The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 1/Czechoslovak Brigade in Russian Retreat

by Jaroslav Hašek

Czechoslovak Brigade in Russian Retreat.

By Jaroslav Hašek.

 

I shall try to describe briefly the important part played by the Czech soldiers in the awful days of the great Russian debacle in Galicia, when our men maintained the semblance of a front, saving the adjoining Russian provinces and spoiling Mackensen’s clever plans.

It is evident now that the first wabbling of the Russian front on July 5th was connected directly with the bloody bolsheviki demonstrations in Petrograd. An appeal was issued by these fanatics to the men at the front to go on strike and leave the trenches. The appeal resulted in something like sabotage applied to war conditions. The first stage of it was that thousands of the bolsheviki soldiers maimed themselves by shooting off a finger and then going home. This strike procedure was rather pain ful to the strikers, and so on July 5th a strike of violence was inaugurated on a large part of the Galician front. Regiments that had orders to attack were held back by other regiments kept in reserve; fanatic agitation was kept up among newly arrived battalions and finally the real purpose of it all was revealed, when positions were voluntarily abandoned. It is not yet definitely known which regiment started the disgraceful rout of July. At any rate we saw revolutionary victories of June 18th and 19th thrown away. Where our heroic fellows fought to smash the militarism of Germany and Austria, there the Prussian now sings “Wacht am Rhein” and the Austrian his “Oesterreich, du edles Haus”. It is painful to think that the little cemetery of Cecova, the resting place of the boys who fell in the day of victory at Zborov and the Krasna Lipa has no doubt been carefully gone over by a sergeant and a file and that the names of our dead heroes have been copied from the crosses for use against their families in Bohemia.

We don’t grow sentimental, when we think of it. We are full of anger, terrible anger at the great loss due to traitors who work for German gold. German money is the explanation of the events of July 5th, when Austrians and Germans swept over our lines and captured the sacred ground of Cecova.

Today, when I have thought much of what happened, I do not know what to call that event which the Russians call retreat. Was it retreat or was it flight? Neither the one nor the other. It was the act of a man who abandons a place of responsibility and goes home, leaving carelessly a burning candle in a pile of straw. The phenomenon is sometimes called moral insanity.

Perhaps some day a student of psychology will be able to explain the mental processes of guards-men who left the trenches, threw away their rifles into rye fields, plundered the depots at the base of clothing, sugar and chocolate, emptied loaded trucks of munitions so that they might load them with tinned food. Think of soldiers who abandoned their stations and nonchalantly walked back in streams regardless of the fact that comrades who did not go would be soon overwhelmed by waves of Germans and Austrians, that in a few hours there would be but little islands of hopelessly outnumbered fighters, where there had been the strong Russian front. Such islands were the regiments of the first Czechoslovak brigade. They stood firm in a mighty dam and alone held back the German flood. From July 5th to July 15th Czechoslovak regiments threw back unaided the German attacks. From Ostasovce to Velke Borky, from Slachtince to Grabovka and Teklovka Bohemian bayonets held up the realization of the hastily conceived German plan to make full use of the situation and push the military lines forward into the Russian territory and at the same time get in the rear of the army holding the line between Stanislavov and the Carpathians. The whole Tarnopol front was to be stricken by panic.

“How lucky that the Bohemians were there,” said a certain newspaper. It is dangerous to rely on luck in battle, but it was more dangerous to rely on the Russian army on that awful July 5th, when a number of companies of our first regiment were sent forward for a stretch of duty in the fire trenches with a detachment of machine guns. We reached the position just as the sun was rising; there was not a muzhik in the first line, as far as our eyes could reach. I don’t know yet what became of them; probably they are included in the 42,000 prisoners that German papers brag about.

The trenches were empty, and in half an hour German artillery commenced shelling positions far back of us. We could do nothing. So a few companies of the first regiment fell back to the village Bohdanuvka with the machine guns, and when we got there we came under the fire of German machine guns. From the front trenches to Bohdanuvka is five versts. In all that space we did not see a soldier, except a few muzhiks who were asleep in the rye waiting until the Germans picked them up. And there should have been two divisions there. It was a sample of what took place on that day. On this sector the defenders went over to the enemy, soldiers of other sectors marched back in groups all night without their guns, refusing to be stopped and giving the stereotyped answer that they were going home to rest. When such news reached Russia, it was not strange that stories were told that the Czechoslovaks were surrounded and that we were cut to pieces. When the Germans had reached Zborozh, we were still near Jezerna; when the Germans were bombarding Tarnopol, our boys were counter-attacking near Slachtince; Tarnopol was burning, and we still fought at Grabovka. Those are names that will be inscribed with golden letters into the history of the Czechoslovak army, especially of the glorious first regiment that had to hold back the strongest units of the second German army. But the names of these little villages will be written in black letters in the records of those German regiments that came into contact with the bayonets of the first Czechoslovak brigade. Our first regiment alone broke several guard regiments brought over from the French front.

Mackensen’s plan to strike quickly, to create a panic, to surround the Carpathian army and to push the Galician front into Russia was frustrated by our bayonets. Officers who witnessed our counter-attacks regretted that there was not at least a full army corps of us. The Germans would have been sent flying. At Grabovka, so the captured Germans told us, four attacking battalions refused to go forward, when some one called out: “Die rotweissen kommen”. (The red-whites are coming). That is why you read in Russian papers: How lucky that the Czechoslovaks were there. A tribute to our determination to fight to the death.

It is difficult to say just where our first brigade accomplished its most wonderful deeds, for all its units along the entire broken front held back the pressure of the gigantic German-Austrian might with such sang-froid that the equipment of the Russian units could be saved and artillery had a chance to pull out in time. Wherever our boys were stationed, not a single gun was lost. The first regiment by its fierce defense of the heights at Ostasevce made possible the destruction of the great army depots at Jezerna so that the Germans captured very little booty there; and the same regiment successfully covered the retreat of the entire supply train of a full army corps, while the second and third regiments prevented a panic on the wabbling front of Zborozh.

The Germans now claim that theirs was an unexpected offensive. But when one considers the remarkable coincidence of the arrival of fresh troops from the French front with the strike of the Russian forces near Tarnopol, where the bolsheviki controlled the regimental committees, the conclusion is inevitable that the “unexpected offensive” was in reality a well-planned campaign of the German-Austrian general staff and the followers of Lenine. That our part in this campaign did not result in the complete destruction of our brigade is very creditable to the ability of our commander, the regimental officers and the bravery of the men. Every member of the Czechoslovak Brigade realized how much depended on our resistance and how the entire Russian army would be encouraged by a demonstration that the Germans could be held up. We made it possible that the masses of deceived soldiers got over their hypnotic state and stopped running away, after they perceived that some regiments were still facing the enemy and keeping him out of Russian territory. We talked with a man who ran away with the disorganized masses. “See,” we told him, “we fought for your land and your liberty, while you marched back and abandoned us to be overwhelmed by the Germans, each of our regiments fighting two divisions”. He had blue, good-natured eyes and tears welled up, as we talked to him. “We did not think”, he explained with a red face: “we were told that if we left Galicia, they would make peace and we could go home to our women.”

From July 5th to July 15th lasted the splendid struggle of our brigade against an enemy many times stronger. It was necessary to defend a number of crossings over small Galician rivers, and for ten days and nights we were on guard without a rest, throwing back many attacks every day. We could get no relief, for we covered the retreat of an army. After every German attack we counter-attacked, but when the Germans fell back, our orders were to retreat, because on both sides of us Russian guard regiments continued to march backwards. At any rate we did our duty. Not only did we cut a way through, but we confounded the plans of our friend Mackensen.

Today we are resting, full of memories of those awful days. The regimental headquarters are in a fine country house in the midst of a noble park. And as we rest, we plan future battles. All the Czechs and Slovaks blown by the whirlwind of war into Russia are mobilizing. Masaryk, the leader of the nation, surely leaves Russia satisfied with us. He saw the foundations of the Czechoslovak army now increasing in size like an avalanche. Soon we will pay back to Germany and Austria for all the sufferings of the Bohemian nation. Masaryk saw the creation of an army of irreconcilables.

 

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