over. Horses sent from the front took me on to the new headquarters of
the F Regiment. It was a big cottage with two bare, spacious rooms.
On the wall of one were pencil pictures of Hindenburg, surrounded
with a laurel wreath, and Austrian ladies of various degrees of
comeliness. The officer in charge made me comfortable; and from the
outside room were audible the telephone reports from the battlefield.
The first words that I heard were "rank and file many: number not yet
ascertained."
The staff had left this cottage at six in the morning. At eight the
Russians opened a heavy artillery fire which came home on a weak part
of the enemy's line. At eleven the infantry left its trenches and
advanced, point by point, making shallow holes with head-cover at each
line when it halted. At five in the evening, being now within storming
distance, the whole Russian line went forward. The Austrian front was
pierced at two points; to left and to right their quick-firing guns
continued to play with deadly effect, but with a third great sweep
forward in the centre, the whole position were surrounded and carried,
nothing being possible for the enemy except surrender. The regiment
encamped on the conquered hill.
All this came in over the telephone, with first some and then more
detail, as to the losses. "G. is killed"; "H. is shot in the ear";
"L. is wounded"; "G. is missing"; "G. is at the station, seriously
wounded." The group of soldiers at the telephone were all taken up
with the general course of the action. I asked the officer if G. was a
great friend: "I am sorry for him," he said. "He's a comrade." Every
word of the reports was checked by the receiver and then repeated to
the divisional officers. It was clear that the Austrian positions were
very strong, and that the chief damage was done by their machine-guns.
I was in bed in my corner, when there was a hubbub of rather exacting
voices; it was a group of fifteen captured Austrian officers. One, who
retained the habit of command, quieted the rest and then entered our
room. He was a young captain, strong and healthy, and showed no sign
of confusion or annoyance. He seated himself to the good meal which
his captors had prepared for him, ate with appetite and, turning to
the Russians, said vigorously, "I see no point in this war; it should
be stopped: it is all England's fault." I interposed from my corner
and asked for his reasons; he had none; he said, "That's the only way
that I can explain it; England is the only real enemy of Germany; she
has egged on the others indirectly; and she has kept her own fleet in
harbour." We had a friendly discussion as to the facts of the matter,
especially about the Austrian policy of aggression at the expense of
the Slavs and Russia; and he ended by saying that he knew nothing of
politics and did not think that officers ought to. He told me the
Austrian trenches were flooded, and though the food was fair, the
condition of the men was enough to make his heart bleed. When the hill
was taken, he was at the telephone; he saw that the Russians were
through on the left, that they were through on the right, and that
they were storming the centre. "There was no point in running on them,"
he said simply, "so I surrendered. But I'm keeping you awake, am I not?"
A young sentry came in, saluted the regimental flag, and mounted guard
over it, his face settling at once into a fixed stare. When I woke the
next morning, the man, his pose and his stare were still the same.
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." "When you hear
that in Russia," I said, "you will have the kind of peace that you ask
for, but I don't think you ever will."
The colonel came back with his staff, drenched through, even to
the case of his field-glass, but jubilant. After the rest came a
middle-aged officer with his head bound up, and that gentle look which
accompanies head wounds. He said in a conversational voice "Hurrah" and
sat down. Some one asked him of his wound; and he simply answered, "Oh,
that's nothing."
_April 16._
I have been to see one of the first regiments which I visited, in its
new surroundings. When I was first with the H's, they were maintaining
ground under difficulties. They were opposite a notable and commanding
height, which could sweep the Russian line with a cross-fire or lodge
bombs among the H's at short range. I remember in particular a visit
to an exposed part of the trenches in company with two officers, one a
fair-haired florid young man who sniped at stray Austrians, the other
also young, but dark and sallow, evidently not strong, to whom this
part of the front had been entrusted. When I said I should like to
visit it, he said, "You'll be killed"; and when I rather pointlessly
said, "That is interesting," he replied, "No, it is not interesting."
He struck me and others as bearing a hard burden, and bearing it well.
I remember the fair young man sniping at the enemy, and also dealing
with a soldier who asked to be sent to the rear. "What's his wound?
That's not much." "Yes, but he has a wife and three children." "Then I
should say he is one of those who ought to stay: he has seen a bit of
life."
I found the H's beyond the Beskides. My orderly and I rode over a broad
shoulder, then crossed a gully, and climbed the main ridge at one of
its lower points. The Beskides are the frontier between Galicia and
Hungary, and they are in almost every sense a dividing line. From here
the rivers flow respectively north and south--to the Vistula and Baltic
or to the Danube and Black Sea. There is a marked difference between
the views northward and southward. Though on a very much larger scale
and with greater detail, it recalls the difference between the northern
and southern views from Newlands Corner in Surrey. To the north, it
is true, there are descending lines of hills, but they are uniform
and severe, and covered mostly with firs. To the south opens up a
whole series of Hascombes and Hind Heads and, best of all, Horseblock
Hollows. It is an English forest, of oaks and elms and especially
beeches; and the firs and pines, as in Surrey, are in relief and not in
sole possession. Many of the hills are covered with brown fern like the
hills in east Herefordshire. 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. One sees in the distance other
hills as high as the Beskides and to the east the towering mass of the
High Tatra.
Near the ridge of the Beskides was a great park of horses, and along
the top were trenches and soldiers. All the way down among the beeches
one seemed to be riding straight on to the enemy, whose positions,
unless absolutely enveloped in cloud, seem to be at less than half
their real distance. Soon the horses had to be left in the wood; and
crossing a narrow hollow we came out on a low, bare bluff which was
the line of the H regiment. A green hill loomed up close above us, and
every man and every line of the trenches could be distinguished. This
was the enemy. It seemed only a stone's throw, but when the rifles and
machine-guns first set to work here, they found that they did not carry
the distance and stopped firing. A desultory cannonade was going on,
but it ceased as the evening began to close in; mingled rain and snow
were sweeping in gusts about us, and even the near distance was soon so
shrouded as to seem for us non-existent. We were as if on a promontory
in a dark sea.
By this time I was in the earth shelter of an old acquaintance,
the commander of the battalion with whom I had passed a night some
months before. How changed he was. Always the soldier, he had before
looked the smart man of the world. Now he was grimed and tired and
had something of the mild and enduring look of a hermit. The water
came through our mud hut everywhere. As we sat eating biscuits and
chocolate, another acquaintance came in and with almost such a smile as
one might have in speaking of a wedding said, "You remember the fair
young man; he is dead." I asked after the sallow young officer. "He
is dead, too; both were killed when we tried to take the green hill
opposite, they are lying out there now." The fair youth just before his
death had telephoned "All in order," and he was first wounded in the
open and then shot dead while looking through his field-glass. The H's
were among the first to move on the Beskides, which they took at the
rush. Here, on the further side, they had three tries at the green hill
in front of us, two at night and one in the early morning; each time
they had won the top, and each time the German troops, which had been
brought up in large numbers to the defence of the Carpathians, proved
too many for them, and they had to retire, leaving their dead behind.
Each attack was made up the stiff ascent in mud knee-deep. Such is the
price to be paid for each hill in the Carpathians.
All night the water poured in on my host and myself. We lay so as to
avoid, as far as possible, its trickling on the face. At intervals in
this unquiet night one saw the soldier servant rise from where he slept
bowed on a box and move over our squelching floor of fir boughs to try
some new plan to stop the dripping. My host said, "I'm used to it now."
However, next morning he had a great inspection of earth shelters, with
the result that we moved into the telephone hole. I asked a private if
it was better there, and with a glad smile he said, "It's good there
and it's good here; as long as we stand here we have got to suffer;
soon there'll be peace."
The colonel, whose staff was some way behind, was of the same way of
thinking. He used to like to say, "He that endureth to the end shall
be saved." He had himself lived for a week in our night quarters, till
he was driven out by a shell which fell a yard off and sent a beam
flying past his head. Firing went on most of the time, and while I was
there shots lodged on or near the trenches and at different points on
our path up the Beskides. When I halted to look back from the crest,
a man came up at once and said, "You're under fire." I remember the
quiet reply of one of the soldiers when he was asked if there were any
wounded that day. He said "Not yet."
I found the regimental staff, with the kindest of colonels, in an
armoured blockhouse that had guarded the railway tunnel between Hungary
and Galicia. I asked him after the two dead officers. The sallow young
man was not dead after all. He had led the storming of the Beskides
and was the first man into the trenches. "He saved the whole thing for
us," said the Colonel, "and I am presenting him for the Cross of St.
George."[1]
_April 17._
I started off from the General's on a journey of six miles, and I had
an object lesson in the difficulties of movement in this region. My
orderly, naturally, did not know the names of villages in this part,
and thus we found ourselves at a neighbouring station eight miles from
my destination. A train was due; but at any station on this line a long
halt may be necessary for the collection of all that must be forwarded,
whether troops or material. I spent the interval at a local Feeding
Point, where I had some acquaintances. Only a soldier-caretaker was
there, attending to a young scout-leader who had got a shrapnel wound.
At last the train moved off. I had made a couch of my wraps in a large
goods wagon; but I was the only passenger who travelled in comfort. The
others were private soldiers, and in the dark they talked freely, and
were entirely themselves. One of them was telling sad things of the
losses in his regiment, of how the telephone might have saved them,
but had broken down. "You won't manage in war without loss," said one
of the elder men. "No losses, no victory." Few as they were, his words
summed up the difference between sitting in trenches and making ground
by attack. They talked on; and as one often notices in these night
talks of the Russian privates, there was a kind of sacred simplicity,
which left one thinking. I recalled the Austrian private who did not
care what country his home belonged to as long as he earned his own
living.
Seven hours had passed since I left my starting-point, and I was still
a mile and a half from my destination. 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.
This forward detachment of the Red Cross was always keen and united.
It worked under fire during a time of retreat, and all its members
had the George medal for courage. When I was with them it was a slack
time; and the result was that one member of the band after another felt
the effects of the previous stress and had to go off to Russia. Now
they had struck another period of arduous work, and the absent ones
were returning with a few new additions. Work pulls people together,
especially out here, and they were making more effort than ever. When I
reached their very modest quarters (two rooms: one for the sisters and
one for the men), I could not make out where the ambulance rooms ended,
because each member's bed in the detachment was occupied by a wounded
man or invalid awaiting the evacuation train. Here was an old colonel
(they had nursed several here); there was a private, who had won first
the George Cross and then a commission. Judging by my own experience, I
fully expected the train to be hours late, and thought the detachment
would get no sleep till the morning. However, the train drew up, the
officers thanked and kissed the gentlemen of the detachment, and the
room was clear. I had a warm welcome from my friends, and a bed was
found for me.
The next day I had an interesting talk with some cordial officers
at the staff of a brigade which had taken 7000 prisoners, or almost
the number of its own men, from the enemy since December. In all the
regiments in the Austrian army the various nationalities were now
hopelessly mixed up. They told me of a Serbian, an officer in an
Austrian regiment, who had been court-martialled and transferred for
not joining, at a banquet, in toasting the extermination of Serbia. All
the Austrians, they said, are now for peace, and the military oath,
to which, in this non-national state, the greatest significance is
attached, is the only deterrent from wholesale surrender. As always
elsewhere at the front, I found the greatest enthusiasm for the work of
England in the allied cause.
I ended this journey in an ambulance train standing at Mezolaborcz,
which is already Hungary. The chief of the train, though I did not
know him, gave me a clear night's rest, with luxuries of every kind,
including English tobacco, of which he insisted on making me up a
packet for my journey. But the best of the evening was, as so often,
a clever and fascinating conversation on the war and the future of
Russia and England. There is matter in this subject for all sorts of
interesting suggestion, but one seldom meets any difference of opinion
on one point, namely, that after the war the relations of the two
countries will assume a far wider importance, political, economic and,
above all, social, and that they will be among the chief factors that
make for the peace of Europe.
_April 19._
The staff of the Xth Division was housed in a white-walled cottage at
the end of the little town. After the usual glasses of tea and talk
of England, we set out with a small cavalcade for the front. The long
street was very definitely Hungarian. It was not only the notices and
the shops, with surname written first, among which I saw the historic
name of Rakoczy, probably a Jew; but that the line of the houses, the
river and the landscape were all new to one coming from Russia.
We rode fast along the double track of railway, and very quickly
reached our first halting-place. Diverging to the high road, which
was also fairly hard and dry, we soon left our horses and proceeded
on foot. The road was so good and straight, the weather was so fine,
and the beautiful hills so peaceful, that, though talking all the time
about the war, we somehow forgot that we were in it, when suddenly,
from a high hill that seemed quite close to us, there crashed a shell
about thirty yards from us. The little lurid flame that preceded the
explosion burned long enough to let us throw ourselves against the
bank, which was bright with pretty blue flowers. We found we had
exactly reached the front of our positions and made our way under
shelter up a slope. The men were at work on their breastworks, which
were very different from those of the Galician plain. On this higher
ground, almost at any point the spade soon came on springs of water
which filled the hole in a few minutes. In such places the breastworks
are ordinarily what is called horizontal; they are constructed of
brushwood and spruce fir, and give hardly any shelter. The earth-huts
are replaced by little arbours of fir boughs, which are very much
more difficult to warm, though from the captured Austrian trenches,
unfortunately facing in the other direction, there have been taken
quite a number of excellent little stoves. As the new Russian lines
were only recently occupied, they were still in a very primitive state;
in the wood that stretched in front, trees were still being cut to
the stump to serve as posts for the wire-entanglements, and the lines
themselves were not as yet at all continuous. Shells continued to fall
at short intervals for some time, and a private, killed while at work,
was brought up for burial. The colonel pointed the moral of getting the
shelters finished as soon as possible.
When the firing died away, we walked along the outside of the
lines; the task of sentries and scouts was a difficult one, for the
trees stood close together. After a halt, I was taken further by a
business-like officer with worn uniform and steely blue eyes, and, with
his approval, I passed a word or two of greeting from the English army
to the groups of soldiers at work. Several of the men asked me to send
a like greeting back.
As we went forward, this little procedure became more detailed. The
idea was taken up with enthusiasm by the commanders of companies,
especially after I had been conducted, staff in hand, over a deep
gully which separated us from the next regiment. Here each company was
called outside its trenches and drawn up facing the enemy. I gave the
salute, "Health, brothers"; and the usual answer came in a thundering
peal. I told them how grateful we were for everything that they had
sacrificed and everything that they had done for our common cause,
and said that we wanted to be in time to do our full share on land,
that our new big army was ready, and that we were going to advance as
they had done. There is no difficulty in making simple things clear to
Russian soldiers. They answered with their "Glad to do our best," and
the "Hurrah!" which was so vigorous as to bring the Austrian machine
guns into play; I am glad to say, without results. Several of the men
came and talked to me in groups later; they felt the effects of their
hard work and the heavy losses that go with attack, but their spirit
was a conquering one, and all the more impressively so, because of the
hardships in which I saw them. Later, when I saw the Commander of the
Army, who had run a risk of being captured close to this very ground,
he asked me to continue to give these greetings, "to hearten for the
common cause," and arranged for me to get early news of any successes
on the western front.
I slept with the usual brotherly group of officers in a little
forester's hut, a hundred yards from the comparatively open front; on
the outside of the door was chalked the word "Willkommen," which read
like an amusing invitation to the enemy. We all slept on the floor,
but I was accommodated with a litter, which made an excellent bed. The
porch served as first-aid point, and when the firing was resumed in the
morning, a wounded man was brought in here.
Before I went further, the Brigadier-General sent me by telephone a
warm greeting, to be communicated to England.
_April 20._
The reader will remember "The Birds," a very tight place held by the
L regiment beyond a river on another front. The L's had done no end
of work and had suffered heavily long before I visited them at "The
Birds." There, too, they lost many men--about 1500 out of 4000--in an
action which followed on their occupation of those positions and in the
weeks of cannonade which they endured there.
I was aware that the L's were now in the Carpathians and close to
me. The two regiments whose lines I had traversed had lost many in
this hill warfare. Where a hill is taken, the enemy's losses, though
probably more than double the Russian, are rather in surrenders than
in killed and wounded. A hill attack, which is beaten off by superior
numbers, means heavy sacrifices.
I clambered over another of the steep intersecting gulleys. A group
of S's stood waving their farewells. There was a bit of bare slope
facing the Austrian plateau, and then I came on the first shelter of
the L's, quite a comfortable mud hut. The young officer, who had come
to meet me, was an acquaintance, and he sat down and told me about the
men I knew. In a single night attack on the height in front of us,
two-thirds of the officers that I had known had gone down, and about
half the regiment. Name after name came up with the brief record, "He's
killed." We lay on the straw--in nearly all other huts here there
were only boughs of fir--and he told me the whole story. The hill
was almost inaccessible, the works were long prepared and elaborate,
the Germans had hurried up large forces here; yet the attack all but
succeeded. "All but," and no results but losses. At Rava Russka and on
the San the L's had given of their best, and decisive successes had
followed. The hill opposite had cost more and still faced us. It is one
of the saddest of thoughts, that the bravest of all, the men who go
furthest, must lie where they fell. Yet the L's, who in the course of
a few days have again been brought up to full strength by the enormous
reinforcements which Russia continues to pour into the army, will have
written their name on the Hungarian war in as lasting colours as on the
Galician. We are over the crest; we are fighting in the main downwards;
we touch a vital spot; and we are going forward.
There is nothing which makes one feel all this better than to pass
along the lines of a regiment so battered, still in position at the
time when I visited it; nay, more, occupying for the moment far more
than the natural extent for its full strength, and occupying it as
a conqueror with swiftly thrown-up works that only provide for an
elementary shelter. And the battle is not offered; the enemy sits on
his heights and makes no counter-stroke to push his temporary advantage
home.