One morning in April, 1915, Stephania Ychas, the wife of the keeper of
a railway-crossing to the north of the Lithuanian town of Shavli, felt
the saddest and loneliest woman in the world. Do what she could, she
found it impossible to rid herself of the feeling that a catastrophe
was imminent--that the terrible war into which her country had been
plunged meant the end of all things. Poor Lithuania! Once so fair a
place, now so desolate a wilderness!
Stephania's duties, in these troubled times, kept her continually on
the _qui vive_. At all hours of the day--and latterly during many of
the night--she had to be in and out of her little house, in order to
see that the rails were clear, or to note the numbers of the troop
trains as they swept past towards the north. Backwards and forwards,
from her door to the telephone, fixed against the wall on the
right-hand side of a little window through which she could overlook a
big sweep of the line in the direction of Shavli, she went, welcoming
the never-ending succession of trainloads of soldiers, wounded, or mere
war material passing on to the new line of defence, and reporting their
progress to the railway and military authorities.
Day after day, night after night, the great retreat of the Russian
forces continued, until, single-handed as she was, Stephania Ychas was
almost dropping with fatigue. A hundred times she told herself that
human flesh and blood could never stand such a strain. It was not the
fatigue alone which was crushing her. Added to her physical tortures
were mental ones, the feeling of being alone, so horribly alone, and
the knowledge that the enemy, as announced by the retreat and the
nerve-racking booming of the guns, was rapidly advancing on Shavli,
and that until Russia had had time to recover, the hated Teutons would
inevitably overrun Lithuania as far as Vilna. At night her brain
was filled with pictures of burning farms, ravaged orchards, and
indescribable scenes of brutality such as she knew the German soldiers
had been guilty of in Belgium and Poland.
A dozen times a day, dizzy and sick at heart, she had been on the
point of staggering to the telephone to inform the commander of a
neighbouring station that she could continue no longer. But a sense of
duty had held her back. When it came to a point of renunciation, her
stout Lithuanian heart said "Nay," and she recalled the parting from
her husband and his final adjurations.
Buried in thought, while waiting for a train which has just been
signalled from Shavli, she recalled the morning when Michael Ychas,
suddenly called to the Colours, had left her. It seemed like an
eternity since those days of the mobilization.