Stanley Washburn

On the Dniester,
July 4, 1915.

It would not be in the least difficult for me to write a small volume on my impressions and observations during the time that I was with this particular cavalry corps on the Dniester; but one assumes that at this advanced period in the war, readers are pretty well satiated with descriptive material of all sorts, and there is so much news of vital importance from so many different fronts, that the greatest merit of descriptive writing in these days no doubt lies in its brevity. I will therefore cut as short as possible the account of my stay in this very interesting organization.

The General in command was a tough old cavalry officer who spoke excellent English. He was of the type that one likes to meet at the Front, and his every word and act spoke of efficiency and of the soldier who loves his profession. His head-quarters were in a little dirty village, and his rooms were in the second story of an equally unpretentious building. The room contained a camp-bed and a group of tables on which were spread the inevitable maps of the positions. This particular General as far as I could gather spent about one half of each day poring over his maps, and the other half in visiting his positions. Certainly he seemed to know every foot of the terrain occupied by his command, and every by-path and crossroad seemed perfectly familiar to him. Without the slightest reservation (at least as far as I could observe) he explained to me his whole position, pointing it out on the map. When he began to talk of his campaign he immediately became engrossed in its intricacies. Together we pored over his map. “You see,” he said, “I have my — brigade here. To the left in the ravine I have one battery of big guns just where I can use them nicely. Over here you see I have a bridge and am across the river. Now the enemy is on this side here (and he pointed at a blue mark on the map) but I do not mind; if he advances I shall give him a push here (and again he pointed at another point on the map), and with my infantry brigade I shall attack him just here, and as you see he will have to go back”; and thus for half an hour he talked of the problems that were nearest and dearest to his heart. He was fully alive to the benefits that publicity might give an army, and did everything in his power to make our visit as pleasant and profitable as possible.

H.I.H. The Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovitch, Commander of two divisions of Cossacks.

On the afternoon of the second day Prince Oblensky arranged for us to meet the Grand Duke Michael who is commanding a division of Caucasian cavalry, one of whose detachments we visited in the trenches a few nights ago. I should say he is not much over forty years of age, and he is as unaffected and democratic a person as one can well imagine. I talked with him for nearly an hour on the situation, not only on his immediate front but in the theatre of the war as a whole. Like everyone in Russian uniform whom I have met, he was neither depressed nor discouraged, but evinced the same stubborn optimism that one finds everywhere in the Russian army. As one saw him in his simple uniform with nothing to indicate his rank but shoulder straps of the same material as his uniform, and barring the Cross of St. George (won by his personal valour on the field of battle) without a decoration, it was strange to think that this man living so simply in a dirty village in this far fringe of the Russian Front, might have been the Czar of all the Russias, living in the Winter Palace in Petrograd, but for a few years in time of birth. The Western World likes to think of Russia as an autocracy, with its nobility living a life apart surrounded by form and convention, but now, at any rate, I think there is no country in the world where the aristocracy are more democratic than in Russia. It is true that the Czar himself is inaccessible, but he is about the only man in Russia who is; and even he, when one does meet him, is as simple, unaffected and natural as any ordinary gentleman in England or in America.

From the Grand Duke’s head-quarters I motored out to the Staff of a Cavalry Brigade, and had tea with the General who, after entertaining us with a dance performed by a group of his tamed “wild men,” went himself with us to his front line trench. His head-quarters were near the front, so near in fact that while we were waiting for the dancers to appear, a big shell fell in a field just across the way, with a report that sent the echoes rolling away over hill and valley. It is considered bad form to notice these interruptions however, and no one winked an eye or took any notice of the incident. The General’s trenches were not unlike those I had already before visited, except that one could get into them in the daytime without risk of being shot at if one came up through the woods, which ran rather densely to the very crest of the bluff.

Here was the most curious sight that I have ever seen in war. The rough-and-ready cavalrymen from the Caucasus with their great caps, each as big as a bushel basket, all covered with wool about six inches long, were lying about behind small earthworks on the fringe of the woods peering along their rifle barrels which were pointed across the river. On an almost similar elevation on the opposite side was the line of the Austrian trenches. For once the sun was over our shoulders, and in their eyes and not ours, so that I could safely walk to the edge of the wood and study their works through my field glasses. Everything was very quiet this particular afternoon, and I could see the blue-coated figures of the enemy moving about behind their own trenches, as indeed the Russians could with their naked eyes. The war has lasted so long now, and the novelty has so worn off, that it is safe to do many things that could not have been done in the early months. No one nowadays is anxious to start anything unnecessary, and sniping is a bore to all concerned, and it hardly draws a shot if one or two men are seen moving about. It is only when important groups appear that shots are fired.

Not two hundred yards back in the woods were the bivouacs of the reserves, and the hundreds and hundreds of the little ponies tethered to trees. There they stood dozing in the summer sunshine, twitching their tails and nipping each other occasionally. I have never seen cavalry in the trenches before, much less cavalry with their horses so near that they could actually wait until the enemy were almost in their works and then mount and be a mile away before the trench itself was occupied. In this rough country where the positions lend themselves to this sort of semi-regular work, I dare say these peculiar types of horsemen are extremely effective, though I question if they would appear to the same advantage in other parts of the Russian operations. As a matter of fact one of the regiments now here was formerly attached to the Warsaw Front, but was subsequently removed from that army and sent down to Bukovina as a place more suited to its qualities.

We had a bit of bad luck on this position with our motor-car which we had left in a dip behind the line. Just as we were ready to start for home, there came a sharp rainstorm which so wetted the roads that the hill we had come down so smoothly on dry soil proved impossible to go up when wet. A sotnia of Cossacks pulled us out of our first mess with shouts and hurrahs, but when night fell we found ourselves in another just as bad a few hundreds yards further along. For an hour we went through the misery of spinning wheels and racing engines without effect. We had stopped, by bad luck, in about the only place where the road was visible from the Austrian lines, but as it was dark they could not see us. When the chauffeur lighted his lamps, however, three shells came over from the enemy, extinguishing the lamps. About ten in the evening we started on foot, and walked to a point where we borrowed a car from the brigade staff, and went on home. Our own car was extricated at daylight by a band of obliging Cossacks who had been on duty all night in the trenches, and were going into the reserve for a day’s rest.

Leaving this army corps in the afternoon we motored further east, and paid our respects to a brigade of the regular cavalry, composed of the —th Lancers and the — Hussars, both crack cavalry regiments of the Russian army, and each commanded by officers from the Petrograd aristocracy. The brigade had been in reserve for three days, and as we saw it was just being paraded before its return to the trenches. The —th Lancers I had seen before in Lwow just after the siege of Przemysl, in which they took part, at that time fighting in the trenches alongside of the infantry. I have never seen mounts in finer condition, and I believe there is no army on any of the fronts where this is more typical than in the Russian. On this trip I have been in at least fifteen or twenty cavalry units, and, with one exception, I have not seen anywhere horses in bad shape; the exception had been working overtime for months without chance to rest or replace their mounts. The Colonel of the Lancers I had known before in Lwow, and he joined me in my motor and rode with me the 20 versts to the position that his cavalry was going to relieve at that time. This gentleman was an ardent cavalryman and had served during the greater part of the Manchurian campaign. To my surprise I found that he had been in command of a squadron of Cossacks that came within an ace of capturing the little town of Fakumen where was Nogi’s staff; and he was as much surprised to learn that I was attached to Nogi’s staff there as correspondent for an American paper.

The Colonel was now in charge of the Lancer regiment and was, as I learned, a great believer in the lance as a weapon. “Other things being equal,” he told me, “I believe in giving the soldiers what they want. They do want the lance, and this is proved by the fact that in this entire campaign not one of my troopers has lost his lance. The moral effect is good on our troops, for it gives them confidence, and it is bad on the enemy, for it strikes terror into their hearts. Before this war it was supposed that cavalry could never get near infantry. My regiment has twice attacked infantry and broken them up both times. In both cases they broke while we were still three or four hundred yards distant, and of course the moment they broke they were at our mercy.”

For an hour or more we motored over the dusty roads before we dipped over a crest and dropped down into a little village not far from the Dniester, where were the head-quarters of the regiment that the Lancers were coming in to relieve. As we turned the corner of the village street a shrapnel shell burst just to the south of us, and I have an idea that someone had spotted our dust as we came over the crest.

The cavalry here was a regiment drawn from the region of the Amur river, and as they were just saddling up preparatory to going back into reserve for a much-needed rest, I had a good chance to note the condition of both men and mounts, which were excellent. The latter were Siberian ponies, which make, I think, about the best possible horses for war that one can find. They are tough, strong, live on almost anything, and can stand almost any extremes of cold or heat without being a bit the worse for it. These troops have had, I suppose, as hard work as any cavalry in the Russian Army, yet the ponies were as fat as butter and looked as contented as kittens. The Russians everywhere I have seen them are devoted to their horses, and what I say about the condition of the animals applies not only to the cavalry but even to the transport, to look at which, one would never imagine that we were in the twelfth month of war. The Colonel of the Amur Cavalry gave us tea and begged us to stay on, but as it was getting late and the road we had to travel was a new one to us, and at points ran not far from the lines of the enemy, we deemed it wiser to be on our way. Some sort of fight started after dark, and to the south of us, from the crests of the hills that we crossed, we could see the flare of the Austrian rockets and the occasional jagged flash of a bursting shell; further off still the sky was dotted with the glow of burning villages. In fact for the better part of the week I spent in this vicinity I do not think that there was a single night that one could not count fires lighted by the shells from the artillery fire.

Midnight found us still on the road, but our Prince, who was ever resourceful, discovered the estate of an Austrian noble not far from the main road, and we managed to knock up the keeper and get him to let us in for the night. The Count who owned the place was in the Austrian Army, and the Countess was in Vienna.

Leaving this place early the following morning we started back for Tarnopol and the Headquarters of the Army that stands second in the Russian line of battle counting from the left flank.

ON THE ZOTA LIPA