In The Glare of Battle.
By J. Okunev.
The following sketch is taken from Mr. Okunev's Russian book of impressions of the War. He followed the Russian armies through Galicia and up the Carpathian passes, and his vivid accounts are unusual for their power and skill in characterization.—Ed.
There is nothing more dreadful than the sight of human habitation laid waste by the war. A few shells from a gun of large caliber lay a building in ruins, so that nothing remains but piles of dirt, broken stones, and pieces of wood. And if a town or a village happen to be within the range of the guns, whose hurricane-like cannonade usually precedes an attack, then every building in it is razed to the ground, and on the spots upon which so recently stood the homes of men nothing is now seen except smoke-stacks, which, for some reason or other, shells, shrapnel, and bullets usually miss.
Going in the direction of the town of R., we passed many such spots laid waste by artillery fire. Burnt pillars, bent sheets of iron torn off the roof and scattered on the ground, broken dishes, mutilated utensils, frames with scraps of burnt canvass in the place of paintings, bodies of pianos, blackened by fire,—this is all that is left of the merry Polish estates, which the Austrians had visited, and through which the artillery fire played unhampered.
We have become accustomed to death; the sight of the most terrible wounds frightens us no longer. We have seen cases in which a "dum-dum" bullet would enter the body, and, on coming out, tear a hole as large as a saucer. We have seen dreadful sufferings; a thousand times have we imagined ourselves in the place of our wounded comrades. The fear of pain, which is infinitely more severe and acute than the fear of death, has already burned out in the soul of every one of us. Nothing can make us afraid or desperate; nothing can terrify us. And yet there is something to which we cannot become accustomed: it is the sight of charred roofs, fragments of furniture, broken plate . . .
Plain soldiers, especially peasants, men like Zverev, Lozhkin, Zozulenko, feel even more deeply than we, educated men, the meaning and the horror of this destruction.
"They must have come to the end of the rope," say they,
