Day by Day with the Russian Army, 1914-15Pares, Bernard
History
Day by Day with the Russian Army, 1914-15
Pares, Bernard
World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Poland; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives, English
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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