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.
Il Cammino della CiviltàThe Path of Civilization
". . . A peasant woman, old and wrinkled as a fairy-tale witch, stopped near us. Peering into our faces, she told us with breathless, excited mutterings that she had seen the villains who had lighted the fire; she had seen them, she avowed, in the act of igniting a straw thatch. 'Kazaki oni byli! Nashi ruskiye; svoi ruskiye! [Cossacks they were! Our Russians; our own Russians!]' and, she continued, 'What could the poor and helpless do when their own people turned against them?'. . . 'German spies!' denounced the soldiers; 'Kazaki!' moaned the peasants under their breath."
Frances Farmborough, an English teacher in Moscow when war broke out, trained for and joined a Red Cross unit serving with the Russian Army. 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. Trying to leave nothing for the advancing enemy, the Russians, in Farmborough's account chiefly Cossacks, set villages ablaze. The night of August 1, 1915 (July 19 Old Style), Farmborough's unit had turned in for the night after pitching its tents in the village of Rymachi when she was awakened to cries the village was burning. By the morning Rymachi was ruins, and still more refugees joined the estimated one million driven eastward.
Nurse at the Russian Front, a Diary 1914-18 by Florence Farmborough, pp. 104, 105, copyright © 1974 by Florence Farmborough, publisher: Constable and Company Limited, publication date: 1974
1915-08-02
