After having inspected the outposts, I went back, bedded myself in a soft sand-heap, covered myself up, and was soon fast and peacefully asleep.  During the night the dew moistened the sand, and when I awoke in the morning I found myself encased in a plastering which could not be removed for days.

III

Our hopes of getting a little rest and respite from the fighting were soon shattered, for a scouting aeroplane brought news that the Russians were again advancing in overwhelming strength.  Our commanding general, coming to the conclusion that with the reduced and weakened forces at his command he could not possibly offer any effective resistance to a renewed onslaught, had determined to fall back slowly before their pressure.  The consequence was a series of retreating battles for us, which lasted about ten days and which constituted what is now called the battle of Lemberg.

We were then terribly outnumbered by the Russians, and in order to extricate our army and prevent it from being surrounded and cut off, we constantly had to retreat, one detachment taking up positions to resist the advancing Russians, trying to hold them at all costs in order to give the rest of the army sufficient time to retire to safety.  This maneuvering could not, of course, be carried out without the forces guarding the rear and covering the retreat suffering sometimes terrible losses.

These were depressing days, with rain and storm adding to the gloom.  The men tramped wearily, hanging their heads, ashamed and humiliated by the retreat, the necessity of which they could not grasp, having, as they thought, successfully repulsed the enemy.  It was difficult to make them understand that our regiment was only a cog in the huge wheel of the Austrian fighting machine and that, with a battle line extending over many miles, it was quite natural that partial successes could take place and yet the consideration of general strategy necessitate a retreat.  Our arguing made little impression on the men; for they only shook their heads and said, “We were victorious, we should have gone on.”

The spirit of retreating troops is vastly different from that shown by an advancing army, and it was probably in recognition of this well-known psychological state that our general staff had in the beginning attacked the Russians wherever they could, in spite of the overwhelming superiority of the foe, but the reinforcements the Russians were able to draw upon had swelled their ranks so enormously that any attack would have been little short of madness.

The real hardships and privations for us began only now.  The few roads of Galicia, which at best are in bad condition, through the constant passing of heavy artillery and wagons of all kinds following each other in endless procession through constant rains, had become well-nigh impassable, the heavy mud constituting an additional impediment to the marching of troops.  In order to get all of the train carrying provisions out of the possible reach of a sudden raid by the Russian cavalry, it had to be sent miles back of us, so as not to interfere with the movement of the troops.  This caused somewhat of an interruption in the organization of the commissary department and very little food reached the troops, and that only at very long intervals.