In the Russian Ranks: A Soldier's Account of the Fighting in Poland. John Morse

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СКАЧАТЬ body. The man was close by, a mere mass of smashed flesh and bones, with thousands of beastly flies battening on his gore, as they were on that of all the corpses. The sight was unbearable. Sick and nearly fainting, I had to lean against a broken waggon to recover myself.

      Our wounded had been murdered. There could be no question of that. For we had not left any behind who were capable of fighting, yet a dozen had been finished off by bayonet wounds—and German bayonets make awful jagged wounds because their weapons have saw-backs.

      One bayoneted gunner was not quite dead. At long intervals—about a minute it seemed to me—he made desperate efforts to breathe; and every time he did so bubbles of blood welled from the wound in his breast, and a horrible gurgling sound came from both throat and breast. There were two doctors in our party, but they looked at each other, and shook their heads when they examined this miserable man. Nothing could be done for him except to place him in a more comfortable position. War is hellish.

      We found another of our men alive. His plight was so terrible that it was hardly worth while to increase his suffering by carrying him away. We did so: but he died before we had gone two versts. On that part of the field which the Germans had been compelled to cross without waiting to carry out their fell work, we found more survivors, and took back a dozen, of whom three were Germans. There happened to be no Red Cross men with our division just then; but we sent them to the rear in empty provision waggons.

      This is what I saw of the battle of Biezum, if this is its correct designation. According to Polchow the Russian centre was at Radnazovo, a town, or large village, eleven versts further east; and the whole front extended more than thirty versts, though the hottest fighting was near Biezum. It was afterwards reported that 10,000 Russians were killed in this engagement, and 40,000 wounded. The Germans must have lost heavily too. I saw thousands of their dead lying on the ground near Biezum alone. The fight was not a victory for the Russians, and scarcely could be claimed as such by the Germans. The two forces remained in contact, and fighting continued with more or less intensity until it developed into what modern battles seem destined to be, a prolonged series of uninterrupted operations.

CHAPTER V

       Table of Contents

      THE FIGHTING UP TO THE 26TH AUGUST

      There appeared to be nearly 300 men in Polchow's battery when we went into action: only fifty-nine remained with the four guns we saved at the close of the day, and not one of these escaped a more or less serious hurt, though some were merely scratched by small fragments of shell or bruised by shrapnel bullets. At least twenty of the men would have been justified in going to hospital; several ultimately had to do so, and one died. Even British soldiers could not have shown greater heroism. Chouraski, the non-commissioned officer who had attached himself to me, had a bullet through the fleshy part of the left arm, yet he brought me some hot soup and black bread after dark; whence obtained, or how prepared, I have no idea. I was much touched by the man's kindness. All the soldiers with whom I came in contact were equally kind: and I have noticed that the men of other armies with whom I have come in contact in the course of my life, even the Germans, seemed to see something in my personality which attracted them, and to desire to be friendly. Perhaps they instinctively realized that I am an admirer of the military man; or perhaps it was the bonhomie which is universal amongst soldiers. Certainly I got on well with them all, though some time elapsed before we could understand a simple sentence spoken on either side.

      For two days I was not fit for much: then I went to the front with a detachment of sixty gunners which had arrived from Petrograd via Warsaw. I found the battery and the rest of the regiment encamped to the westward of Przasnysz.

      Heavy fighting was going on somewhere in front; but the contending troops were not in sight. The whole country was full of smoke, and the smell of burning wood and straw was nearly suffocating. The Germans had set fire to everything that would burn, including the woods. During the night heavy showers of rain fell, and these extinguished most of the fires and saved a vast quantity of timber.

      I could see that the Germans had been driven back a considerable distance; and the Russians claimed to have won great victories in the neighbourhood of Stshutchen and Graevo, and to have already passed 500,000 men across the German border. That they were making progress was obvious; and on the 20th August I witnessed some desperate infantry fighting.

      The Germans came on, as they always did, in immense columns, literally jammed together, so that their men were held under fire an unnecessarily long time. The usual newspaper phrase, "Falling in heaps," was quite justifiable in this case. Thousands fell in ten minutes; and the remainder broke and fled in spite of the efforts of their officers to stop them. I was well in front and saw what took place. The German officers struck their men with their swords and in several cases cut them down; and I saw one of them fire his revolver into the crowd. I did not actually see men fall, but he must have shot several.

      The Russians, too, adopted a much closer formation than was wise, and suffered severely in consequence, but they never wavered. The Germans came on again and again, nine times in all, and proved themselves wonderful troops. Four out of the nine charges they drove home, and there was some desperate bayonet fighting in which the Teutons proved to be no match for the Muscovites. The last named used the "weapon of victory" with terrible effect, disproving all the modern theories about the impossibility of opposing bodies being able to close, or to come into repeated action on the same day.

      On the contrary, it may be taken as certainly proved that men's nerves are more steeled than ever they were, and that the same body of men can make repeated and successive attacks within very short periods of time. In the above attacks fresh bodies of troops were brought up each time, but the remnants of the battalions previously used were always driven on in front. I noticed this: on three occasions the 84th regiment (probably Landwehr) formed part of the attacking force.

      "Driven on" is the correct term. The German officers invariably drove their men in front of them. Arriving in contact with their foes, the soldiers fought with fury. It was the preliminary advance that seemed to discompose them: and, indeed, their losses were dreadful. They certainly left at least 30,000 dead and wounded on the ground on the 20th. The greater number were dead, because those who lay helpless received a great part of the fire intended for their retreating comrades, and thus were riddled through and through.

      The Russian artillery played on the masses both when they advanced and retreated; but the fight was chiefly an infantry one. The full effect of the guns could not be brought into play without danger of injury to our own men. In the end the Russians chased the enemy back and the artillery was advanced to support them. Considerable ground was gained; but four or five versts to the rear of their first position the Germans were found to be strongly entrenched. The day's fight was finished by a charge of a large body of Cossacks and Russian light cavalry. They swept away the force of German horsemen who ventured to oppose them, and also drove back several battalions of infantry. That part of the Russian Army which had been engaged bivouacked on the ground they had fought over.

      The cries of the wounded during the night were terrible to hear, and came from many different points and distances. Hundreds must have died from want of attention, and hundreds more, on both sides, were murdered. The Germans, who were hovering about in small parties, persistently fired on the Red Cross men, so little could be done for the dying; and the cruelties which were perpetrated, and which were revealed (so I was told) by the shouts, entreaties and imprecations of the sufferers, aroused a nasty spirit in the Russians, and particularly in the Cossacks, and led to fearful reprisals, so that in one part of the field I know that not a German was left alive. I am bound to add that after I had seen two Russians brought in with their eyes gouged out, and another with his nose and ears cropped, and his lacerated tongue lolling from his mouth, I had not a word СКАЧАТЬ