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Mounted Indian Cavalry non-commissioned officer.
A Russian Cossack riding among refugees fleeing before a Central Power advance. The Russians adopted a scorched-earth policy in the months-long retreat before the German-Austro-Hungarian Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive of the spring, summer, and fall 1915, with Cossacks accused of burning homes and crops to deny them to the advancing enemy, and to prevent civilians from remaining behind and providing intelligence to the invader.
I've killed many Germans, but never women or children. Original French watercolor by John on blank field postcard. In the background are indolent Russian soldiers and Vladimir Lenin, in the foreground stands what may be a Romanian soldier who is telling the Russians, 'You call me savage. I killed a lot of Boches [Germans], but never women or children!'
Christmas on the front, Vaucelles, France, 1916. A watercolor of the village gate. A separate photograph shows two German soldiers posing before the gate.
Mustapha Kemal Pasha, later Ataturk, from 'Four Years Beneath the Crescent' by Rafael De Nogales.
"On leaving St. Omer we took a short cut southward across rolling country. It was a happy accident that caused us to leave the main road, for presently, over the crest of a hill, we saw surging toward us a mighty movement of British and Indian troops. A great bath of silver sunlight lay on the wheat-fields, the clumps of woodland and the hilly blue horizon, and in that slanting radiance the cavalry rode toward us, regiment after regiment of slim turbaned Indians, with delicate proud faces like the faces of Princes in Persian miniatures. Then came a long train of artillery; splendid horses, clattering gun-carriages, clear-faced English youths galloping by all aglow in the sunset. The stream of them seemed never-ending. . . . For over an hour the procession poured by, so like and yet so unlike the French division we had met on the move as we went north a few days ago; so that we seemed to have passed to the northern front, and away from it again, through a great flashing gateway in the long wall of armies guarding the civilized world from the North Sea to the Vosges." ((1), more)
"He fell without a murmur in the noise of battle; found rest'Midst the roar of hooves on the grass, a bullet struck through his breast.Perhaps he drowsily lay; for him alone it was still,And the blood ran out of his body, it had taken so little to kill." ((2), more)
"All day long we jolted along the plains or through woodlands, and wherever we looked we could see the moving figures of homeless people. It was said that the Cossacks had received orders to force all inhabitants of villages and hamlets to leave their homes, lest they be made to act as spies and, in order that the enemy should encounter widespread devastation in his progress, the homesteads were set on fire and crops destroyed.Thus a new word was added to our daily vocabulary — that of refugee, and from that day onward for many weeks to come the life of our Unit was closely interwoven with that of the refugees. Their plight was heart-rending." ((3), more)
"Suddenly the artillery fire died away. The front line became visible. But then we began firing again. Our artillery put the Russian trenches under heavy fire. I demanded that the reserves go in. We had a firing line, man against man. The Russians didn't advance and those who tried to retreat were blown away. We killed hundreds of them. It is irresponsible, how ruthlessly the Russians drive their men forward. My men were exemplary. An unshakeable wall. The night passed without incident. We left the Russians alone so that they could collect their wounded. Many were screaming all day in the wheatfield." ((4), more)
"A man is down! He was under the wheels of a gun-carriage! A flash of a white face — a cry above the confusion — that was all; we still clattered along and the gun-carriage pressed forward without heed. Here, indeed, was the law of the primitive world, the survival of the fittest! To fall was to be crushed, abandoned, and to die, while the swollen tide of wheels and feet swept on and on in fitful, passionate fury, engulfing horse or human which impeded its passage. And ever the lazy, threatening drone of enemy planes sounded in our ears silenced only the quick, sharp bark of enemy shells at our heels." ((5), more)
(1) Edith Wharton toured the Western Front in 1915, reporting from the Argonne, Alsace, Lorraine, and the Vosges. In June 1915 she went to the North and into Belgium, sectors held by the British (including Indians and Canadians) and Belgian armies. On June 19, she had stood in her car to watch 'the river of war,' French 'cavalry, artillery, lancers, infantry, sappers and miners, trench-diggers, road-makers, stretcher-bearers' streaming to the west. On June 24 she admired its British and Indian counterpart.
Fighting France by Edith Wharton, pp. 178, 179, copyright © 1915, by Charles Scribner's Sons, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1915
(2) Quatrain from the poem '1914' by Ferenc Békássy, who was killed at Dobronoutz in Bukovina, June 25, 1915. A Lieutenant in an Austro-Hungarian Hussar regiment, Békássy had studied at Cambridge College, England. A friend of John Maynard Keynes, Békássy was a rival of the English poet Rupert Brooke for the love of Noël Olivier, who went on to become a doctor. Békássy wrote in both English and Hungarian. The Hogarth Press published Adriatic and Other Poems, a volume of his English poetry, in 1925.
The Lost Voices of World War I, An International Anthology of Writers, Poets and Playwrights by Tim Cross, page 347, copyright © 1989 by The University of Iowa, publisher: University of Iowa Press, publication date: 1989
(3) Frances Farmborough, an English teacher in Moscow when war broke out, trained for and joined a Red Cross unit serving with the Russian Army. By late June, 1915, the joint German-Austro-Hungarian Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive, launched on May 2, had broken the Russian front, splitting the northern and southern armies, and driving the Russians back hundreds of miles. For these months, Farmborough's account is of the ongoing, brutal retreat.
Nurse at the Russian Front, a Diary 1914-18 by Florence Farmborough, page 83, copyright © 1974 by Florence Farmborough, publisher: Constable and Company Limited, publication date: 1974
(4) Ernst Nopper, a German officer on the border of Austria-Hungary and Polish Russia, writing on June 27, 1915. The Russians had attacked two days earlier, suffering heavy losses with no gain. The Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive, a joint German-Austro-Hungarian assault, had driven the Russians back, but not yet broken their line. The Russian version of the shell shortage was the most extreme of the major powers, the army lacking guns, artillery shells, rifles, and ammunition to respond to the German attacks.
Intimate Voices from the First World War by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, page 105, copyright © 2003 by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, publisher: Harper Collins Publishers, publication date: 2003
(5) A late June 1915 excerpt from the diary of Frances Farmborough, and English nurse serving with the Russian Army. She and her unit were part of the great Russian retreat in 1915, driven back by the combined German and Austro-Hungarian Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive. Farmborough's unit sets up intermittently, then is driven on again, amidst refugees and units of the Russian army.
Nurse at the Russian Front, a Diary 1914-18 by Florence Farmborough, page 85, copyright © 1974 by Florence Farmborough, publisher: Constable and Company Limited, publication date: 1974
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