I remember one such pile of ruins, which I saw not far from the road
leading to Jaroslav. This ruin remained permanently fixed in my memory
by reason of a horrible tale connected with it.
Some time ago there lived on a farm a well-to-do Galician gardener.
When the war broke out he was drafted into the army. He went
forth, leaving behind him a wife and three small children. Shortly
following his departure, troops commenced appearing in the immediate
neighborhood. At first came small detachments, but these were quickly
followed by more formidable bodies. In a short time lines of trenches
were dug on both sides of the farm and real warfare began.
The firing was continuous. The family sought safety in the corners
of their hut. They hid in the cellar under the heaps of beets and
potatoes, but the children soon became accustomed to the hissing of
bullets and lost all fear of them.
The wounded soldiers, for the most part Austrians, began crawling
toward the farm. There they bound up their wounds. The children
looked on and sometimes gave aid, holding with their tiny fingers the
blood-soaked cotton, or winding long and transparent bandages around
the wounded limbs. They became accustomed to pain and to the groans of
the dying, and in their naive and simple way rendered all the help of
which they were capable.
At night, when darkness fell and when firing from both sides would
cease, the Austrian relief workers would come, place the wounded on
long and unsteady stretchers, and carry them to the rear. On one
occasion the wounded sent the eldest girl to the pond to fetch some
water. She stayed away for a long, long time. Later she was found lying
on the grass with a bullet in her slender little shoulder. The pails
lay near her empty.
During the night she, too, was placed on a stretcher and was carried
away. With her went the mother and the rest of the children. From that
night on the farm remained forsaken.
The wounded, however, continued crawling to the hut, their numbers
increasing from day to day. At times the litter bearers could not
manage to look into the farm, and the wounded lay for days at a stretch
without aid.