_The Colossal Struggle of the Slavs_
_Told by Bernard Pares, Official Observer with the Russian Army_
This is one of the most important narratives in the records of
the War; it is an invaluable witness of the colossal struggle
waged on the Eastern battle front. The author was granted official
privileges awarded to no other non-combatant. He passed through
the first Warsaw Campaign, the crucial battle of Dunajec, and
the Russian retreat. When Germany declared war on Russia, he
volunteered for service and went to Petrograd and Moscow, where
he was appointed official correspondent with the Russian Army,
traveling with the general staff. He later joined the third army
as an attaché. Here he was given written permit by General Radko
Dmitriev to visit any part of the firing line. "We were the advance
guard," he says, "of the liberation of the Slavs ... the retreat of
the army to the San and to the Province of Lublin. We were driven
out by sheer weight of metal ... it was a delight to be with such
splendid men as the Staff of the Russian Army. I never saw anything
base all the while I was with the Army. There was no drunkenness,
everyone was at his best, and it was the simplest and noblest
atmosphere in which I have ever lived." His experiences have been
gathered into a volume entitled, "Day by Day With the Russian
Army," from which the following incidents are retold by permission
of his American publishers, Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
[16] I--WAR STORIES FROM THE RUSSIANS
It is wonderful how little effect the war seems to have made on the
body of Russia. On the other hand, the atmosphere of nervous tension
begins to disappear the moment one begins to get really near to the
front. In the Red Cross offices at Kiev I found the same straining
toward the front as elsewhere, only much calmer because these were
people who had a big war work to do. Hospitals meet the eye in the
streets at every turn.
Once in the train for Galicia it was again the war atmosphere and
simplicity itself. The talk was all of people engaged directly or
indirectly in it. A graceful old lady with a very attentive son was on
her way to get a sight of her husband, one of the generals. A young
officer, whose wound has kept him out of it for three weeks, is on his
way to the front before Cracow. A fresh-looking young man, at first
unrecognisable to his friends with his close-cropped bullet head,
tells how he went on a reconnaissance, how he came on the Austrians,
how their first line held up their muskets and when the Russians had
passed on fired on their rear, how nevertheless practically all came
back safe and sound. It was told with a kind of schoolboy ingenuousness
and without suggestion or comment of any kind on the conduct of those
concerned. Then followed an account of a war marriage, at first put off
and then carried out as quietly as possible. All the friends of every
one seemed to be at the war.
At the old frontier some of the buildings near the station were wrecked
by artillery fire, and the railway was lined with a succession of solid
hospital barracks, with the local commandant's flag flying over one of
them. There was plenty to eat at the station; and though we moved on
very quickly, every one from our crowded train managed to find a place
in the Austrian carriages, chiefly because every one was ready to help
his neighbour. The corridors jammed with passengers and kits, we moved
on through the typical "strips" of Russian peasant culture, a pleasant
wooded country, passing a draft detachment on the halt which waved
greetings to us. My companion, Mr. Stakhovich, a phenomenally strong
man and imbued by a fine spirit, was talking of the indifference of the
Russian peasant to danger; he regarded it as an indifference to all
sensations; anyhow they go forward, whatever the conditions, as a sheer
matter of course. With the ordinary educated man the mind must be kept
occupied with work if unpleasant possibilities of all kinds are to be
kept out of it; but General Radko Dmitriev, to whom we are going, will
jump up from a meal, however hungry, when there is a chance of getting
under fire.