April 9.

I have been visiting my friends at the Staff of the army at Jaslo. Even this place has not been immune, bombs have been thrown from aeroplanes, doing no damage to the army but wounding and killing some children.

I visited the General in command, who is in splendid spirits. He is the simplest of men, and stops in the streets to talk to the children or to any new arrival. He is happy now, because things are going forward.

The Staff lies in rather better quarters here, but with the same simplicity as when I first visited it at Pilsno. One of the regiments I knew came through in fine style with its colonel at its head; it had done forty-eight miles in two days, and was ready for any amount more. The different battalions were singing different soldiers' songs, each taking pride in getting a good swing and putting in the best foot forward. I was struck with one man who marched at the side leading the songs with a mouth like a brass instrument and a voice to match.

Two German airmen have just come down here. They had made a wide circuit, and were brought down by the failure of their motor. As always here, they are being well treated. Even in the case of spies caught red-handed, it is most difficult to get the Russian soldier to shoot, especially if the condemned shows any sign of fear.

Austrian soldiers are to be seen here everywhere. The Germans and Magyars are under close surveillance; but the Austrian Slavs are ordinarily allowed to wander about freely. Many of them have shown in the most thorough way their attachment to the Russian cause; but I am told on the best authority for this area, that there is not a known instance of their abusing their liberty to play the part of spies. At many points on the Austrian front the Slavonic cause is like a kind of contagion. Under German direction disaffected troops are moved from one point to another to escape this infection, and finally, at the first opportunity, come over en masse.

Every day the prisoners are gathered together in groups according to their various nationalities for examination. These interrogations, which are of a very systematic kind, obtain very interesting results. Most of the prisoners testify to a shortness of food, not only in the front but in the rear. Letters from home to them speak of the dearness of all food; some necessities cannot even be obtained for money, and different parts of the empire are applying to each other for them in vain. Nowhere is there any spirit left. The only comfort which the officers can suggest is to await some success from the Germans. Some, moreover, describe the officers as being never on view, except to abuse their men, treating them worse than cattle: "So that one does not know whether one is a man or not." Only one Austrian officer so far has been taken in this part with a bayonet wound. It is known that there have been further protests in Bohemia after the taking of Peremyshl, and that the severest repression has been used, also that two Polish regiments have been literally decimated, that is, that every tenth man in them has been shot. One man's brother writes to him that he is called for the first time to the army at the age of forty-eight, and in his part the last call covers those between forty-two and fifty-two. Other new battalions are formed, ninety per cent. of reservists and ten per cent. of wounded who have returned to the colours; in most of them there is now a hopeless mix up of all nationalities. Some describe their training as having only lasted four weeks. In all cases the preoccupation of the commanding officers is regarding retreat.

April 11.

The centre of interest is now in the Carpathians. If Russia could have advanced with success against the strong German positions in East Prussia, she would have secured her right flank, but only as far as the sea, which would still have remained in German hands. On her left, her victories in Galicia have brought her to a very different barrier, which, if passed by her, will certainly remain impassable for the beaten enemy. It is a good thing that the Austrians, continually spurred forward by the Germans, have exhausted themselves in one desperate counter-attack after another on Galicia. It is a good thing that the Germans, realising what the ultimate defeat of Austria must mean to them, have diverted so many of their forces to this side. It is best of all that they have risked a desperate advance in the Bukovina and even as far as the Russian frontier, in the hope of dragging Rumania in on their side. The fall of Peremyshl has opened the gates of Hungary and has made possible a movement which threatens vital results on this front. Hungary and Prussia are the two keys to our triumph in this war. The one element in Austria that holds firm to the Prussian alliance is the Magyar; the one statesman in Austria is the Hungarian, Count Tisza, whose estate almost on the crest of the Carpathians is now in Russian hands. A Russian advance on this side can crush Hungary or cut her from Prussia. It can bring even the Magyar to wish for peace; it can finally put aside all action of Austria; and along the real barrier thus secured to the south, it can facilitate the concentration of the forces of the allies against the main enemy. It is, indeed, good that this effect comes at the time when we are hammering at the gates of Constantinople and opening up an effective advance from our western front.

But the task in the Carpathians is a stupendous one, and it comes when the Russian army has been tried to the full by the tremendous work which it has already gone through. We had in England no adequate army when the war began; we had not reckoned on the shameless violation of Belgian territory or on the obligations of a joint struggle with allies for the independence of Europe. Every one in Russia understands the miracle that we have done in creating so rapidly a really competent continental army on the basis of volunteer service, and every one sees that we were right to defer our blow till the great new instrument was whole and perfected. But it is Russia who has given us time for preparing our action on land; and the sacrifices which this has cost her are heavy indeed. The tremendous impact at Rava Ruska was followed by another prolonged and exterminating effort on the San, and this takes no account of the work which was done in holding the furious attacks of the main enemy in Russian Poland. These efforts put a terrible drain on the Russian resources. While we stood firm on the west, whole Russian regiments were almost annihilated in the victorious storming of one Austrian position after another. In my earlier visits to regiments I have often asked how many men of the first call still remain; sometimes only six of a company were still left, sometimes it was hardly more out of a whole regiment. It was an army already replaced at almost every point which had to attempt the conquest of the Carpathians.

The Carpathians are not the Alps. It might be easier if they were, for there would be fewer positions capable of being defended. They are a belt of high and higher hills some sixty miles or more in breadth, where whole armies can hold line after line. They are full of trees, water and mud. Only one double line of railway runs through them. As they have the shape of a fan spread northwards, the defence can concentrate backward along the various converging passes and can, in a relatively small space, almost block the narrow entrance to the Hungarian plain. But once that final barrier is passed, Hungary is lost. Any counter advance can be blocked without great expenditure of forces, and the conqueror will be free to advance southwards or westwards.

April 12.

At the Staff of the Army I fell in with a number of casual acquaintances who all saluted me as "Mister." There was a keen young flying-man who was now going back to his cavalry regiment, and a colonel sent to take temporary command of an infantry regiment. The talk was in fragments and all of incidents of camp life or engagements. We knew that another advance had been made and that big things were going forward.

All night we travelled by train, with changes and queer moments in the dark when our luggage ought to have been lost but wasn't. In the early morning the Colonel and I were on an engine climbing the Carpathians along a fine double track. We sat like Dean and Archdeacon in little side stalls with our things stacked where there was least coal and bilge, while the engine-driver, a most intelligent man from the Caucasus, explained the difficulties of his work. The rise is a very steep one, and we had a front view of it, passing up long slopes or through strata of yellow rock. In these mountains one had at once the feeling of being altogether away from Russia; and the new Russian army notices blending with the earlier Polish and Hungarian inscriptions suggested the atmosphere of a big adventure. All along the beautiful slopes there was the look of a huge Russian picnic, soldiers sitting at rest in great boyish crowds very much as in peace time the peasants do on the sloping banks of the Volga. The bright dresses of the Ruthenian women and the almost theatrical picturesqueness of their men-folk touched the whole with novelty.

Alighting at a station near the top, I found the usual war crowd and park of waiting army carts, and a brisk-faced intendant who rapped out business-like answers to a running fire of questions from all sides. My own business was to get to General Dobrotin, and it was made easy by the appearance of a plain-faced officer who said, "He's the man who pours cold water over himself in the morning; give him to me; we know him all over the division." I was soon in a formanka—a sort of boat-like cart which works particularly well in the mountains—and making my way up the gorge, at first with a broad shallow river to my left and later branching into the hills. Here in a little gully lay a scattered village; and the notes of a mountain flute were wafted down the slope.

General Dobrotin and his famous division have had far more than their share of the great fighting in this war; and they have been given one critical task after another, because their action has so often been decisive. In no less than three great movements they made the first cut in, and held the ground won as a kind of pivot until the whole operation was successfully completed. It was so at Rava Russka, on the San, and at Muchowka. They had now been transferred to the other flank of our Army.

It was the second time that this division, now enlarged into an army corps, had had mountain fighting, to which the Russian soldier is much less accustomed than to the plains. This time the task was a stupendous one. The railway pass crosses one of the lowest parts of the Carpathians, but close to it rises the long, steep ridge of the Eastern Beskides, which is the actual crest of the range at this point. It is covered with forest, and forms a line of rounded heights which are often separated from each other by almost precipitous gullies. Along this line ran a chain of carefully prepared positions, which the Austrian officers regarded as inaccessible.

Dobrotin's force, brought up with the greatest secrecy, had in some cases hardly detrained before it was launched to the attack. It soon mastered the outlying ground and then marched from all sides to the attack of the main ridge. The Russian infantry, on which has fallen the brunt of attack in this war, does not ordinarily go forward in close columns like the German. Groups of men, led by the instinctive enterprise of the more daring, gain one point of vantage after another, each of which forms a pivot for an advance of the whole line. In night attacks the movement can, of course, be more general and more rapid. In any case the last hundred yards or so are covered at a rush; but there is an inevitable pause before the wire entanglements, which in front of the Austrian trenches are generally most elaborate and have to be cut through with enormous scissors under a storm of fire, especially of quick-firing guns.

The Russians went up the slope with unconquerable daring, the new recruits showing the same courage as those already seasoned by the war. The whole operation went with a simplicity which made short work of all obstacles. Under a furious fire the men swarmed into the Austrian trenches, at once overcoming all opposition. There is no easy retreat from heights of this kind; everywhere hands were thrown up and the positions were won. The Russians sit firm on the crest of the Carpathians.

The staff from which this crucial attack was directed lived like a little family of brothers in a farmhouse in the valley. The General, white-haired, with one eye left, and with two other wounds, but with a youthful vigour of voice and movement, lived among his officers with a comradely simplicity, now patting one on the back, now sharing with another a bench on which to draw up a report, now gazing with amused interest at the regimental chronicler at work with his typewriter. His was an authority absolute.

April 14.

The F and J Regiments were to storm a height of about 2,500 feet on the further side of the Beskides and thus close the flank of the newly-won positions against any turning movement of the enemy.

I set out in the General's britchka in a swirling storm of sleet. Ground could only be made very slowly; for the whole country was sunk in deep mud. On a slope in the road we came upon an ambulance transport stuck fast, with a couple of soldiers using all their expletives, which would have translated quite simply into English. Soon afterwards we had to leave the road and plough through spongy meadows intersected with ditches. At one ditch there were two sharp cracks, and here both our springs were broken.

It was a desolate halting-place, with no one in sight. My soldier-driver announced: "We shall go nowhere with this to-day." However, he set to work and showed prodigies of strength and resource, using broken boughs as levers, detaching certain parts of the carriage for strange uses in other places, and more than once lifting the cart almost off its wheels by its own strength. I made a fruitless journey for help; and a squadron passing on its way to the front could do nothing for us. My driver did, indeed, succeed in tying up the broken springs; but the most that he could hope for was to get back safely; so I went forward on foot over a bog and a moor, to the nearest village. Here I found a train of transports, whose captain kindly sent help to the britchka, and I myself went on to the staff of the J Regiment. This was in a Ruthenian cottage several miles behind the firing line; only orderlies were left here besides the Ruthenian family, which almost always remains in some corner of its hut during occupation by the Russians. These people had vigorous, handsome faces, and were dressed, men and women, in bright colours; they sat almost silent in an attitude of long waiting. While I was with them, orders came for the staff to move on: a squad of men marched in, and, saluting, took away the regimental flag, tramping off southwards. As the last man left, the Ruthenians began to talk, at first in whispers. Their language was Russian, their religion Uniat, and they had much more in common with the invader than with the neighbouring Magyar.

The delays had spoiled my chance of seeing the action, which was nearly over. Horses sent from the front took me on to the new headquarters of the F Regiment. It was a big cottage with two bare, spacious rooms. On the wall of one were pencil pictures of Hindenburg, surrounded with a laurel wreath, and Austrian ladies of various degrees of comeliness. The officer in charge made me comfortable; and from the outside room were audible the telephone reports from the battlefield. The first words that I heard were "rank and file many: number not yet ascertained."

The staff had left this cottage at six in the morning. At eight the Russians opened a heavy artillery fire which came home on a weak part of the enemy's line. At eleven the infantry left its trenches and advanced, point by point, making shallow holes with head-cover at each line when it halted. At five in the evening, being now within storming distance, the whole Russian line went forward. The Austrian front was pierced at two points; to left and to right their quick-firing guns continued to play with deadly effect, but with a third great sweep forward in the centre, the whole position were surrounded and carried, nothing being possible for the enemy except surrender. The regiment encamped on the conquered hill.

All this came in over the telephone, with first some and then more detail, as to the losses. "G. is killed"; "H. is shot in the ear"; "L. is wounded"; "G. is missing"; "G. is at the station, seriously wounded." The group of soldiers at the telephone were all taken up with the general course of the action. I asked the officer if G. was a great friend: "I am sorry for him," he said. "He's a comrade." Every word of the reports was checked by the receiver and then repeated to the divisional officers. It was clear that the Austrian positions were very strong, and that the chief damage was done by their machine-guns.

I was in bed in my corner, when there was a hubbub of rather exacting voices; it was a group of fifteen captured Austrian officers. One, who retained the habit of command, quieted the rest and then entered our room. He was a young captain, strong and healthy, and showed no sign of confusion or annoyance. He seated himself to the good meal which his captors had prepared for him, ate with appetite and, turning to the Russians, said vigorously, "I see no point in this war; it should be stopped: it is all England's fault." I interposed from my corner and asked for his reasons; he had none; he said, "That's the only way that I can explain it; England is the only real enemy of Germany; she has egged on the others indirectly; and she has kept her own fleet in harbour." We had a friendly discussion as to the facts of the matter, especially about the Austrian policy of aggression at the expense of the Slavs and Russia; and he ended by saying that he knew nothing of politics and did not think that officers ought to. He told me the Austrian trenches were flooded, and though the food was fair, the condition of the men was enough to make his heart bleed. When the hill was taken, he was at the telephone; he saw that the Russians were through on the left, that they were through on the right, and that they were storming the centre. "There was no point in running on them," he said simply, "so I surrendered. But I'm keeping you awake, am I not?"

A young sentry came in, saluted the regimental flag, and mounted guard over it, his face settling at once into a fixed stare. When I woke the next morning, the man, his pose and his stare were still the same.

Along the drenched road and fields came numberless batches of blue Austrian uniforms, prisoners, usually escorted only by one brown Russian. I had a lot of talk with some of these. "Miserabel" was their word for their condition before capture. All were sick of the war, "even the Hungarians now, though at first they liked it." "The main thing," said one, "is that people should not go on killing each other: nothing else counts. As to territory, it's all one to me to what State my home belongs; I only want to earn my living." "When you hear that in Russia," I said, "you will have the kind of peace that you ask for, but I don't think you ever will."

The colonel came back with his staff, drenched through, even to the case of his field-glass, but jubilant. After the rest came a middle-aged officer with his head bound up, and that gentle look which accompanies head wounds. He said in a conversational voice "Hurrah" and sat down. Some one asked him of his wound; and he simply answered, "Oh, that's nothing."

April 16.

I have been to see one of the first regiments which I visited, in its new surroundings. When I was first with the H's, they were maintaining ground under difficulties. They were opposite a notable and commanding height, which could sweep the Russian line with a cross-fire or lodge bombs among the H's at short range. I remember in particular a visit to an exposed part of the trenches in company with two officers, one a fair-haired florid young man who sniped at stray Austrians, the other also young, but dark and sallow, evidently not strong, to whom this part of the front had been entrusted. When I said I should like to visit it, he said, "You'll be killed"; and when I rather pointlessly said, "That is interesting," he replied, "No, it is not interesting." He struck me and others as bearing a hard burden, and bearing it well. I remember the fair young man sniping at the enemy, and also dealing with a soldier who asked to be sent to the rear. "What's his wound? That's not much." "Yes, but he has a wife and three children." "Then I should say he is one of those who ought to stay: he has seen a bit of life."

I found the H's beyond the Beskides. My orderly and I rode over a broad shoulder, then crossed a gully, and climbed the main ridge at one of its lower points. The Beskides are the frontier between Galicia and Hungary, and they are in almost every sense a dividing line. From here the rivers flow respectively north and south—to the Vistula and Baltic or to the Danube and Black Sea. There is a marked difference between the views northward and southward. Though on a very much larger scale and with greater detail, it recalls the difference between the northern and southern views from Newlands Corner in Surrey. To the north, it is true, there are descending lines of hills, but they are uniform and severe, and covered mostly with firs. To the south opens up a whole series of Hascombes and Hind Heads and, best of all, Horseblock Hollows. It is an English forest, of oaks and elms and especially beeches; and the firs and pines, as in Surrey, are in relief and not in sole possession. Many of the hills are covered with brown fern like the hills in east Herefordshire. The earth is rich in soil, in water which seems to bubble to the surface as soon as one makes any hole in it, and also in snakes, of which a great number have been found wintering by the Russian soldiers wherever they have entrenched themselves. The streams are broad and clear with beds of stones and pebbles.

One looks in vain for any sign of the plain below. In every direction it is a sea whose waves are hills. This is all the more so because the broad belt of the Carpathians makes an enfolding curve forward and southward, both to left and to right. One sees in the distance other hills as high as the Beskides and to the east the towering mass of the High Tatra.

Near the ridge of the Beskides was a great park of horses, and along the top were trenches and soldiers. All the way down among the beeches one seemed to be riding straight on to the enemy, whose positions, unless absolutely enveloped in cloud, seem to be at less than half their real distance. Soon the horses had to be left in the wood; and crossing a narrow hollow we came out on a low, bare bluff which was the line of the H regiment. A green hill loomed up close above us, and every man and every line of the trenches could be distinguished. This was the enemy. It seemed only a stone's throw, but when the rifles and machine-guns first set to work here, they found that they did not carry the distance and stopped firing. A desultory cannonade was going on, but it ceased as the evening began to close in; mingled rain and snow were sweeping in gusts about us, and even the near distance was soon so shrouded as to seem for us non-existent. We were as if on a promontory in a dark sea.

By this time I was in the earth shelter of an old acquaintance, the commander of the battalion with whom I had passed a night some months before. How changed he was. Always the soldier, he had before looked the smart man of the world. Now he was grimed and tired and had something of the mild and enduring look of a hermit. The water came through our mud hut everywhere. As we sat eating biscuits and chocolate, another acquaintance came in and with almost such a smile as one might have in speaking of a wedding said, "You remember the fair young man; he is dead." I asked after the sallow young officer. "He is dead, too; both were killed when we tried to take the green hill opposite, they are lying out there now." The fair youth just before his death had telephoned "All in order," and he was first wounded in the open and then shot dead while looking through his field-glass. The H's were among the first to move on the Beskides, which they took at the rush. Here, on the further side, they had three tries at the green hill in front of us, two at night and one in the early morning; each time they had won the top, and each time the German troops, which had been brought up in large numbers to the defence of the Carpathians, proved too many for them, and they had to retire, leaving their dead behind. Each attack was made up the stiff ascent in mud knee-deep. Such is the price to be paid for each hill in the Carpathians.

All night the water poured in on my host and myself. We lay so as to avoid, as far as possible, its trickling on the face. At intervals in this unquiet night one saw the soldier servant rise from where he slept bowed on a box and move over our squelching floor of fir boughs to try some new plan to stop the dripping. My host said, "I'm used to it now." However, next morning he had a great inspection of earth shelters, with the result that we moved into the telephone hole. I asked a private if it was better there, and with a glad smile he said, "It's good there and it's good here; as long as we stand here we have got to suffer; soon there'll be peace."

The colonel, whose staff was some way behind, was of the same way of thinking. He used to like to say, "He that endureth to the end shall be saved." He had himself lived for a week in our night quarters, till he was driven out by a shell which fell a yard off and sent a beam flying past his head. Firing went on most of the time, and while I was there shots lodged on or near the trenches and at different points on our path up the Beskides. When I halted to look back from the crest, a man came up at once and said, "You're under fire." I remember the quiet reply of one of the soldiers when he was asked if there were any wounded that day. He said "Not yet."

I found the regimental staff, with the kindest of colonels, in an armoured blockhouse that had guarded the railway tunnel between Hungary and Galicia. I asked him after the two dead officers. The sallow young man was not dead after all. He had led the storming of the Beskides and was the first man into the trenches. "He saved the whole thing for us," said the Colonel, "and I am presenting him for the Cross of St. George."[1]

April 17.

I started off from the General's on a journey of six miles, and I had an object lesson in the difficulties of movement in this region. My orderly, naturally, did not know the names of villages in this part, and thus we found ourselves at a neighbouring station eight miles from my destination. A train was due; but at any station on this line a long halt may be necessary for the collection of all that must be forwarded, whether troops or material. I spent the interval at a local Feeding Point, where I had some acquaintances. Only a soldier-caretaker was there, attending to a young scout-leader who had got a shrapnel wound.

At last the train moved off. I had made a couch of my wraps in a large goods wagon; but I was the only passenger who travelled in comfort. The others were private soldiers, and in the dark they talked freely, and were entirely themselves. One of them was telling sad things of the losses in his regiment, of how the telephone might have saved them, but had broken down. "You won't manage in war without loss," said one of the elder men. "No losses, no victory." Few as they were, his words summed up the difference between sitting in trenches and making ground by attack. They talked on; and as one often notices in these night talks of the Russian privates, there was a kind of sacred simplicity, which left one thinking. I recalled the Austrian private who did not care what country his home belonged to as long as he earned his own living.

Seven hours had passed since I left my starting-point, and I was still a mile and a half from my destination. I decided to walk, and set out along the railway. The night was dark, and the only light was from the enemy's projectors. There were bridges over deep gullies that called for caution; and every hundred yards or so I was hailed by a sentry; one of them asked naïvely whether I was a Magyar. Anyhow, I reached the station an hour and a half before the train; and in the half-smashed station building I found first an ambulance room, and above it a little band of devoted workers with whom I had lived at another part of the front.

This forward detachment of the Red Cross was always keen and united. It worked under fire during a time of retreat, and all its members had the George medal for courage. When I was with them it was a slack time; and the result was that one member of the band after another felt the effects of the previous stress and had to go off to Russia. Now they had struck another period of arduous work, and the absent ones were returning with a few new additions. Work pulls people together, especially out here, and they were making more effort than ever. When I reached their very modest quarters (two rooms: one for the sisters and one for the men), I could not make out where the ambulance rooms ended, because each member's bed in the detachment was occupied by a wounded man or invalid awaiting the evacuation train. Here was an old colonel (they had nursed several here); there was a private, who had won first the George Cross and then a commission. Judging by my own experience, I fully expected the train to be hours late, and thought the detachment would get no sleep till the morning. However, the train drew up, the officers thanked and kissed the gentlemen of the detachment, and the room was clear. I had a warm welcome from my friends, and a bed was found for me.

The next day I had an interesting talk with some cordial officers at the staff of a brigade which had taken 7000 prisoners, or almost the number of its own men, from the enemy since December. In all the regiments in the Austrian army the various nationalities were now hopelessly mixed up. They told me of a Serbian, an officer in an Austrian regiment, who had been court-martialled and transferred for not joining, at a banquet, in toasting the extermination of Serbia. All the Austrians, they said, are now for peace, and the military oath, to which, in this non-national state, the greatest significance is attached, is the only deterrent from wholesale surrender. As always elsewhere at the front, I found the greatest enthusiasm for the work of England in the allied cause.

I ended this journey in an ambulance train standing at Mezolaborcz, which is already Hungary. The chief of the train, though I did not know him, gave me a clear night's rest, with luxuries of every kind, including English tobacco, of which he insisted on making me up a packet for my journey. But the best of the evening was, as so often, a clever and fascinating conversation on the war and the future of Russia and England. There is matter in this subject for all sorts of interesting suggestion, but one seldom meets any difference of opinion on one point, namely, that after the war the relations of the two countries will assume a far wider importance, political, economic and, above all, social, and that they will be among the chief factors that make for the peace of Europe.

April 19.

The staff of the Xth Division was housed in a white-walled cottage at the end of the little town. After the usual glasses of tea and talk of England, we set out with a small cavalcade for the front. The long street was very definitely Hungarian. It was not only the notices and the shops, with surname written first, among which I saw the historic name of Rakoczy, probably a Jew; but that the line of the houses, the river and the landscape were all new to one coming from Russia.

We rode fast along the double track of railway, and very quickly reached our first halting-place. Diverging to the high road, which was also fairly hard and dry, we soon left our horses and proceeded on foot. The road was so good and straight, the weather was so fine, and the beautiful hills so peaceful, that, though talking all the time about the war, we somehow forgot that we were in it, when suddenly, from a high hill that seemed quite close to us, there crashed a shell about thirty yards from us. The little lurid flame that preceded the explosion burned long enough to let us throw ourselves against the bank, which was bright with pretty blue flowers. We found we had exactly reached the front of our positions and made our way under shelter up a slope. The men were at work on their breastworks, which were very different from those of the Galician plain. On this higher ground, almost at any point the spade soon came on springs of water which filled the hole in a few minutes. In such places the breastworks are ordinarily what is called horizontal; they are constructed of brushwood and spruce fir, and give hardly any shelter. The earth-huts are replaced by little arbours of fir boughs, which are very much more difficult to warm, though from the captured Austrian trenches, unfortunately facing in the other direction, there have been taken quite a number of excellent little stoves. As the new Russian lines were only recently occupied, they were still in a very primitive state; in the wood that stretched in front, trees were still being cut to the stump to serve as posts for the wire-entanglements, and the lines themselves were not as yet at all continuous. Shells continued to fall at short intervals for some time, and a private, killed while at work, was brought up for burial. The colonel pointed the moral of getting the shelters finished as soon as possible.

When the firing died away, we walked along the outside of the lines; the task of sentries and scouts was a difficult one, for the trees stood close together. After a halt, I was taken further by a business-like officer with worn uniform and steely blue eyes, and, with his approval, I passed a word or two of greeting from the English army to the groups of soldiers at work. Several of the men asked me to send a like greeting back.

As we went forward, this little procedure became more detailed. The idea was taken up with enthusiasm by the commanders of companies, especially after I had been conducted, staff in hand, over a deep gully which separated us from the next regiment. Here each company was called outside its trenches and drawn up facing the enemy. I gave the salute, "Health, brothers"; and the usual answer came in a thundering peal. I told them how grateful we were for everything that they had sacrificed and everything that they had done for our common cause, and said that we wanted to be in time to do our full share on land, that our new big army was ready, and that we were going to advance as they had done. There is no difficulty in making simple things clear to Russian soldiers. They answered with their "Glad to do our best," and the "Hurrah!" which was so vigorous as to bring the Austrian machine guns into play; I am glad to say, without results. Several of the men came and talked to me in groups later; they felt the effects of their hard work and the heavy losses that go with attack, but their spirit was a conquering one, and all the more impressively so, because of the hardships in which I saw them. Later, when I saw the Commander of the Army, who had run a risk of being captured close to this very ground, he asked me to continue to give these greetings, "to hearten for the common cause," and arranged for me to get early news of any successes on the western front.

I slept with the usual brotherly group of officers in a little forester's hut, a hundred yards from the comparatively open front; on the outside of the door was chalked the word "Willkommen," which read like an amusing invitation to the enemy. We all slept on the floor, but I was accommodated with a litter, which made an excellent bed. The porch served as first-aid point, and when the firing was resumed in the morning, a wounded man was brought in here.

Before I went further, the Brigadier-General sent me by telephone a warm greeting, to be communicated to England.

April 20.

The reader will remember "The Birds," a very tight place held by the L regiment beyond a river on another front. The L's had done no end of work and had suffered heavily long before I visited them at "The Birds." There, too, they lost many men—about 1500 out of 4000—in an action which followed on their occupation of those positions and in the weeks of cannonade which they endured there.

I was aware that the L's were now in the Carpathians and close to me. The two regiments whose lines I had traversed had lost many in this hill warfare. Where a hill is taken, the enemy's losses, though probably more than double the Russian, are rather in surrenders than in killed and wounded. A hill attack, which is beaten off by superior numbers, means heavy sacrifices.

I clambered over another of the steep intersecting gulleys. A group of S's stood waving their farewells. There was a bit of bare slope facing the Austrian plateau, and then I came on the first shelter of the L's, quite a comfortable mud hut. The young officer, who had come to meet me, was an acquaintance, and he sat down and told me about the men I knew. In a single night attack on the height in front of us, two-thirds of the officers that I had known had gone down, and about half the regiment. Name after name came up with the brief record, "He's killed." We lay on the straw—in nearly all other huts here there were only boughs of fir—and he told me the whole story. The hill was almost inaccessible, the works were long prepared and elaborate, the Germans had hurried up large forces here; yet the attack all but succeeded. "All but," and no results but losses. At Rava Russka and on the San the L's had given of their best, and decisive successes had followed. The hill opposite had cost more and still faced us. It is one of the saddest of thoughts, that the bravest of all, the men who go furthest, must lie where they fell. Yet the L's, who in the course of a few days have again been brought up to full strength by the enormous reinforcements which Russia continues to pour into the army, will have written their name on the Hungarian war in as lasting colours as on the Galician. We are over the crest; we are fighting in the main downwards; we touch a vital spot; and we are going forward.

There is nothing which makes one feel all this better than to pass along the lines of a regiment so battered, still in position at the time when I visited it; nay, more, occupying for the moment far more than the natural extent for its full strength, and occupying it as a conqueror with swiftly thrown-up works that only provide for an elementary shelter. And the battle is not offered; the enemy sits on his heights and makes no counter-stroke to push his temporary advantage home.

I write of a time which has already passed; for the whole position is very different now. But I say the L's were conquerors. There were nothing like enough of them for a continuous line; so they had picked out all those sections which commanded any possible advance of the enemy, and held them as masters. For the intervals, the gullies, they detached large scouting parties which met any forward move halfway. The work which this meant for all will remain with me as giving a picture of a Russian regiment after a check. All the officers and men were alert and looking to the next move in the game. A soldier who guided me, confident and intelligent, stopped only for a moment in his conversation, to say: "But, as a matter of fact, sir, there are very few left of us." Regiments that can take punishments like this, communicate their spirit and tradition to those of the new recruits who are so fortunate as to join them.

From one occupied point to another, our little party of officers and men walked freely over the open, in face of the neighbouring Austrian plateau, till each of our cleverly chosen positions had fallen into its place in our survey. I had a long walk back; in fact, I did not get out of the range of the Austrian plateau till the next day. My two soldier guides and I sat down and smoked by a stream for a while, and they told me that of their fellow villagers who set out at the beginning of the war, the one had lost sixteen out of eighteen, and the other fifty out of sixty. One of them, with three comrades, had fought his way back, when the rest of his company was lost.

The position is changed now, but I feel that the more we know of this fighting, the more we shall understand of the Russian spirit and of the Russian sacrifices, and the clearer will be the picture of the Russian advance.

May 1.

Waiting at a railway station, I met a young officer who was taking home the body of his brother. The young man met his death leading a night attack. He took his company further up than any, and even got through the wire entanglements and into the enemy's trenches. The deadly fire of the machine guns made it necessary to draw off the men, and this company got the order late. Some fought their way through, but their leader was mortally wounded. The brother was serving in the neighbouring artillery and was able to be with the dying man to the last. He said that his brother might easily have surrendered with others, but it would always be a satisfaction that he did not "hold up his hands and go into Austria."

At staff headquarters of the army I passed many funerals. Here the enemy's airmen make a visit almost every day. Two days ago, and again to-day, they appeared in force and dropped their bombs almost without a break. The air battery and picked riflemen kept up an incessant fire on them. Yesterday I watched an aeroplane under fire of Russian shrapnel. The shells burst all round it and evidently forced it to give up its intention of reaching the town: it sped away northwards. These raids have had hardly any success. Even the bombs which lodged where they were meant to, on the railway or on the aerodrome, did no real damage. The net result is a small number of wounded, including civilians and a sister of mercy.

An officer whom I met in the trenches, and of whom I wrote under the name of "George," has very appropriately been appointed one of the judges of recommendations for the George Cross. The soldier's George is given for any signal act of bravery, and the men thus honoured are always found to be the rallying points in further attacks. The officers' George is in four classes. Only some four individuals have ever received the first class, beginning with Kutuzov. The second class, which is for very definite achievements of generalship can only be given to Generals (Ivanov has it for the conquest of Galicia), and the third only to Generals and Colonels. The fourth, which is for any act of courage or initiative, can be won by any officer. The different achievements which can win the George are clearly set out. The two first classes are conferred only by the nomination of the Sovereign; for the other two there is in each army what is called a "Duma," or panel of selectors.

My friend, who is one of the bravest and simplest men that I have met, told me very interesting things about his work. His own standard of bravery is not striking acts of daring, but the maintenance of normal composure in the performance of dangerous tasks. It is, I think, a standard which will appeal to Englishmen. One of the most typical instances of Russian courage that I know is among the records of the battle of Borodino. An aide-de-camp galloped up to a commanding officer and, pointing towards a hill, said: "The Commander-in-Chief asks you to attack there." As he spoke, a cannon ball carried away his extended arm; he simply pointed to the hill with the other, and said, "There: be quick."

At many points of our line there has been a complete lull. One battery which I visited, standing on some thickly wooded hills, was building a wooden villa for the officers, and had already put up a camp theatre for the performances of short plays written by the men. There was little but the ordinary diversion of shooting at aeroplanes.

Prisoners continue to testify to the discontent in the enemy's armies. For instance, an Alsatian says that any Alsatian would come over at the first opportunity. A German says that the conditions in his regiment are such that he would have shot himself but for regard for his family. Czechs report further mutinies in their regiments which have been punished with military executions. The Ruthenian regiments, which cannot now be reinforced from Galicia, are rapidly melting away. Even the Hungarian soldiers are described as desirous of peace.

May 3.

The advance of the Russians over the Carpathians was sure to draw a counter-stroke, and it has come just where many have expected it, but with tremendous force. This is because it is not so much the work of the tired Austrians, but rather the biggest effort that Germany has yet put forth in her attempts to bolster her ally. We have all been preparing for May, and Germany and even Austria have evidently made great preparations. The food supply in the Austrian army has been much improved; the proportion of Germans on the Austrian front has been enormously increased; heavy artillery has been concentrated; and the Emperor and Hindenburg have been reported to be here.