We draw up in the great station at Lvov. To the right of us stretch
endless lines crowded with wagons, especially with sanitary trains. In
the lofty passages and waiting-rooms are sleeping troops with piled
muskets, some wounded on stretchers tended by the sisters of mercy who
are constantly on duty here, and a crowd of men, all soldiers, coming
and going. One passed many Austrian prisoners, of whom another enormous
batch was just announced to arrive; and elsewhere a Russian private
explained to me the excellent quality of the Hungarian knapsack, which
he and his comrades had turned into busbies. One man was asleep inside
the rail opposite the ticket office. He did not seem to mind how often
he was awakened.
In the town everything is quiet, and life goes so naturally that no
one could take it for a conquered city. In the country this might have
been expected because far the greater part of the population is Little
Russian; but in Lvov the Russians are only about 17 per cent. and the
predominant element is the Polish (60 per cent.), the rest being Jews
(20 per cent.) or Germans (3 per cent.).
Lvov is taking on more of the character of a Russian town. Many of the
Jews have left. The Russian signs over new restaurants, stores, etc.,
meet the eye everywhere. Of the Little Russian party which supported
the Austrians, many have now returned and are making their peace with
the new authorities. The Russian soldier is quite at home in Lvov, as
one sees when the singing "drafts" swing past the Governor-General's
palace; the Austrian prisoners in uniform, who are allowed liberty on
parole, seem equally at their ease. Numbers of Russian priests are
pouring into Galicia, but not fast enough for the Uniat villages which
have embraced Orthodoxy; as soon as they arrive, peasants come with
their carts and take them off to their parishes, without waiting for
any formal distribution. The Uniat creed and ritual are practically
identical with the Orthodox, so that the difference between the two
was purely political. At the new People's Palace of Nicholas II, I
saw a number of children, principally from families that had suffered
severely at the hands of Austrian troops, receive Christmas presents
on the day of St. Nicholas, who is the Russian Santa Claus. Archbishop
Eulogius, in a very effective little address, told them that the
biggest Christmas present which they were receiving was the liberty to
speak their own language and worship in their own way in union with
their Russian brothers.
Starting for the army, I spent a night of strange happening in the
great railway station, as our train was delayed till the morning. At
one time I went, in the frosty night, to look for it at the goods
station, where there were endless rails and wagons, and found it
after a long search. In the big restaurant four little boys made
great friends with me, one of fourteen in uniform and spurs who had
been serving as mounted scout with a regiment at the front, and
one of thirteen who had attached himself in the same capacity to a
battery. Both were small creatures, and the first was a remarkable
little person, with all the smartness and determination of a soldier,
relieved by an amusing childlike grace and courtesy. He said to me in a
confidential voice, "I see you are very fond of little children," and
he ordered with pride lemonade and chocolates for us both. He said the
men at the front could last a week to ten days, if necessary, without
any food but _sukhari_ (army biscuit), so long as they had cigarettes.
His imagination had been caught by the aeroplanes over Peremyshl,
and also by the Carpathians, which he described with an up and down
movement of the hand. He had a great disgust for anything mean and a
warlike pride in the exploits of the soldiers of his regiment. His
model was a boy, now a young man, who had been through the Japanese
War. "If a general comes past," and he made a salute to show the
extreme respect felt for his hero. Many a time in that long night,
while the weary heads of doctors and sisters of mercy were bent in
sheer tiredness against the tables, he would come and sit by me and
ask me to read the war news to him, or to tell him about the English
submarines. He left me with the smartest of salutes in the early hours
of the morning.