THE TRANSFORMED RUSSIAN ARMY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11282, 9 January 1915, Page 4

THE TRANSFORMED RUSSIAN ARMY.

One need,; a. symbol with winch ,co npprolv'iid a fact, as great as For inc. till mow, tho «y»» >ol l>n* n momorv of Moscow in the winter »l 1 i)()o i lie wir.if.r of rnvoluUnn. when tl.o i>arriea/!es were up in the Greets nn.l tho dra-o.ms worked among the crowds like' slaughternvn in a slia.ml.los. Toward that, arc-hod gatowav loading from the Red Square min'iho. kreinlin came soldiers on loot, bringing with thorn prisoners dredged out of the, turmoil, two armed men to each battered and terrified oapyve, whose vhito and bloodstained tnco fif ft r«l startling and ghastly between tho prf'V uniform gion-tcoals. Iho first of'lbem ffutift to the deep arch, in whoso recess is a, lampht shnne; I etood aside lo sec them Ro past. I.ho soldiers v.'cro wrenching tho man along by tho .arms, each holding him on one, side; I recall vet tho prisoner'^loan, miserable gaze, with tho suggestion it had of dissolute and desperate youth; and as Uicv came abreast of the faintly gloaming icon in the gate they let liim go for "a moment, Mi'k dazed eye:; wandered up to tho shrine; ho was already bareheaded ; and with a .shaking, uncertain hand he crossed himself in the intricate Russian fashion. The soldiers who guarded him, too—they shuffled their "rides to a convenient hold to have a right hand free—they crossed themselves and their lips tnov- I ed. Then they went, through the. arch,! and out upon the snow within the I wal's, and once, apa in they had hold j of their man and were thrusting him along to the prison which for him was tho antechamber of death. ANOTHER RUSSIA. That was Russia, then: prisoner and captors, soldiers and revolutionaries, blinded' and bewildered by the rush and dazzle of affairs, straining asunder, vet linked, knitted into a unity of the spirit which they neither understood nor questioned. But a week ago, on those still, dreary lands which border the Prussian frontier, there was evidence of a Russia that has been born or made since those hectic days in Moscow. The 'Germans, who had forced General Rennenkampf to withdraw to the border, wore making an attempt to envelop his left wing. Their columns, issuing from tho maze of lakes and hills in Masurenland, came acrosslhe bonier on both banks of tho little river Amulew, and foil upon him. There is a road in those parts that drifts south along tho frontier, an unmade, unholy Russian road, ribbed with outcrops of stone, a purgatory to travel upon till tho snow clothes it and one can go by sledge. Away to ihe south-west, beyond the patches of fir wood and the grey, steeply rolling land, there toned the far diapason of artillery; strings of army transport, Red Cross vehicles, and miscellaneous men straggled upon the road. From beyond the nearest shoulder of land sounded suddenly some gigantic and hoarso whistle, an ear-shattering roar of warning and urgency. There was shouting and a stir of movement; the waggons and Red Cross vans began to pull out to ono side; and over tho brow of the hill, hurtling into sight, huge, unbelievably swift, roaring upon its whistle, tore a great, grey-painted motor-lorry, packed with khaki-clad infantrymen. It was going at a hideous speed, leaping its tons of weight insanely from rock ridge to traffic-churn-ed slough in tho road; there was only time to note its immensity and Uproar and the ranked faces of the men swaying in their places, and it was by, and another was bounding into sight behind it. A hundred and odd oT them, each with thirty men on board—three battalions to reinforce the threatened left wing—a mighty instrument of war, mightily wielded. It was Russia as she is 'to-day, under way and gathering speed. At Rennenkampf S headquarters at Wirba-llen, where formerly one changed trains going from Berlin to Petersburg, one sees the fashion in which Russia shapes _ for war. Here, beneath a little bridge with a black' and white striped sentry box upon it, its muddy banks partitioned with rotten planks into gooso pens, runs that feeble stream which separates Russia from Germany. Upon its farther side, wha,t is left of Eydtkuhuen, the Prussian frontier village, looms drearily through its screen of willows —walls smoke-blackened and rooiiass, crumbling in piles of fallen brick across its single street, which was dreary enough at its best. To the north and south, and behind to the eastward, are the camps, a city full, a county full of men armed and equipped; the mean and ugly village thrills to tho movement and purpose. On the roof of the schoolhouse there lifts against the pale autumn sky the cobweb mast and stays of the wireless apparatus, and in the courtyard below and in tho shabby street in front there is a surge of automobiles, motor-cycles, mounted orderlies—all the messagecarrying machinery of a staff office. The military telephone wires loop across the street and splay out in a dozen directions over the flat and trodden fields; for within, the dynamic kernel to all this elaborate, shell is Rennenkampf, the Prussian-Russian who governs tho gate of Germany. FIGHTING- STUFF.

Hero is the brain of the army; its limbs go swinging by at all hours, in battalions and brigades, or at tho trot with a jangle of bits aud scabbards, or at the walk with a bump and clank as the gun wheels clear the ruts. It is the infantry that fills the eye—fine, big stuff, man for man the biggest infantry in the world. Their uniform of peaked cap, trousers lucked into knee boots, and khaki blouse, is workmanlike, and the serious, middle-aged officers trudging beside them are hardly distinguishable from the men. They have not yet learned the- uses of tho short, broad-bladod bayonet; theirs are of the old three-edged type with which the Bulgarians drove the Turks to Chataldja: but there is something else that they have learned. Since, tho first days of the mobilisation that- brought them from their homes there, is not a man among them that has tasted strong drink. AN EMPIRE GOER DRY.

Last year the State's profits from the, vodka monopoly amounted to 780.000,000 roubles Pay, roughly, £80,000,000. 1 do not know how the statistics of drunkenness stand, but to the eye Russia was the drunkennest country in tho world.

Tho villages sodden with it; tho ritual lasts and the drinking were beginning to have their effect on the physique of the people. Then came tho threat of war and tho mobilisation, and Russia, showed a new face to the world. She had her people organised and under military law; an order or a ukase was sufficient to effect anything, and the bayonets \vcro> there to back it. Suddenly, with that same peremptoriness that robbed a Jew of lias birthright or throw Finland into chains, the word went forth nnd tho whole ss-le and manufacture of vodka ceased. Russia was struck sober. In 1904 the men came drunk from their hornas to the- centres; one saw them about the. streets and on the railways and in the gutters. But these men have been sober from the start and will perforce be sober to the end. Of all that elaborate and copious machinery of war which "Russia, has built up Miice IK-r failure in Manchuria, there is nothing so impressive as this.' Her thousand and odd aeroplanes, her murderously expert artillery, her neat and .successful field wireless telegraph, oven her strategy, count as secondary In it. The chief of her weaknesses in the- pasl has luxm the slowness of her mobilisation; (Jermany, with her plans laid and tested for a mobilisation

(By PERCEVAL GIBBON, in "Collier's.

AT THE GATEWAY OF GERMANY.

in four days, could count on time enough to strike before Russia could move She used her advantage to effect whp.n Austria planted the seed of this present war by the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina; she was able to present Russia- in nil her unprepared ncsN with the alternative of war in twenty-four hours or an acceptance of the situation. But this time if- has been different. PROVINCES SET FOR BATTLES TO COME.

At, St Petersburg—wo call it Potrograd now—one sees how different. Hither, from tho northern nnd eastern governments, come the men who arcto swell Rennenkampf's force. Their cadres, tho skeletons of the battalions of which they are- the flesh, are waiting for them—officers, organisation, equipment, all is ready. The endless trains deca-nt them; they swing in leisurely columns through "the streets to their depots, motley as a circus—foresters, muzhiks in foetid sheepskins, cattlemen and rivermen, Siberians, tow-haired Finns, the wide gamut of the races of Russia, all big or biggish, with those impassive, blunt-featured fane ß that mask the Russian soul, and all sober. No need now to make men of them before making soldiers; no in- ! forno at the wayside stations and troop trains turning up days late. It is as if. at, tho cost of those annual 780,000,000 roubles, Russia had bought the clue, to victory. West beyond Eydtukbnen, under the pearl-grey northern sky. lies East Prussia. Hereabout it is flat and fertile, with lavish, eye-fatiguing lovels of corn stretching away to Insterburg and beyond to Konigsberg's formidable girdle of forts. Hero are many villages, and scattered between them innumerable hamlets of only two or three houses and a small town or two. Most of them are empty now; the Gorman army that leans its back on the Vistula's fortresses has cleared this country like a dancing floor for its work. It lias rearranged it a-s one rearranges the furniture in a room; whole populations have, hern transported, roads broken, bridges blown up, strategically unnecessary villages burned. Nothing remains on the ground that ha.s not its purposo assigned—not oven the peoplo. and their purpose has been clear for some time past. A POPULATION IN LEASH. The Russians have been over this ground already and fell back from it after their defeat between Osterode and Allenstoin. Their advance was through villages lifeless and deserted and over empty roads; the retreat was through a. country that swarmed with hostile life. Roads were blocked with farm carts; houses along their route took fire mysteriously, signalling their movement and direction, and answered from afar by other conflagrations; bridges'that had been sound enough before blew up at the last moment. What the Belgians were charged with and their country laid waste for, all East Prussia is organised to do daily as an established and carefully schooled auxiliary to the army. A fow days .since there arrived a prisoner, driven in on foot by a mounted Cossack, sent back by the officer commanding the reconnaissance party which had captured him. Ho came up tho street, shuffling at a quick walk to keop ahead of the horse and the thin, sinister Cossack—an elderly farmer in work-stained clothes, with the lean neck and pursed jaws of a hard bargainer. In all his bearing and person there was evident the man of toils-omo life who has prospered a little; in that soldier-thronged street, in his posture of a prisoner with iV> Cossack's revolver at his back, he was conspicuous and grotesque. His eyes, under the grey pent of his brows, were uneasy; and through all his commonplace quality and his show of fortitude there was a gleam of the fear of death that made him tragic. He had been found on his farm doing nothing in particular; it was out of simply general suspicions that the Russian officer had ordered him to be searched. The result was the discovery of a typewritten paper, giving precise instructions as to how a German civilian in East Prussia ■ must act toward the enemy—how to signal- movements of infantry, of cavalry, of artillery, how to estimate tho numbers of a body of men, what to say if questioned, and the like—a document conceived and executed with true Prussian exactitude and clearness, a masterpieca in the literature of espionage. For him there was no hope; even the Hague Convention does not protect spies, however earnestly and dangerously they serve their country. He passed, always at the same forced shuffle of reluctant feet, toward his judges and his doom.

South and south-west from Wirballen the character of the land changes; from its easy levels, it crumples into that maze of small hills and little ragged-edged lakes called Masurenland, a complicated bit of country, hard to keep under observation. Into it run the railways from Konigsberg, Elbing and Danzig on the Baltic, ami from Berlin on the west; the German military genius, looking eastward towards the then unawakened might of Russia, saw the possibilities of this region as an area for the concentration of a big force. Troopships from Stettin and Lubeck can pour whole army corps through the ports and down tho railways hither; the long, crawling trains can. flood it with men from the east; an army corps a clay, forty thousand men, every twenty-four hours, when the plant is working at full pressure, can be gathered here among the fir woods. Rennenkampf, we hear, is to move shortly and move backward again, drawing his whole line with hini; Masurenland and what it hides is tho reason. Half the art of war is in knowing and using the ground, and Ronnenkarupf's battlefield will be to the east, on Russian soil, upon the line of his own choice and reasonably far from the nucleus cf German strength in Masurenland. FOOLING THE GERMANS JUST ONCE. Tlio reconnaissance which definitely established tho fact of tho concentration among those secret hills serves to typify the "quality of the actual fighting in this war, of that spirit of lavishness and gusto in the work of slaughter which is, for the moment, the whole culture of Europe. It was a. night raid across the border from Grajewo to Bialla, a small place to the east' of the Spirding See, not shown on any but large maps. It moved in some force a. whole Cossack regiment, three batteries of field guns and a couple cf thousand of the fine, quick-marching infantry that is so rile hereabout—and its purpose was to attack Bialla, and its immediate purpose, do < what da-ma-""© it could, and return with its news. 6 ' At daybreak they were up with Bialla, the Cossacks half rushed a couple of outposts, and the fight was on m the fresh light of a resplendent sunriso._ "Their aeroplanes spouted up from behind the town like a flock of wild ducks." „ , An infantry officer who was through the affair told me that detail, and how the machines swooped forward over the Russian position, each spluttering forth into rocket signals, red for artillery, blue for infantry, and how tho thickly dotted clumps of fir wood made their observations futile. As no time did the Gcrmnns guess the strength of the ridiculously inferior Russian force, they were bluffed from tho start. Their guns shelled hillsides far in the .rear of the Russians with a terrible spray of shrapnel, .as though the light, were miles thick, with supports and reserves and everything handsome about it, instead of"hare-breined piracy.

THE DAUNTLESS ENEMY

In the end it was an infantry business; tho simplicity of infantry, the directness of the bayonet, the decisiveness and clarity of the issue, one way or tho other, appeal to the Russian psychology- Everybody agreed that the Germans fought as.Germans can—magnificently; it was they, and not the Russians, who tried first to get to grips—gapped, rippling lines of ih-.'m suddenly apparent upon the fields, racing forward, checking, torn afunder by tho fire, coming on again, gtuif; down in platoons, destroyed or <\r' ::i\ back. Charge after charge they u\ d, upending blood like water. , lji one place a Russian captain, lying among his men in a wide ditch, gave the order to cease fire, to lot the. enemy approach. He. waited, talking all tho time to his soldiers as one talks to sooth© a restive hor.se, "warning them to wait for tho signal, a shot to be fired by himself. He held them till tho charge was eight paces away—till, as ho explained, "he could see their teeth." Imagine those lips contorted with effort, parted breathlessly, and the- unmoved man in the ditch, watching steady eyes, perhaps with a sort of pitying amusement, till he could see between them the white shine of their teeth. Then, and not till then, he let loose the volley that put them down to the last man. RIVERS OF BLOOD. Early in the afternoon the German trenches were rushed and taken. Tliero i.s an impression in the Russian Army, left over from the earlier fighting in East Prussia, that the Germans dread the bayonet; incidentally, it is a thing one hears of the enemy in every campaign; but at Bialla that impression was corrected, for they stood to it desperately. And then—— "The trenches were like the long graves we dig after a battle; they.were full of dead; and the blood, stood on the ground in pools and puddles." Those again are the words of my eye. witness informant; I myself, am a, wai correspondent, and therefore did no-fa .see it. But I remember, before Adrianople, the night on which the sheep-skin-clad Bulgarian reservists took the trenches on the wet slopes of Papa's Tepe in the rain, and what those trenches looked like an hour afterward. Men's bodies—not lying, but tangled—in them, the grotesque and writhed attitudes, the faces yet grimacing inhumanly in the light of; the lantern, the stiff limbs that stuck up> and seemed to brandish themselves, and the mud underfoot that was wet with more precious stuff than rain. And I remember thinking, too, that if one could only follow back 'he ravelled intricacy of causes and interests behind the war, one might arrive at last at some one man, the supreme Criminal whose action or inaction had bfonght this horror into being, tho man who filled the trench with dead; and that he would never see his work.

The rest was street fighting'in the village, setting fire to mountainous accumulation.? of stores, cutting wires and the like; and then the return by way of a, fight at Johannisburg 'with the news that enabled Rennenkampf to tuck his left wing out of harm's way before it was too late. But oho'asks oneself, if tha.t is the way thai a- reconnoitring force fights, what 'will bo real battle be like when the great German columns shove across the frontier to the attack, and half of north-west-ern Russia becomes a battlefield?

' But if I wore to seek for myself a symbol to express the true sense and import of war, it would not be a trench full of dead, nor even—though it tempts me—a stout man siting at his ease in a big'handsome room,in a big ugly palace, reading a despatch from the blood-slippery front, beginning: "Your Majesty.". No; it-would be a road, such a road as those ol<S trade roads across the Government or Kovno; a streak of grey dust in a grey horizon-ringed dreariness of plain, .and against the western sky,a low-hanging smud-go of smoke as from a burning village. Upon the. road would ba people, strung out, straggling far apart, sore-footed and slow, men, women, and feebly crying children, all poor and ordinary; and the night would be coming on. And there in a little compass within the scope of the most usual daily commonplace would be war in its incidence and just pro--porfcion. MAKING THE DEFENCELESS TREMBLE. North of Wirballen, Germany tails off to a wedge of land with the Baltic on one side and the frontier on the other, having the port of Momel close to its northern end. Within twenty miles of Memel the Russian border is dotted with villages: Krotipgen, Groshdny, Pesitchik. Wewershany, a rash of poverty-stricken hamlets- that survive from the days when the main road from Kovno to the sea passed through their midst. Of la.te, troop ships have been reinforcing the 'German strength at Momel; the patrols are out along the frontier and moving to and fro across it, and in tlio villages is terror—the terror that hears guns in the winds, that wakes quaking in the night upon a noise of footsteps without, that sets blanched lips to babbling upon the first alarm, " The Germans are coming." ■ That is the new potency of the German name: that it is a word of fear not to the armed enemy, but to the defencoless; not to men in fortresses, but to women in villages. It• is a real fear, no mere contagion wafted across Europe from marytred Belgium. Kovno and Vilna have seen those refugees and the bewilderment of their misery, their aspect of humanity humbled and made abject. There are women among tliem who have carried children forty miles across country to the railway.

There are others, lialf maniac with anguish, who have been separated from their children in the flight: tliere are men old and young, who look as if they wore nowly come from the torture chamber.

Groshdny, about twelve milea from Memo], was bombarded a few nightd ap;o, though not a soul remained in the village. It had been visited previously by a party of thirty infantry under an officer—solid men of ihe landwehr, these called up to the colours to complete tho strength of a reserve corps, all Hearing forty years of age. They demanded what has come to ba called a "contribution" of the village; Sir Henry Morgan used to call it a. ransom. The villagers stood aghast. Money—they had no money; where should a Russian village get money from ? Their poverty, manifest to the eye, should have answered for them, but the Germans were not to bo satisfied so easily. Money or they would burn the village! At this point the local frontier guard and police opened fire on them and they retired, leaving four dead. It was" an inestimable gain for Groshdny, a gain of several hours; tho night beheld tho villagers making the best of tlie lima Carrying bundles and dragging handcarts, the whole population faced the eastward road toward Kovno, leaving to the German wrath their homos, the mean theatre of their meagrxj lives, yet rich in that their lives wvre still their own. The following evoninp. camo the guns, and twelve' shells d : pose of Groshdny. The noiso of ' firing was heard in the. near-by v'h and they too were abandoned l'< with.

RUSSIA'S ONCREEPING AT." Thus then stands tho gate of many: from Memel on tho var

6omewhore near Mlawa on th<*. <■■<

a wide gate, but strongly £unr. Within the next few weeks w-e •-■ know-whether the road to Berlin is hor through Galicia and Silesia Tin. (i

cow and Brestau. Old battle groarni, all of it, tragic and glorious with traditions of death and viotory, Kg earth fat with tho bodies of the shiin, its echoes familiar with the voice of cannon. A hundred years ago it snw. too, tho prowess of that great ally of Russia, who broke Napoleon, 'who comes again now in these grey days of September—the Russian winter.