foreground, and high rugged hills bounded the view. Making my way to some rising ground, I for a time sat in an arbour beside a dismantled and deserted house, with the panorama of plain and villages stretched in front of me, listening to the swirl of the enemy's shrapnel and to the booming replies of a Russian battery. I made my way round to this battery; the men were engaged in improving their underground shelters, which were lined with straw, well heated, and furnished with shelves for a few belongings, including even books, and, anyhow, provided a refuge against frost and bullets. Water was near, and the soldiers' washing was hanging out to dry outside. We couched in the straw and talked of the western front till the word was given to fire. The officer gave the directions and the guns were discharged smartly. A German shell, which broke near us, was greeted with a cry of "Bravo!"; and when the officer announced that the practice was "excellent" the men all cheered. I had more talk in the telephone pit and in the officers' shelter; there was absolute composure, and the men were anxious to move forward again, having been here for over two weeks; I was asked to share any little delicacies that these hermits possessed.

Exchanging good wishes "for health and success" I made my way on through the villages toward the broken bridge. One of a group of soldiers, when I asked the way to the lines, simply pointed, saying "Here, close by." A long line of high earthworks ran close to the stream, on the other side of which were the Germans, their sentry being about 1000 yards away. I entered a hut and drank tea with the battalion commander, an old gentleman in a jersey, who, with charming apologetic gesture, offered me some white bread and chocolate. 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. After the last great halt, on the San, the men went forward with a tremendous rush, and the enemy's rifle pits were filled with dead. Again the talk turned chiefly on the French and English front, and on the necessity of carrying the war to a real settlement. No one can understand why the Germans challenge such enormous losses by their attacks in close columns. Late at night I made my way back to the town; every now and then a few isolated shots rattled in the darkness.

_January 5._

I set out late in the evening for a forward ambulance post attached to a famous fighting division. Our party consisted of two soldiers, a niece of Count Bobrinsky, who took such a notable part in the Duma visit to England, and myself. The young Countess, who was enveloped in tarpaulins, is one of the hardest workers in the ambulance. Our cart was stacked with necessaries for the soldiers; on the wall of the courtyard German soldiers had scribbled in large letters expressions of their self-satisfaction, such as "Austria and Germany fear God, and nothing else in the world," and sundry contemptuous allusions to "der Nikolai, der Georg und der Französe."

From the time when we left the lights of the town we had to go mostly on foot, negotiating difficult bits of road and ploughing our way through fluid mud. We passed over high ground and close to the front; all round us was the glare of camp fires and in the distance the flash of projectors. In the darkness we were constantly meeting trains of carts.

At last, on the slope of a hill, we turned into a Polish hut. It had two fairly large apartments, with a big stove and an earthen floor. In the inner room lived the six sisters of mercy: in the outer we were an interesting and strange collection; along one side lay a big bed, on which, crosswise, sat or slept the Polish peasant, his wife, two daughters and little son; in a corner, on a heap of boxes which he had to arrange each night, slept the young priest, the monk, whom I had met before, and one of the most spiritual men whom I have known; the two sanitars and myself made our beds each night beneath the windows (one of which was smashed), removing them each day to make room for the dinner-table. By the stove, or anywhere else, our soldier servants slept on straw.

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. They have not yet lost the sense of the battlefield or reached the stage where they are fully conscious of their wounds. They take their places one after another in the cottage chair--in which one of them died yesterday as soon as he had sat down--and the young divisional doctor, with the help of the sisters, removes their first rough-and-ready bandages, and gives them such quick treatment as may enable them to be sent further. It is, of course, the seriously wounded of whom one sees most here, for many of these get no further, dying here, or on the road. From one of them the doctor removed an enormous splinter of shrapnel completely embedded in the body; the largest bombs of all, which the soldiers call "portmanteaux," make terrible wounds.

Here all day and all night the doctors and sisters work at the wounded as they come in. The senior sister, a lady of the most remarkable capacity, takes about one night's sleep in five, but is always as fresh and bright as can be. Her husband, a member of the Duma, travels over Russia for the better organisation of the Duma field hospitals. The transport is in charge of one of the sanitars, the son of a Moscow business man, who has a particularly clear head for work. The whole party, three of whom talk excellent English, are drawn close together by their work; and there is the atmosphere of complete unselfishness which one feels so strongly in anything connected with the Russian soldier. As to our soldier servants, it is clear that their constant preoccupation is to make themselves useful to anyone.

_January 6._

We lie at the head of a little valley, some few miles from the Divisional Staff. As the troops move forward new questions are constantly arising; and our transport sanitar, Nikolay Nikolayevich, discusses the possibilities of getting better access for the wounded to the hospitals. We are pressing back the enemy into the Carpathians, and there are halts in front of difficult hill positions. The advance through swamps of mud makes tremendous demands on the men, who have to lie for days in rifle pits full of water; at times a well-chosen and well-entrenched position holds the Russians at bay at a distance of a few hundred yards or less, in one case fifty, and yet they will not go back. "Und auf den Carpathen sind die wege beschneit," often recur to me, these lines of one of the laziest of German student songs, which is a kind of renunciation of all effort.

Nikolay Nikolayevich and I rode over through the snow to the Staff of the Division. He is a charming and simple man, very like one of our own best-known Generals both in face and manner. He lives in a small hut, which is kept very clean. We lunch and discuss transport, and I am asked to carry certain suggestions to the town. On our way back, accompanied by two Cossacks, we pass through Tuchow, a little township half in ruins, and I notice that, as on our way out, some one is still strumming on a piano in a house of which only the walls are standing. The cannon has carried away a large tree and left deep pits near the road.

Driving in the evening to the town, I find groups of wounded, for whom there is no place on the carts, wandering forward in the darkness. The men choose among themselves which I shall take with me: "Let him with the nose go," for one of them has had his face smashed up; the rest move on contentedly, and my passengers give me a word of thanks, which would make any one feel ashamed of himself. This is their Christmas Eve.

It is very wonderful, this self-denying patience of the Russian soldier, and it is too big a thing that one should get tired of speaking of it. A doctor at work here tells me how constantly it is impressed upon him. A man whose chin he has had to remove simply says: "Thank Heaven, now you've tied me up, and I am all right." Another, after his leg has been taken off, as soon as he is able to speak, says: "Ah, but it was a fine fight at Krasny; they gave it us, but we gave it to them too." 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. The qualities of the real Russian people are going to take their proper place among the best factors in the future of European civilisation.

_January 8._

In our _halupa_ (hut) we had those intimate and speculative conversations which seem so natural to Christmas Eve. Monk and Intelligents were on common ground. Only once Father Tikhon put down his foot when one of the party expressed indifference as to the other life. "No," he said, "joking apart, that's not good, least of all in time of war"; and the rebuke was accepted as gently as it was given.

Our Russian Christmas began with the burial of a wounded soldier who had died in the night. In a little waste patch in the snow, near the lazaret, the priest stood in his gorgeous vestments and bowed deep over the new grave, while two soldier choristers sang the beautiful prayers for the dead.

In the evening there was a Christmas Eve service in a room of the lazaret, which Father Tikhon and the soldiers had spent no end of trouble in turning into a chapel. The room was crowded with soldiers, and there was an improvised choir. The simple directions of the priest and the strangeness of the surroundings only added to the deep atmosphere of reverence.

I completed the night service in our hospital in the town. Here the first-floor landing had been turned into a chapel. A matronly sister from Moscow, one of the simplest souls in this work-a-day gathering, served as clerk. The leader of the choir was a young Social Democrat doctor, who had suffered for his convictions at the time of the second Duma; and among the choir were all who had had a training in church singing, which reaches such a high standard in Russia. The singers included sisters, sanitars, soldiers and several of the convalescent wounded, who were wrapped in their long grey dressing-gowns; and one wounded man had been laid on his stretcher among the choir in order that he might take part in the singing. Afterwards we all had cakes and tea; and a conversation as to what England could do, and what would follow in Europe, lasted well into Christmas Day.

We have here with us Bishop Tryphon, of Moscow, who, like the Bishop of London, asked leave to accompany the army, and is now the Superior, or Rural Dean, of one of our Divisions. The Russian army has a staff of army chaplains with an Arch-Presbyter or Chaplain General, as in England; but many priests have enrolled specially for the war. Some have been killed, others wounded, others taken prisoner; some have been specially honoured for serving the Liturgy to regiments under fire. I am told that Father Tikhon's first sermon under fire was wonderfully simple and impressive. One regimental priest told me how a shell burst in his quarters, blowing a medical attendant to bits and leaving himself with a bad contusion.

Bishop Tryphon took a prominent part in the entertainment of our Bishops in Moscow, and sends them by me a message of greeting and good wishes. He arranged a solemn Christmas Day service, with trained singers who were serving in the army. He later visited the hospitals, giving short and plain addresses, and his blessing to each branch of the Red Cross work in turn. There was a great Christmas tree in the station, where presents were distributed to four hundred wounded. Gifts were also distributed under fire by the hospital workers to the soldiers in the trenches some miles from the town.

In the evening I took part in a Christmas gathering in one of the big hospitals. Everyone's health was drunk in turn by Christian name, the whole being woven into a long song. Afterwards we sang songs of the Volga, and some stayed on talking till five in the morning, resuming their work a few hours later.

_January 10._

Returning to our _halupa_ in the little village, I rode over in the night to the General to convey the results of my journey. It was almost pitch dark and the road was in most places a simple swamp of mud, sometimes with gaping holes in the causeway or with beams or trunks of trees lying about; and though I had a soldier and a lantern, the ten miles took over four hours. Next morning we left the _halupa_: the dismantling process made the hut look more desolate, and while our things were being packed, the peasant family sat on their bed, looking on like moony spectators at some rustic entertainment. They showed more than satisfaction with their payment, which they expressed after the local fashion by kissing every one's hands; but they had now to expect the arrival of a fresh batch of strangers.

Our forward move of a few miles was carried out with great expedition; but our carts made quite a long train, and the movement of even a small ambulance section is in itself, under such conditions, almost an exploit. Just in front of me went our Austrian field kitchen with three separate cauldrons, which is found very useful. In a few hours we were installed in our new quarters, a great improvement on the _halupa_, within a stone's throw of the divisional lazaret and the now reopened railway station. From beyond a near wooded hill came the sound of almost continuous firing.

We were now close behind the line of the front ambulance points. At the station, which we put in order for their reception, there was a constant dribbling stream of soldiers who had come almost straight from the front. Most of them had walked in with their kits, and many seemed almost unconscious of their wounds. Their conversation was of comrades who stood at other points in the line, of the relative distance of the enemy and of the conditions of work in the rifle pits.