- from the book 'Field Notes from the Russian Front' 1915
- 'A Visit to the Trenches'
- by Stanley Washburn
- Special War Correspondent of the ‘Timesl’
On the Russian Front in Winter
photos by Georges H. Mewes
Dated from A Certain Place, West of Warsaw
January 10, 1915
The lot of the struggling journalist who wants to see things in this war is a hard one. It is difficult to get west of Warsaw, and the nearer one gets to the front the harder becomes the task. While I was turning over in my mind how to manage it without a knowledge of the Russian language, there came a wire from the General Staff informing me that I had been temporarily assigned to the group of Generals from the Grand Duke's headquarters, who with a Staff Colonel were making a trip over the Warsaw positions. So my way was made easy for three of the pleasantest days that I have had during the war.
The company consisted of General Sir Hanbury Williams, the representative of the British Army, the Marquis De La Guiche from the French, and General Oba from the Army of far-off Japan. Colonel Moucanoff of the Grand Duke's personal suite was in charge. Our party left Warsaw in a special train and proceeded to the headquarters of the General commanding the army group west of here. We found the General, whose name is well known in London, but whose identity I am not permitted to disclose, established with his staff in what had formerly been a women's sanatorium. The great sun parlour where the ladies used to bring their knitting, and discuss the gossip of Russia, has now been turned into a telegraph office and general telephone exchange. Here the thousand and one details of the operations of a gigantic army are cleared and digested every day. Great maps with forests of pins show the movements of all the regiments and brigades under this command, and there are enormous numbers of them.
We stopped only long enough to exchange courtesies with the commander and his staff, and then in two great grey military motor-cars started west for the headquarters of a certain army corps, the number of which cannot be disclosed. Our two cars were of the most powerful army types, each directed by a Siberian trooper with a hat like a bushel basket of black wool on his head. The weather was bad, and the roads in horrible shape; but the big cars ploughed through the mud like an ice breaker opening the channel to a frozen harbour. About 1.30 in the afternoon we turned into a village and at its outskirts into the driveway of a beautiful summer estate, where the commander of the army corps had his headquarters.
The General met us at his door, and with the usual clicking of heels and the saluting of salutes we were ushered into a really lovely house. The front hall was given over to telegraph instruments and dirty troopers and orderlies standing about waiting for instructions. The fine old library with its hardwood floor and wonderful woodwork and bookshelves loaded with volumes in all languages had been taken over for the Commander's private dining-room. The rest of the house was filled with soldiers and officers tramping about in their spurred boots over the shining floors, which, by the way, shine less I should say with each day that the war lasts. Here the General gave us royally of everything that one could desire in the way of food.
Immediately after dinner we emerged into the beautiful grounds, with trees now laden with snow, and accompanied by the Chief of Staff mounted horses and started our journey to the front. Three Cossacks rode ahead; fifty or more fell in behind as a guard of honour, and our little cavalcade proceeded toward the positions. After a ride of an hour we halted at another, though less pretentious, villa where the Brigade Commander had his headquarters. Poland being as flat as a board, it is very difficult to get into the advance positions without drawing the fire of the enemy. The road to the trenches for which we were aiming, lay for two miles in direct vision of the German line, and for this reason we dismounted and passed an hour taking tea until the early dusk began to settle over the landscape. As the weather was pretty bad we did not need to remain until it was actually dark before starting, but set out a little after four o'clock. We were not far from the front here and the dull boom of the guns sounded every minute, first from one quarter, and then from another.
For three-quarters of an hour we rode on, and then the Chief of Staff turned suddenly off the road, and by a faint trail through a bit of woodland led us to a clearing. At first sight it contained nothing of interest, but on the farther side we saw at last the carefully masked battery of the Russian heavy artillery. The officer in charge obligingly offered to throw some shells into the German lines for our benefit, but as it was now getting dark and we were anxious to visit the trenches, we declined his offer and proceeded on our way. We made one more halt at the regimental headquarters and chatted a little with the colonel commanding. From here we moved forward to the edge of a small wood and dismounted and proceeded on foot. The sharp crack of rifles now sounded spasmodically in front of us. Our guide, though a General, seemed to know every foot of the way, and with the sureness of an Indian following a trail in the forest, he led us through the woods, having first warned us to move separately and not in groups.
At last, turning off sharply, we came to the line of reserve trenches. The soldiers were sitting and squatting about in their little shelters, having their suppers as peacefully as though there were in the whole world no such thing as war. From this trench we entered saps and for fifteen minutes followed a maze of twisting trenches, until at last we emerged on the first position itself. This particular front lies along the Rawka river, with the trenches skirting the bluff on our side of the river. Heavy woods crowd to the very brink, and in and out among these runs the labyrinth of the Russian defensive position. I have in the past seen many trenches, but I do not think I have ever been in better and more comfortable ones than these that we now visited. The first line was very deep, possibly eight or ten feet in places, while saps ran back at frequent intervals to the reserve trenches, a hundred or two hundred yards in the rear, where the bulk of the soldiers of the reserves were gathered. We found the men well dug in, and shelters everywhere.
While it is true that a trench is not an ideal place to spend the winter in, yet it is equally true that there is a lot more comfort in a well-made trench than one would imagine possible. The officers' quarters burrowed out of the ground were extremely cosy. The major commanding the battalion had a room fully fifteen feet by ten, ten or fifteen feet under ground. One entered it by steps leading down from the main trench. Sofas, pictures on the walls of dirt, and a writing table on which an oil lamp burned brightly, gave the whole place a homelike appearance that one hardly expected to find on the very front line. The whole was roofed over with six-inch logs, which held up, I suppose, five feet of soil above that. In the corner was a telephone communicating with the headquarters itself. Nothing short of an extremely big shell bursting exactly on the top of the place would bother the inhabitants to any great extent.
Leaving this hospitable shelter we wandered about in the trenches for some time, working our way up to the one which was nearest to the German position. Here in sheltered overheaded ditches, one saw the butts of innumerable guns sticking out of the loopholes, ready for the soldiers to jump to at the first sound of an advance. The main German line of trenches was between 250 and 300 yards from this position. During the day time this was, in fact, the interval between the armies, but at night both Russians and Germans pushed out their pickets to the brink of the river that ran between, cutting down the distance to merely a hundred yards. While we were there, these pickets, taking advantage of the night which had now completely shut out the view, began to work forward, and then began that spasmodic "crack, crack, crack," that one hears by night up on the front line.
The Russian troops were well clothed and well fed and their moral seemed extraordinarily high. The system of reserve trenches connecting with saps with the first line, makes possible frequent changes of the personnel of the first line. The shelters and comforts in the second line or reserve trenches were excellent. My own impression, from what I could make out in the darkness, was that fully two-thirds of the troops were in the second-line trenches, where they were not subjected to the nervous strain of rifle fire and constant sniping from the German side of the river. In case of a German movement during the night the pickets at once discover the activity and report it. Long before the enemy is actually under way, the first-line defence is at work through the loopholes with rifles and machine guns; and before the attack becomes actually a menace, the reserves are fed up through the saps, so that by the time the enemy are really pressing the position, they have the entire available Russian line to meet them. From a defensive point of view I think it a fair assumption that the Russians have never had a stronger position in Poland than the so-called Bzura line. If they leave it at all it will be through some strategic consideration, and not, I feel sure, through any menace of a frontal attack.
We left the trenches through the saps by the 'same way that we had come in, and found our Cossack escort holding our saddled horses back in the woodland where we had left them earlier in the evening. We struck home by a new route, the greater part of the way leading through a most beautiful pine forest, a Cossack with a lantern riding ahead lighting our way. As I rode along in the dark with the clink of Cossack accoutrement jingling on all sides, my companion, General Williams, said the scene reminded him of Western Canada; and to our surprise we discovered that we were both equally familiar with the great Empire of Western Canada that stretches even to the foothills of the Rockies.
It was well on in the evening when our little cavalcade turned into the headquarters driveway. It had begun to snow, and we were all wet and cold and stiff as we slid out of our saddles and turned our ponies over to the Cossack. From within the house there shone cheer and light and the sound of many voices. As we entered the great hall, the full brass military band gathered in the background burst forth with the English National Anthem, followed in turn by that of each of the other Allies represented in our little party.
A sumptuous supper followed, and then we were led into the great beautifully furnished drawing-room in which army cots had been installed for our comfort. It always impresses me strangely to be constantly living in other people's houses, surrounded by all their personal knick-knacks and belongings. Here in a great gold frame on the table was a picture of a wedding party. A sweet girl bride with her little wedding group were sitting in the sunshine on the front porch. It was spring and flowers were everywhere about the verandah where now stand two solid Russian sentries each with fixed bayonet. And as I looked at the picture my mind drifted far from war, and I vaguely wondered where all these nice sweet-faced people in the picture were now. Suddenly the windows shook. "Boom" went a great gun not far off. And then again came the same old tumult "Boom, Boom."
"They're off again," said the General as he pulled off his boots. "Let's turn in; it's getting late."
photos by Georges H. Mewes
