WITH THE AUSTRIANS

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2356, 12 January 1915, Page 3

WITH THE AUSTRIANS

DIRTY GALICIA INVITING THE CHOLERA SCOURGE EASTERN AND WESTERN WARS CONTRASTED This interesting letter by the Now York "Evening Post's" correspondent, dated October 30, tells much about tho Eastern campaign, about which other correspondents have kept silence. Przemysl, Austrian Poland (Galicia), October 30.—Last evening while wo skidded down the lull toward the Rivor San, ,the flashes of Russian artillery lire twelve miles to the eastward pulsed through tho night mist, like reddish heat lightning. I'efc thou, as we passed the sentries of the outer and the inner fortifications, where nothing was visible except great redoubts of sod and masses of wire entanglements, and received the password—ifaldruf it was—you could hear no detonations; nor any throughout the night in this long-beleaguered Austrian stronghold. But certainly a battle was on. in the streets our headlights struck the blinking eyelids of endless tiles of gray infantry, trudging afield under their cowskin knapsacks; and toward midnight in the Cato Stieber it was being whispered that again tho Russians wore attempting to surround the city.

To this place from tie Austrian-staff headquarters, as the crow flies, it is scarcely sixty miles, but by motor-cars and rail it took us three days and nights. As to both mud and landscape, you might have beon touring-the Piedmont region of Virginia. The singletrack railroad was all but blocked with returning, hospital trains, trains of wounded, of .Russian prisoners, Red Cross trains going forward; each with no less than two engines and two dozen cars. Remember, that for all one reads of France aud Belgium, this eastern war theatre is by far the greater both in length of tiring lino and numbers engaged. The line extends for 500 kilometres south-south-west of Warsaw, now that the German and Austrian armies are joined. Here three, nations with some 6,000,000 men in arms face ■one another in practically unending battle.

But mere figures are a weak wonder. A. nearer marvel lies in the contrast, both human and military, between the war here and tho war in the west: and in that difference there is a resemblance of significance for Americans. Yesterday; as we pushed our car over the high divide between two forks of the San, no veteran of our War of the Secession could have stood among those yellowing birches and believed his eyes. Arms bandaged in slings, limping, bracing themselves with stioks, the wounded slipped and tottered down- the hills—afoot, mind you," in muddy, gray uniforms and high-fronted caps, almost the. exact colour and design of the South's. It was 1864, not 1914. It was as if the years between had ■ profited mankind nothing, the world had not moved since then. When Cholera Comes. In a previous letter I cited the likeness of a British to an Austrian headquarters; but. outside the headquarters there is the grim, laborious opposite to that swift and deadly "petrol' war in France. Into the railroad station rolled a train of wounded, of bearded creatures crowding the wide doors of' luggage vans', staring at you,from their swathing? with the meek, gaze of'the discarded conscript. The hind car was a passenger carnage.. Two men in gloves, clad from head to foot in white rubber, stood on the platform. There was a stretcher outside the last compartment.. Two Boldiers were lugging a limp body from it, by the head and heels, as one does a dead man.- He sanii upon the canvas without a sound nor tho tensing of one muscle. He was middle-aged, yet only thinly bearded, his nose had once been broken, and his cheeks had a queer greenish .pallor. A Red Cross man pushed through the hushed throng, his arms forward, unfolding a big square of paper. He slapped it upon the carriage with the same perfunctory deftness that a theatrical advance agent shows a billboard. It read in great vermillion letters: CHOLERA

That morning in my visit to General Conrad von Hotzendorf, who, so to speak, is the General Joffre of the -Austrian army, he had given warning of the disease without—and justly, from his viewpoint—conceding any alarming figures. . In half an hour this was all that one could -get out of that alert, questioning, and genial master of a nation's fate, who, with his gray-white pompadour hair and over-bright eyes, suggests a young lion, though he is quite sixty; who, though he has lost one son, and had another wounded, wears no black on either arm of his small body. And the same night, by rail, on this ' last lap to the front, was but (following the' white trail of the scourge. All along the ties and rails it lay, livid, in the tons of lime scattered there to destroy infection dropped by returning sick and wounded. Next day here and there a hospital car boro in 'white, chalk the fateful legend, "Cholera Verdachtig." We may land in one of those yet. That night we moved our blankets from tho stuffy carriage' to sleep in the open air on one of the flat cars that carried our motors. And wo woke in the morning to find hanging, one on the foot of my navy cot, one on tho radiator of the machine, two pairs of much-soiled un-der-garments flung from a passing train. As the Soldiers Return. By three o'clock in the afternoon we had passed seven trains. In ono I counted twenty-seven cars, with but a single surgeon aboard. And from the battlefields in this region alono there aro at least three linos of rail open. Ever since the opening of the war one may have been haunted with tho thought that no human agencies could, with justice to modern humanitarianism and science, cope with tho immense masses of wounded. Here for tho firßt'timo, tho truth of such a speculation hit me concretely. As the jammed cars ground westward, the great red crosses on them, with "Kranke" in black letters underneath, began to dance in the back of my mind. Vanished, they still flew over the weeping willows of the roadsides, over tho high thatchings, green with moss, of the peasant's log hovels. And you knew that on tho Russian side, with their far greater numbers, now in retreat before tho victorious Austrians, the samo pitiful cargoes should bo trundling eastward. Still they passed us. Arms were thrust out from bandages, holding caps, which wo showered with cigarettes. They shouted and scrambled for them. Tied to the button on each man's right shoulder was a small white tag, noting the nature and location of his hurt. Occasionally at a halt some grimed and hairy fellow would step off for a moment upon tho lime of the white trail, dragging after him a bandaged foot. And your one thought was: It all cannot last long—it novor, never can last. The while tho famous Viennese caricaturist in our party, which included tho several degrees from a real Hungarian nobleman to a "sobsister" from Newark, N.J., sketched us into roars of laughter.

-Then ilio Russian prisoners. Mostly they peered from liny gratings in tho tops of their -wheeled prisons, the roundbrimmed, khaki-coloured caps looking ironically English above their snub Shunoses and corn-coloured beards. To my cresting in their language, "Draahtitol Kak ponhsviate?." those crowded in the

doorways around the bayonets of the guards returned the hail, and held out brass buttons from their uniforms in exchange for cigarettes. Once, in his oagorncss during a halt, ono tumbled out, to bo fiorcoly prodded back, into the coop.

Tho shift into the motors was at some tongue-twisting village.- In tho sunless and bluish Gnlician haze wo headed for Sanok, among tho quilted cabbrgo and vivid green winter ryo fields, along stucco roadside shrines. Tho town, hold for three weeks by tho Russians, snowed no moro sign of it than ono heavy cornice, in tho usual pale stucco Btylo of Poland, split by a shell, two bullet-holes in tho Etappoiicommanao'B winfaw, and that uttor dearth of cigarettes and matches which is tho unvarying mark of ovcry captured town in Europe, But Sanok was notothenvise conventional, uxcept for Galicia. When I say that, despite its horde of soldiery, its thrifty Jews, in their curled peikaß and black coats, it js filthier than tho meanest Chinese village—and without China's lamp-lit gaiety—no careless suporlativo is meant. Thoro was moro mud on the sidewalks than in tho roadways. No Sanitary Service Exists. Most travellers have put up with foul sanitation, but Sanok, whero wo spent the night, had absolutely none. Our inn had only an open yard behind, but the proprietor's wife wore an elegant wig, and had her face powdered. So, incidentally, if Austria has never been able to clean Galicia—tho . sequence is obvious. But perhaps ono is unjust, end the filth was made by tho Russians, though it is tho samo in Neu San dec and hero where they havo never been. The point is that no attempt is made to clean anything, anywhere. A sanitary service, in our army's sense, appears, not to exist. Vera Cruz, before we started to scour it, was a spotless town compared with any in Galicia. And sometimes ono wondorß why cholera haunts eastern Europe. Thus tho next morning it was hard to_ show sympathy with my two naturalised fellow-citizens who tackled me on tho eternal question of how to get back to America. They had their faro and their papers, but neither the initiative to start, nor even to write to our Embassy in Vienna—to the servants they employed for the very purpose of helping them. Stated so, they gaped at the fact. Neither had ever been west of the Hudson or north of 14th Street. Thev were of that mass of "Americans" whose money orders support those Gnlician villages and half southom Italy. One was a little woman in black with a sharp chin and gold teeth of a Grand Street hallmark; tho man wore a "sealskin" coat of the same locality, and greeted me over the ;top of a fence on the main streot, behind which he waß making sucE a toilet as one can in Galicia; Decidedly it is a country with a people which makes you an iconoclast regarding our immigration laws. This mine for the melting-pot—and after the war probably we shall be deluged with its produce—fills one at once with understanding for the ideal yearnings expressed, by a Mary Antin, and at the same time makes you cynical toward the pathetic realism of Slav literature. It omits the essence of life here—its filth and stench. Route of the Russian Retreat. We followed the route of the Russian retreat. By ten o'clock we had overtaken and passed three trains of supply wagons headed for the front, in all 469 rigs by count, and, not ono motor-truck. You were in a different world, a different age, from those of the war in I'rance. Long and narrow, on very small wheels, with in-sloping sides of woven 'willow withes, the soiled, hooded coverings of these carte first raised the aforesaid mirage of our Civil War. From ovcry hilltop a train wound: forward, an endless coil of eyenly spaced, whitisli 'dots along the road. Abreast of it, with the heap of hay high from each tailboard, the vacant peasant faces under their round shoop-wool caps stole cowed and - 'wondering stares at you, as they urged on the bony, horses to tho creak of countless little wheels in the glut of mud. You felt the amazing, searching force of organisation that war' demands; ability in administration against grim, far-flung .odds beside which tho most complex commercial enterprises must bo child's play. No. It could never, never last. What of the wives, daughters, mothers, of those sturdy drivers ? Barefoot in the sodden fields they hoed over the muck for potatoes no bigger than walnuts. Oh, for one good winter blizzard in this grim land! The spring planting, the war, for the moment assumed an equal preoariousness.

Whero these , great outfits had camped, or still were parked in serried ranks, suggested, but on an enormous scale, the Klondike trek in 1898. Eires twinkled among the heaps of fodder; gray, straggling privates boiled soup in their aluminium pots. There were parks of artillery caissons, wagons also heaped with hay; and a railroad station where we crossed the line, mountains of shrapnel and machine-gun ammunition; a field bakery of a dozen oblong, low mud-ovens, belching smoke from stovepipere. At one cross-roads, where plainly a stand in' the retreat was made, an artillery cover of pine branches stuck in the hillside, dismembered wheels prone in the mud' before it, a wrecked mass of wagons—yes, some marked with red crosses—behind. But the smaller trains returning down tho road bore the grimmest flavour. In most sat mute beings with bandaged heads, or grasping their canteen with the arm not cased in a sling or splint. In a few, gray blankets outlined hidden shapes from which you turned your eyes, because they did not brace against the jolting. And still riding across the fields, emerging or vanishing along the lilies of woods, lono horsemen kopt up tho search which tho instinct, of all flesh to hido in its final hour makes necessary. On tho long hill of switchbacks, leading to tho divide I mentioned, pieces of lint and bandages were scattered among the aldora. Everywhere were empty goulash cans, goulash naturally being, ration in this army quite as seriously as is tea for the Briton; and, maybe, too, it has paprika transports. On tho height of land, marked by a cross, wo mot tho only motor of the day, and it was hitched to, and boing dragged by, a. team of horses. Down the other sido, tho road was being graded, and that by women, mind you, barofoot, with their scarce skirts hitched above thoir knees and hooded heads bent low on tho long shovels. The Strongth of Przomysl. One had to pauso and convince himself of the calendar year. For besido such a triumph of feminism as that last, tho next 'instant you woro jerked back a,century or so. A beggar, in bis garb, tumbled straight out of mediaeval allegory, sat waving on high a gleaming brass crucifix. Undor tho stono arch of a roadsido shrino knelt a gray infantryman, with bowed head and riflo leaned against tho robo of Christ. And on the doors of tho Riithonians' cabins —tho Little Russians—woro whitewashed holy crosses, as a tekon to their invading brothers, modorn angels of death, to pass them by in pence. _ War, you wondered, war again in tho old blood-stained arena of nil tho races of Europo. And this was hut the sponr and fringe of it. Shall anyone rvcr soo tho gaßp and scetho of it, who has tho oyos and heart to tell tho truth ?

It was thus wo descended through the darkness, until tho lamps of I'rzemysl looped upward in oven linos from that river-bed 'where 70,000 mon huvo just fallen within thoir shadows. At the present writing it is hard to believe that tho Russians will tako it. They have not powerful piiohrli sii-Lit— len*. The Austrian is tsmnlil. that, iVzomysl mid BelforL are the U'n lirsl, fortresses nf Kurope. Still, an the world knows, Ihn'lirat lesson nf this war has been I he answer to: What is 11. fortress? Just march around it. Liege, Namur, Maubeugo, an army, niajr

march around, but not here, through tho mud and forests of Galicia. . Ono judges as much from facts obtainable, and by tho sooming atmosphoro and spirit of tho inhabitants and garrison. Of that anon, in detail. But you hear no boasts; instead, if ono pries, he gets .a generous recognition of tho Russian strongth. It is tho best of spirits. Across tho street tho Cafo Sticbor is full of them—tho cafo of tho dual ompiro being the best oppression of all militnry genius. It solvos tho problom of how to kill the soldier's woTst cnomy, time. And it is midnight. If 1 listen bb I write thoro can bo heard tho fitful droning dotonations of the mortars in the crntor cincture of forts, only ono of which has yet been destroyed.