This is one of the most important narratives in the records of the War; it is an invaluable witness of the colossal struggle waged on the Eastern battle front. The author was granted official privileges awarded to no other non-combatant. He passed through the first Warsaw Campaign, the crucial battle of Dunajec, and the Russian retreat. When Germany declared war on Russia, he volunteered for service and went to Petrograd and Moscow, where he was appointed official correspondent with the Russian Army, traveling with the general staff. He later joined the third army as an attaché. Here he was given written permit by General Radko Dmitriev to visit any part of the firing line. "We were the advance guard," he says, "of the liberation of the Slavs ... the retreat of the army to the San and to the Province of Lublin. We were driven out by sheer weight of metal ... it was a delight to be with such splendid men as the Staff of the Russian Army. I never saw anything base all the while I was with the Army. There was no drunkenness, everyone was at his best, and it was the simplest and noblest atmosphere in which I have ever lived." His experiences have been gathered into a volume entitled, "Day by Day With the Russian Army," from which the following incidents are retold by permission of his American publishers, Houghton, Mifflin and Company. [16] I--WAR STORIES FROM THE RUSSIANS It is wonderful how little effect the war seems to have made on the body of Russia. On the other hand, the atmosphere of nervous tension begins to disappear the moment one begins to get really near to the front. In the Red Cross offices at Kiev I found the same straining toward the front as elsewhere, only much calmer because these were people who had a big war work to do. Hospitals meet the eye in the streets at every turn. Once in the train for Galicia it was again the war atmosphere and simplicity itself. The talk was all of people engaged directly or indirectly in it. A graceful old lady with a very attentive son was on her way to get a sight of her husband, one of the generals. A young officer, whose wound has kept him out of it for three weeks, is on his way to the front before Cracow. A fresh-looking young man, at first unrecognisable to his friends with his close-cropped bullet head, tells how he went on a reconnaissance, how he came on the Austrians, how their first line held up their muskets and when the Russians had passed on fired on their rear, how nevertheless practically all came back safe and sound. It was told with a kind of schoolboy ingenuousness and without suggestion or comment of any kind on the conduct of those concerned. Then followed an account of a war marriage, at first put off and then carried out as quietly as possible. All the friends of every one seemed to be at the war.