- from the book 'Field Notes from the Russian Front' Front' 1915
- 'A Night Attack in a Snow-Storm'
- by Stanley Washburn
- Special War Correspondent of the ‘Timesl’
On the Russian Front in Winter
in a Russian trench / photos by Georges H. Mewes
Dated: Guzow, Poland
January 6, 1915
The good old days when a war correspondent could go out and stand on a hill and actually see infantry and cavalry advancing, and with his glasses observe the genuine development of an action, are gone for ever. Even if one could come and go as one pleased, it would be impossible to see the things that the reader at home is anxious to hear about. Poland in this neighbourhood is flat, and unless one is fortunate enough to get up in an aeroplane or a balloon there is no such thing as really seeing the details of an action at all, even though one be all but in the battle itself. It seems incredible that one can be within a thousand or fifteen hundred yards of an actual attack and still see almost nothing but the bursting shells. However, this is the fact, even in the daytime, and at night it is still worse.
I had an opportunity of being pretty well in the heart of such an event last night. I and Granville Fortescue (see At the Front with Three Armies' : Liége), the correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, accepted the invitation of a gentleman in the Red Cross to run out with him from Warsaw and have a look at some of the field hospitals in which he was actively interested. Following the general situation from Warsaw becomes rather a bore, and so we gladly accepted his offer, and about eight o'clock on the Russian Christmas Eve we found ourselves just finishing a simple meal, in a little room in one of the improvised hospitals. Across the hall from where we sat some tired nurses were cleaning up the operating room, and piling bloody bandages into a big basket. The last of the day's wounded had been attended to, and were already tucked in the straw in a great shed across the street, where they were to spend the night before moving back toward the big Warsaw hospitals.
"Shall we make a visit to the positions?" asked our Red Cross friend. Both Fortescue and myself had for a week been desirous of getting into the first line trenches in order to form some accurate estimate as to the condition of the Russian soldiers, and now, on the eve of the Russian Christmas, seemed an exceptionally fortunate time in which to make them a call. As we came out into the street of the quaint little Polish village it was snowing. Not a blustering, windy snowstorm, but that quiet, gentle unassuming kind of snow that comes drifting down aimlessly hour after hour, and by morning leaves a white blanket inches deep over everything. Our friend had provided a cart with one weary horse, and into this we climbed, and started westward out of the village. The night was as quiet and serene as the picture on a Christmas card. From the front came not a sound to break the stillness. Once out on the main road we came upon the interminable transport which fills every highway and byway by day and by night. Long strings of artillery caissons, bearing shrapnel as Christmas gifts for the Germans, plodded along through the falling snow, the weary drivers nodding in their saddles, while the soldiers on the caisson lay crossways on the limber, their feet hanging limply over one end. The whole transport seems to move intuitively at night with half the drivers sleeping in their seats.
For more than an hour we drove down one of the great avenues of trees that line nearly all the main arteries of travel in this country. Then we turned off across a field, and for another half hour zigzagged about over a route which seemed familiar enough to our guide, but which to us was as planless as the banks of Newfoundland in a fog. Finally, after driving for nearly two hours, we brought up at a bank of a small creek. With the flashes of a pocket electric lamp our guide discovered the ford, and we drove in-and stuck fast. It was as still as death, with only our voices and the soft ripple of water in the little stream to break the silence. The snow was still falling, and our coats and hats were already white. While we were trying to tease our patient little horse to make one more effort to get us out of the river, there came a sullen boom, from far off to the west. Then a long way off another and another and another. "Ha," said our guide, "the German guns. We are in luck. They may be planning an attack."
Even as he spoke there came a quick red light to our left through the haze of snow, and "Bang" said the sharp incisive little field gun hidden somewhere over there in the darkness. "Bang, bang, bang," said two or three brothers in unison. Almost simultaneously a second battery over on our right came into action with a succession of rapid reports that shook the air. Our little horse made an extraordinary effort, due to the excitement of the firing perhaps, and we got up on the river's bank once more. As we stood in the road there came an earth-shaking crash, and a flash as of lightning from our rear, and a six-inch shell from one of our big batteries a mile or more behind screamed overhead. We heard its melancholy wail fade away, and then a long way off the sullen boom of its explosion. A sudden contagion of fire seemed to sweep the countryside, and in an instant the still night was torn and shattered by the crash of artillery, the whine of shell, and reverberations of heavy explosions. The small German guns now broke loose, and we could plainly see where our own trenches were located, from the quick, hateful jagged flashes of the bursting shrapnel above them.
We climbed into our cart and pushed on toward the front as rapidly as possible. For ten minutes the thunder of the artillery shook the air; and then puncturing the greater tumult came the sharp little crack of a rifle, followed by a series of reports like a pack of fire-crackers exploding. Then it seemed as though some one had thrown a thousand packs of crackers into the fire. The artillery redoubled its rapidity of fire, and to our right front a machine gun came into action; then another just before us, and then a whole series off to the left, until it was impossible to pick out any single piece from the confusion of noise. The flash of the guns and the breaking of shells gave a light like that of a pale moon, and we could clearly see the road ahead of us.
Leaving our cart and patient pony, we pushed forward on foot toward the trenches. Our way led across a field, and then through the fringe of a little grove of Christmas trees. In the field the snow was deep, and we kept stepping into holes and going headfirst into drifts. The crackle of musketry, the monotonous hammer of machine guns, the steady roar of the artillery around us and the whine of shells above us, still continued. After stumbling about in the snow for half an hour, our party came to a halt. The attack which seemed not above a thousand yards before us was still going on. Rockets from the German positions soared on high, and burst with a great white light which we could see even through the snow. Somewhere some one had a searchlight, for we could see its great long finger sweeping here and there across the sky. The noise and tumult continued, but we did not go farther. Our guide thought that it would be impossible in view of the attack, for us to get into the trenches, and I believe he was not sure of the way in the dark. So we turned back, and in half an hour were back at the first dressing station.
Each soldier has his first-aid package, and somehow or other they manage to care for themselves and each other in the trenches with such assistance as the busy doctor in the first line can give. Thence they come back to the dressing station, where their rough field dressings are removed, and better ones put on. They are again moved back one link in the chain, where, as at Guzow, there is an operating table and complete surgical equipment for the more imperative cases.
As we stumbled into the little hut from out of the falling snow in the fields, the wounded were already beginning to arrive. A half-dozen carts with canvas tops, like the old American prairie schooners, were already standing before the door; and sleepy soldiers were stumbling about in the dark helping to get the wounded out of the carts and into the little stuffy hut, where in the dull light of oil lamps, the great patient Russian soldiers, still in their bloodstained bandages and wet and dirty from the trenches, were waiting for treatment. And still from without came the noise and tumult and clatter of the armies celebrating Christmas Eve, the day of "Peace on earth, goodwill to men."
It soon became obvious that we could get no farther toward the front that night, and a little after midnight we started back toward Guzow in our little cart. After we had been on the road a short time the firing began to slow up, and then gradually ceased entirely, save for an occasional spasmodic crash from a field gun, or the heavier boom of a big howitzer that still kept up the fight as though unwilling to go to sleep at all, even as a big dog bays and bays long into the night and refuses to be quieted.
We took a new road home, with the result that we were soon off any road at all and plodding about in the fields. A mile or more from the front behind a hedge we stumbled on the reserve ammunition of the batteries that had been in action. The Russians apparently keep their first reserve caissons constantly ready for action, and I have noticed here as elsewhere, that the horses stand in their harness all hitched to the caissons both by day and by night. Here behind the hedge were perhaps sixteen six-horse teams, each attached to the ammunition caissons. The fuzzy ponies stood apparently quite contented in the snow, their little heads hanging low and their ears flopped forward. Probably they were sound asleep. Under the caissons in the snow lay the artillery soldiers, also sleeping deeply. Both men and horses were covered an inch deep with fallen snow, but it seemed to trouble neither men nor horses. Everything at the front is casual to a degree. Here their batteries were in vigorous action not over a mile away. Men were dying and killing each other two miles away, but these chaps were sound asleep in the snow.
It was three o'clock when we got back to Guzow, and our host put us to bed in a great room already crowded with workers in the service, who needed rest and sleep far more than we did.
Thus on Christmas Eve did one more of the thousand odd details of the fighting on our front pass into history as a repulsed German attack. Hardly a day or night passes in which the identical thing does not happen at least once; sometimes it happens two and three times in the twenty-four hours.
