Gaudier-Brzeska

Trechos de Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916), de Ezra Pound.

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(WRITTEN FROM THE TRENCHES.)

I have been fighting for two monhts and I can now gauge the intensity of life.

Human masses teem and move, are destroyed and crop up again.

Horses are worn out in three weeks, die by the roadside.

Dogs wander, are destroyed, and others come along.

With all the destruction that works around us nothing is changed, even superficially. Life is the same strength, the moving agent that permits the small individual to assert himself.

The bursting shells, the volleys, wire entanglements, projectors, motors, the chaos of battle do not alter in the least the outlines of the hill we are besieging. A company of partridges scuttle along before our very trench.

It would be folly to seek artistic emotions amid these little works of ours.

This paltry mechanism, which serves as a purge to over-numerous humanity.

This war is a great remedy.

In the individual it kills arrogance, self-esteem, pride.

It takes away from the masses numbers upon numbers of unimportant units, whose economic activities become noxious as the recent trades crises have shown us.

My views on sculpture remain absolutely the same.

- - -
Just as this hill where the Germans are solidly entrenched, gives me a nasty feeling, solely because its gentle slopes are broken up by earth-works, which throw long shadows at sunset. Just so shall I get feeling, of whatsoever definition, from a statue according to its slopes, varied to infinity.

I have made an experiment. Two days ago I pinched from an enemy a mauser rifle. Its heavy unwieldy shape swamped me with a powerful image of brutality. I was in doubt for a long time whether it pleased or displeased me. I found that I did not like it. I broke the butt off and with my knife I carved in it a design, through which I tried to express a gentler order of feeling, which I preferred. But I will emphasize that my design got its effect (just as the gun had) from a very simple composition of lines and planes.

- - -
I have been slightly wounded in the night of Sunday 8th, on patrol duty, I have been at rest since and am returning service within two or three days.

- - -
[...] the thoughts of an artist who had a mystical and beautiful mind and who had been long under fire. Is it not interesting and valuable to observe what such a mind selects?

- - -
I do not despair of ever reaching Dusseldorf and bringing back the finest Cezannes and Henri Rousseaux to be found up there. We are not very far from the German frontier as it is.

If you send anything, send chocolate.

- - -
October 24th, 1914.

I am writing from a trench, I have spent four hours of the night on sentry duty before the lines, I have not had the luck of sighting an enemy patrol, tho' at a time I saw several men move, at sunrise I made out what it was: barbed wire nets stuck on stout posts. For the day we have to stay inside this beastly hole without even having the satisfaction of firing a shot. Perhaps to-night we shall have greater fun, anyway it is a happy life, there are hardships but sometimes we can steal away two or three with a sergeant and bring back wine, beer, etc.

- - -
Sunday. A fine sunshine and better mood than yesterday. I have even been thinking about writing a short essay on sculpture for the Blast Christmas No. Please let them reproduce in it a photo of your bust. I shall send the essay as soon as finished, but all depends upon the fighting. If we have a few quiet days you'll have it soon.

- - -
November 7th.

My dear Ezra,

Yes I have survived and will continue to do so, I am absolutely sure. We are at rest to-day after a week's trench life. We have had rain, mud, sunshine, bullets, shells, shrapnels, sardines and fun. I am well weathered and covered ... have more socks, etc. than I ever shall wear out within the next six months. Please keep the sweater, don't have it dyed, send it when the winter has set in really, etc.

- - -
The only things he wants are numbers of the Egoist, cigarettes, chocolate, poems. He promises the article before next Monday.

As I am ordered for a night patrol, it will be the 12th that I do. We are only four in the company for this work. We set out at sun-down and come back at dawn. This time we must go to explore an old bombarded mill within the German line where a maxim-gun section is in position. We shall have luck I have a good presentiment.

I have not received any news since October 5th, etc.

I am writing this on the back of a book pinched from the "Boches," it is a cheap edition of Wallenstein, I am trying in vain to interest myself in its complicated nonsense.

- - -
November 9th.

Dear Ezra,

I have had the greatest fun this night of all my life. I started with two men under my command to reinforce wire entanglements at a few yards off the enemy. We were undisturbed for a long time, my fellows went on driving in poles and I was busy setting wires lying on my back when the silly moon shone out of the mist. The Germans caught sight of me and then pumpumpumpumpumpum then bullets cut four barbed wires just above my face and I was in a funny way indeed caught by the loose wire. I grasped my rifle at last and let them have the change, but it was a signal: my men lost their heads, one let his rifle fall into his wire coil, threw away the wooden mallet and jumped into the trench as a wild rabbit, the other in his wake, but this latter did not forget the gun. When they came in they said I was dead, and to avenge me my lieutenant ordered volley firing, the boches did the same, and I got between the two. At great risk, I came back to the trench, where my lieutenant was very astonished. When the row ceased and the fog set in again I went back with my two chaps, found everything back and completed the wire snares. I got your letter and replied. I am beginning the essay now.

- - -
December 1st.

(Post-card, of the ruins of Rheims, with a gargoyle of "le coq gaulois" left intact) containing thanks for cigarettes, sweater, etc., and the phrase, "I don't deserve so much, as the suffering is very restricted"...

Nothing new, we killed a German a few days ago.

- - -
December 18th.

[...] Before Rheims we had dug hibernating trenches which we had accommodated with all possible care, and we only slept once in this seeming comfort to be ousted over here. I was spying a German through a shooting cranny and loading my rifle when the order came to pack up and get ready to start on a night march. We did not know the destination: some were sure we went to rest some 20 miles behind the lines, others said we were led to the assault of a position, and this seemed confirmed when they took away our blankets to lessen the weight of the knapsack. Anyway, no one foresaw the awful ground we had to defend. We must keep two bridges and naturally as usual "until death." We cannot come back to villages to sleep, and we have to dig holes in the ground which we fill with straw and build a roof over, but the soil is so nasty that we find water at two feet six inches depth; and even if we stop at a foot, which is hardly sufficient to afford cover, we wake up in the night through the water filtering up the straw. We have been busy these last nights bringing in lots of materials, stoves, grates, etc., to make decent abodes, and unhappily they will be done just in time for us to go, as we are relieved of the post within three weeks. The beastly regiment which was here before us remained three months, and as they were all dirty northern miners used to all kind of dampness they never did an effort to better the place up a bit. When we took the trenches after the march it was a sight worthy of Dante, there was at the bottom a foot deep of liquid mud in which we had to stand two days and two nights, rest we had in small holes nearly as muddy, add to this a position making a V point into the enemy who shell us from three sides, the close vicinity of 800 putrefying German corpses, and you are at the front in the marshes of the Aisne.

It has been dry these last three days and the 1st Battalion has cleansed up the place, I believe. Anyway we are going back to-night, and we shall finish the work.

I got a sore throat in this damned place and lost my knife while falling down to avoid bullets from a stupid German sentry, whom I subsequently shot dead, but the stupid ass had no knife on him to replace mine, and the bad humour will last another week until I receive a new one from my people.

Anyway the three weeks here will pass away soon. I take the opportunity to wish you and your wife a Merry Xmas and a prosperous 1915.

- - -
January 27th, 1915.

My dear Ezra,

I was writing you a post-card to Stone Cottage when your last turned up. We are at rest again in the same farmhouse for six days and we are glad of it. These last 12 days in the trenches were hard, it has been raining and every night we had to puddle ankle deep; in the daytime we had to empty ditches and dry our clothes. I have heard from Hulme when he was at Havre on the way to the trenches; it will change him a bit from the comfort he had at Frith Street. I had the luxury of only one patrol, we had to wait for a beastly night to do it as the Germans are too near us.

I started with a sergeant and it was so dark that walking side by side we had difficulty to see each other. We went all along their barbed wires, paid visits to all their sentry posts, which we found empty, and only got one shot fired at us when we got at the corner of a burnt farmstead within their line. The bullet whizzed past our heads and stuck itself in the ground splashing our faces with mud. We had just come from this little emotion when we crossed our own wires and came near our sentries. There was a youngster on duty and my sudden appearance surprised him so much that he let me have a bullet at five yards which missed the mark. The poor fellow got such a fright that he shivered for two days, but of course he had to enjoy a first rate licking with the butt end of a rifle from the angry corporal on the spot. Since we only had only a sham attack the night we were leaving for rest, attack in which my company was not engaged. All the time there have been violent artillery duels in which nobody got the better. [...]

I believe I shall develop a style of my own which, like the Chinese, will embody both a grotesque and a non-grotesque side. Anyway, much will be changed after we have come through the blood bath of idealism. Wadsworth has told me in a letter that Dunoyer de Segonzac fell in Lorraine; he leaves a complete work. His end may have been a great fact. [...]

It is as bloody damp here as it was with you a week ago when you wrote, and I again indulged in the luxury of "mud baths," very good for rheumatisms, arthritis, lumbago and other evils. But nowadays I am a trench veteran. I have experienced all sorts of weather in these hellish places, so that I can stand a night under a heavy rain without sneezing the next day, and sleep beautifully a whole day on hard frozen ground without any ill result to the "abdomenalia." Nevertheless I am writing from a barn behind the lines, a good old sheepfold full of straw where one is warm, and needless to say I enjoy it and appreciate the happy position, especially as I have been able to find good cigars and wine in the village.

Let all the hordes of city clerks and kilted Highlanders come to reinforce us and take up the offensive when the weather is fine again. I dislike rotting away in a ditch like an old toad. Our army is forming behind us, we are being re-equipped with better fighting clothes, soft greys instead of bright blues and reds. We get American boots and socks, English gloves and scarves. We'll do fine work soon.

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14/3/1915.

I am at rest for three weeks in a village. [...]

I am about to be made a sergeant. ... The weather is now magnificent and I am astonished to have been through such a badly wet winter practically in the open air without getting any the worse for it. I have been patrolling lately; we had lively volleys in the early hours. I threw a bomb also in a very black night into the German line: all great fun. It will be a little harder when we have to pierce thro' then three lines of trenches soon; but thereafter the pursuit will be quick and decisive, and I shall get to Dusseldorf perhaps in a week after having waited six long months in the damp.

As we are here six comrades and we can get wine and other suitable liquids, could you send me a couple of pounds during the 21 days we have to stay?

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20/3/1915.

[...] In the night we can go on top of the hills and see the fireworks all along the line from Soissons to Rheims. It is so calm to-day and the fellows are writing and reading so quietly that it's difficult to imagine one's self at war. But I have some presentiment it is the great calm preceding violent storms, for which we are now well prepared.

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May 25th.

There is nothing very special here. Spring in all its beauty, nightingales, lily-of-the-valley in the trenches, and the Germans have been routed. They dared attack our entrenchment. We killed 1.250, but the horrid side is the stench now. We had a handful of prisoners. We are far away from the lines resting. I shall write soon to Wadsworth. Tell me of anything that may happen in London.

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3/6/1915.

Dear Ezra,

It becomes worse and worse. It is the 10th day we are on the first line, and the 10th day we are getting shells on the cocoanut without truce. Right and left they lead Rosalie to the dance, but we have the ungrateful task to keep to the last under a hellish fire.

Perhaps you ignore what is Rosalie? It's our bayonet, we call it so because we draw it red from fat Saxon bellies. We shall be going to rest sometime soon, and then when we do come back it will be for an attack. It is a gruesome place all strewn with dead, and there's not a day without half a dozen fellows in the company crossing the Styx. We are betting on our mutual chances. Hope all this nasty nightmare will soon come to an end.

[...] (The Germans are restless, machine-gun crackling ahead, so I must end this in haste.)

Yours ever,
Henri Gaudier.

- - -
* His premonition of a head wound is curious, for this letter was written I believe only two days before his death. His sister tells me that years ago in Paris, when the war was undreamed of, he insisted that he would die in the war.

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Mais:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/04/henri-gaudier-brzeska
http://frenchsculpture.org/en/artist/gaudier-brzeska-henri

Wittgenstein

Trechos de Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty Of Genius (1991), de Ray Monk.

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He [Ludwig Wittgenstein] joined the Austrian army as a volunteer, the rupture he had suffered the previous year having exempted him from compulsory service. "I think it is magnificent of him to have enlisted", wrote [David] Pinsent in his diary, "but, extremely sad and tragic."

Although a patriot, Wittgenstein's motives for enlisting in the army were more complicated than a desire to defend his country. His sister Hermine thought it had to do with: "an intense desire to take something difficult upon himself and to do something other than purely intellectual work".

- - -
Wittgenstein felt that the experience of facing death would, in some way or other, improve him. He went to war, one could say, not for the sake of his country, but for the sake of himself.

- - -
In the diaries Wittgenstein kept during the war (the personal parts of which are written in a very simple code) there are signs that he wished for precisely this kind of consecration. "Perhaps", he wrote, "the nearness of death will bring light into life. God enlighten me." What Wittgenstein wanted from the war, then, was a transformation of his whole personality, a "variety of religious experience" that would change his life irrevocably. In this sense, the war came for him just at the right time, at the moment when his desire to "turn into a different person" was stronger even than his desire to solve the fundamental problems of logic.

- - -
He enlisted on 7 August, the day after the Austrian declaration of war against Russia, and was assigned to an artillery regiment serving at Kraków on the Eastern Front.

- - -
Wittgenstein spent most of this campaign on board a ship on the Vistula river - the Goplana, captured from the Russians during the initial advance. If he saw any active fighting during these first few months, there is no record of it in his diary. We read instead of great battles heard but not seen, and of rumours that "the Russians are at our heels."

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[...] as soon as he met his crew mates he pronounced them "a bunch of delinquents": "No enthusiasm for anything, unbelievably crude, stupid and malicious."

- - -
His job on the ship was to man the searchlight at night. The loneliness of the task made it much easier to achieve the independence from people he considered necessary to endure the conditions on the boat.

- - -
Coincident with his renewed ability to work on logic, was a revitalized sensuality. The almost jubilant remark quoted above is followed by: "I feel more sensual than before. Today I masturbated again."

- - -
There are no coded remarks in Wittgenstein's notebooks for the second half of September, the time of the Austrian retreat. It was during this time, however, that he made the great discovery he had felt was imminent. This consisted of what is now known as the "Picture Theory of language" - the idea that propositions are a picture of the reality they describe.

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But while he himself was on the offensive, the Austrian army was in chaotic and disorderly retreat. The Goplana was making its way back towards Kraków, deep inside Austrian territory, where the army was to be quartered for the winter. Before they reached Kraków, Wittgenstein received a note from the poet Georg Trakl, who was at the military hospital there as a psychiatric patient.

[...] For as Wittgenstein found out the next morning when he rushed to the hospital, it was indeed too late: Trakl had killed himself with an overdose of cocaine on 3 November 1914, just two days before Wittgenstein's arrival. Wittgenstein was devastated.

- - -
He had wanted to join a balloon section, but when it was discovered that he had a mathematical training he was offered instead a job with an artillery workshop.

Actually, the task Wittgenstein was given at the workshop was mundane clerical work, requiring no mathematical expertise and consisting of compiling a list of all the vehicles in the barracks.

- - -
It is possible, I think, that Wittgenstein's requests to join the infantry were not so much misunderstood as ignored, and that he was perceived to be of more use to the army as a skilled engineer in charge of a repair depot than as an ordinary foot-soldier.

- - -
If Wittgenstein took any pleasure in the Gorlice-Tarnów break-through, there is no indication of it in his diary. Throughout the advance he remained at the workshop in Kraków, growing increasingly resentful of the fact.

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During the autumn of 1915 and throughout the following winter, when almost everything was in short supply and conditions at the Front were extremely harsh, the friendship between Bieler and Wittgenstein was of enormous comfort to them both. They had long and animated conversations on philosophical and metaphysical subjects.

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Militarily it was a quiet time, with the Russians having to regroup after the disaster of the previous summer, and the Central Powers content to hold their position while they concentrated on the Western Front. It was, evidently, a quiet time too for the repair unit. Wittgenstein, pleased with the results of his recent work on logic, was able to make a preliminary attempt to work it into a book. This, the first version of the Tractatus, has unfortunately not survived. [...]

"If I don't survive, get my people to send you all my manuscripts: among them you'll find the final summary written in pencil on loose sheets of paper."

- - -
If Wittgenstein had spent the entire war behind the lines, the Tractatus would have remained what it almost certainly was in its first inception of 1915: a treatise on the nature of logic. The remarks in it about ethics, aesthetics, the soul and the meaning of life have their origin in precisely the "impulse to philosophical reflection" that Schopenhauer describes, an impulse that has as its stimulus a knowledge of death, suffering and misery.

Towards the end of March 1916 Wittgenstein was posted, as he had long wished, to a fighting unit on the Russian Front. He was assigned to an artillery regiment attached to the Austrian Seventh Army, stationed at the southernmost point of the Eastern Front, near the Romanian border.

- - -
When the long-awaited moment came, however, he fell ill and was told by his commanding officer that he may have to be left behind. "If that happens", he wrote, "I will kill myself."

- - -
Once at the front line he asked to be assigned to that most dangerous of places, the observation post. This guaranteed that he would be the target of enemy fire. "Was shot at", he recorded on 29 April. "Thought of God. Thy will be done. God be with me." The experience, he thought, brought him nearer to enlightenment. On 4 May he was told that he was to go on night-duty at the observation post. As shelling was heaviest at night, this was the most dangerous posting he could have been given.

- - -
Throughout these first few months at the Front, from March to May, Wittgenstein was able to write a little on logic. He continued with his theme of the nature of functions and propositions and the need to postulate the existence of simple objects. But he added this isolated and interesting remark about the "modern conception of the world", which found its way unchanged into the Tractatus (6.371 and 6.372).

- - -
At the beginning of the war, after he had received news that his brother Paul had been seriously wounded and assumed that he had lost his profession as a concert pianist, he wrote: "How terrible! What philosophy will ever assist one to overcome a fact of this sort?"

- - -
By this time the Austrian forces had been driven back into the Carpathian mountains, pursued by the victorious Russians. The conditions were harsh - "icy cold, rain and fog", Wittgenstein records.

- - -
Despite these self-admonitions, he in fact showed remarkable courage throughout the campaign. During the first few days of the Brusilov Offensive he was recommended for a decoration in recognition of his bravery in keeping to his post, despite several times being told to take cover. "By this distinctive behaviour", the report states, "he exercised a very calming effect on his comrades." He was quickly promoted, first to Vormeister (a non-commissioned artillery rank similar to the British Lance-Bombardier) and then to Korporal. Finally, towards the end of August, when the Russian advance had ground to a halt, he was sent away to the regiment's headquarters in Olmütz (Olomouc), Moravia, to be trained as an officer.

- - -
Wittgenstein was awarded the Silver Medal for Valour for his part in the stand made by the Austro-Hungarian forces in defence of their positions at Ldziany. In the counter-offensive that followed he took part in the advance along the line of the river Pruth which led, in August, to the capture of the city of Czernowitz (Chernovtsy) in the Ukraine.

- - -
The Russian war effort had by this time completely collapsed, and with it the Kerensky government. The war in the East had been won by the Central Powers.

- - -
On 1 February 1918 Wittgenstein was promoted Leutnant, and on 10 March he transferred to a mountain artillery regiment fighting on the Italian Front.

- - -
By the time of the Austrian offensive of 15 June Wittgenstein was fit enough to take part, and was employed as an observer with the artillery attacking French, British and Italian troops in the Trentino mountains. Once again he was cited for his bravery. "His exceptionally courageous behaviour, calmness, sang-froid, and heroism", ran the report, "won the total admiration of the troops." He was recommended for the Gold Medal for Valour, the Austrian equivalent of the Victoria Cross, but was awarded instead the Band of the Military Service Medal with Swords, it being decided that his action, though brave, had been insufficiently consequential to merit the top honour. The attack, which was to be the last in which Wittgenstein took part, and indeed the last of which the Austrian army was capable, was quickly beaten back. In July, after the retreat, he was given a long period of leave that lasted until the end of September.

- - -
What the Theory of Types attempts to say can be shown only by a correct symbolism, and what one wants to say about ethics can be shown only by contemplating the world sub specie aeternitatis. Thus: "There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical."

- - -
By the time Wittgenstein returned to Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was beginning to break up. After the final Allied breakthrough of 30 October, before any armistice had been signed, large numbers of the men formed themselves into groups of compatriots and simply turned their back on the war, making their way home instead to help found their new nations. One casualty of this situation was Wittgenstein's brother, Kurt, who in October or November shot himself when the men under him refused to obey his orders.

The Austrians could do nothing but sue for peace. [...] the Italians had taken about 7,000 guns and about 500,000 prisoners - Wittgenstein among them.

Upon capture, he was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Como.

He was released on 21 August 1919.

- - -
Like many war veterans before and since, Wittgenstein found it almost insuperably difficult to adjust to peace-time conditions. He had been a soldier for five years, and the experience had left an indelible stamp upon his personality. He continued to wear his uniform for many years after the war, as though it had become a part of his identity, an essential part, without which he would be lost. It was also perhaps a symbol of his feeling - which persisted for the rest of his life - that he belonged to a past age. For it was the uniform of a force that no longer existed. Austria-Hungary was no more, and the country he returned to in the summer of 1919 was itself undergoing a painful process of adjustment. Vienna, once the imperial centre of a dynasty controlling the lives of fifty million subjects of mixed race, was now the capital of a small, impoverished and insignificant Alpine republic of little more than six million, mostly German, inhabitants.

The parts of the empire in which Wittgenstein himself had fought to defend what had been his homeland were now absorbed into foreign states.

- - -
Wittgenstein had entered the war hoping it would change him, and this it had. [...] He was faced with the task of re-creating himself - of finding a new role for the person that had been forged by the experiences of the last five years.

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Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnIc2w2SXhmMktjZjg
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/wittgenstein-and-hitler-same-school-in-austria.html

Flora

Trechos de An English Woman-Sergeant In The Serbian Army (1916), de Flora Sandes.

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Events moved so rapidly in Serbia after the Bulgarians declared war that when I reached Salonica last winter I found it full of nurses and doctors who had been home on leave and who had gone out there to rejoin their various British hospital units, only to find themselves unable to get up into the country.

I had been home for a holiday after working in Serbian hospitals since the very beginning of the war, but when things began to look so serious again I hurried back to Serbia. We had rather an eventful voyage, as the French boat I was on was carrying ammunition as well as passengers, and the submarines seemed to make a dead set at us. At Malta we were held up for three days, waiting for the coast to clear. The third night I had been dining ashore, and on getting back to the boat, about eleven, found the military police in charge, and the ship and all the passengers being searched for a spy and some missing documents. We were not allowed to go down to our cabins until they had been thoroughly ransacked, but as nothing incriminating was found we eventually proceeded on our way, with a torpedo-destroyer on either side of us as an escort. The boats were always slung out in readiness, and we were cautioned never to lose sight of our life-belts. We had to put in again at Piraeus, and again at Lemnos for a few days, so that it was November 3rd before we finally reached Salonica - having taken fourteen days from Marseilles - only to find that the railway line had been cut, and there was no possible way of getting up into Serbia.

- - -
Prilip, about twenty-five miles farther on, was still in the hands of the Serbians, though its evacuation was expected any minute, and even now the road from Bitol to Prilip was not considered safe on account of marauding Bulgarian comitadjes, or irregulars.

- - -
The view from my window is not calculated to inspire confidence either. It looks on to a stableyard full of pigs, donkeys and the most villainous-looking Turks squatting about at their supper. These, I tell myself, are the ones who will come in and cut my throat if Prilip is taken to-night.

- - -
I think my morbid reflections must have been brought on by the supper I had had.

- - -
There were not very many wounded in the hospital, but a great many sick, and dysentery cases beginning to come in rapidly.

- - -
The Second and Fourteenth Regiments were then holding the Baboona Pass, a very strongly fortified position in the mountains, against the Bulgarians.

- - -
We had a long chat with the doctor of the Second Regimental ambulance, and had coffee and cigarettes in his room - a loft over the stable. That is to say, I did not do much of the talking as he was a Greek, and besides his own language only talked Turkish and not very fluent Serbian, although later on, strange to say, when I joined the same ambulance, we used to carry on long conversations together in a kind of mongrel lingo very largely helped out by signs.

- - -
These tents are only a sort of little lean-to's, which you crawl into, just the height of a rifle, two of which can be used instead of poles.

- - -
Putting brandy in my water-bottle had been suggested to me by a tale a young Austrian officer, a prisoner, who was one of my patients in Kragujewatz hospital, told me.

- - -
Corporal punishment, that is to say, a certain number of strokes with a stick (maximum 25 - schoolboys will know on what part), is the legitimate and recognised way of punishing in the Serbian Army, and the sentence is carried out by a non-commissioned officer.

- - -
I used to sit over the camp fires in the evenings with the soldiers, and we used to exchange cigarettes and discuss the war by the hour. I was picking up a few more words of Serbian every day, and they used to take endless trouble to make me understand, though our conversations were very largely made up of signs, but I understood what they meant if I couldn't always understand what they said. It was heartbreaking the way they used to ask me every evening, "Did I think the English were coming to help them?" and "Would they send cannon? The Bulgarians had big guns, and we had nothing but some little old cannon about ten years old, which were really only what the comitadjes used to use. If we had had a few big guns we could have held the Baboona Pass practically for any length of time, for it was an almost impregnable position."

- - -
Only a few days before Bulgarian comitadjes had swooped down and taken prisoner a Serbian soldier who had gone to fetch some water not a quarter of a mile from his own camp.

- - -
The first line of trenches that we came to were little shallow trenches dotted about on the hillside, with about a dozen men in each. We sat in one of them and drank coffee, and I thought then that I should be able to tell them at home that I had been in a real Serbian trench, little thinking at the time that I was going to do it in good earnest later on under different circumstances.

After that we went on up to another position right at the top of Kalabac. It was a tremendous ride, and I could never have believed that horses could have climbed such steep places, or have kept their feet on some of the obstacles we went over, but these horses were trained to it, and could get through or over anything. Just the last bit of the way we all had to dismount, and, leaving the horses with the gendarmes, did the rest on foot. There was no need for trenches there, as it was very rocky, and there was plenty of natural cover.

- - -
This "Slava" day is an institution peculiar only to the Serbians, and which they always keep most faithfully. Every family and every regiment has one. It is the day of their particular patron saint, and is handed down from father to son. It is kept up for three days with as much jollification as circumstances permit, even in wartime.

- - -
In the middle of lunch I had my first sight of the enemy, a Bulgarian patrol in the distance, and orders were promptly given to some of our men to go down and head them off. The men all seemed to be in high spirits up there, in spite of the cold, and some of them were roasting a pig, although I suppose that was a "Slava" luxury for them, not to be had every day.

- - -
I was very sorry afterwards that I had not taken my camera with me up to the positions, but I was not sure at the time if they would like me to, though afterwards they told me I might take it anywhere I liked.

- - -
The villagers themselves, those who had not already fled in terror, seemed to live in the most abject poverty, huddled together in houses no better than pigsties. The place was infested by enormous mongrel dogs, which used to pursue me in gangs, barking and growling, but they had a wholesome respect for a stone, and never came to close quarters.

- - -
A company of reinforcements passed us and floundered off through the deep snow drifts across the fields in the direction of the firing. There was no artillery fire (I suppose they could not haul the guns through the snow), but the crackle of the rifles got nearer and nearer, and at last about midday they were so close that we could hear the wild "Hourrah, Hourrahs" of the Bulgarians as they took our trenches, and as the blizzard had stopped for a bit we could see them coming streaking across the snow towards us, our little handful of men retreating and reforming as they went.

- - -
This bridge was heavily mined and was to be blown up as soon as our men were over, thus cutting off, or anyhow considerably delaying, the Bulgarians, as the river was now a swollen icy torrent. We sat round the fire of the ambulance and dried our feet. Some of the men were soaking to the knees, having no boots, but only opankis, leather sandals fastened on with a strap which winds round the leg up to the knee.

- - -
The soldiers were all retreating across the snow, and I never saw such a depressing sight. The grey November twilight, the endless white expanse of snow, lit up every moment by the flashes of the guns, and the long column of men trailing away into the dusk wailing a sort of dismal dirge - I don't know what it was they were singing - something between a song and a sob, it sounded like the cry of a Banshee. I have never heard it before or since, but it was a most heartbreaking sound.

- - -
I had some wild visions in my head - as I knew the Commandant would wait until the last moment - of a tremendous gallop over the snow, hotly pursued by Bulgarian cavalry. I imagine I must once have seen something like it on a cinematograph.

- - -
Rather to my surprise he submitted quite meekly, and let me dose him with quinine, and tuck him up in his blankets by the stove.

- - -
We sat by the camp fire and pored over the map of Albania, whither we should soon be going, and discussed the war as usual.

- - -
It was bitterly cold, and every few yards we passed horrible looking corpses of bullocks, donkeys and ponies, with the hides and some of the flesh stripped from them; sometimes there were packs, ammunition and rifles thrown away by the roadside, but very, very few of the latter.

- - -
At the very top we stopped at the ruins of a filthy little hut, where a halt was called and the field telephone rigged up. We built a fire outside - it was too dirty to go inside - under the wall, and had some coffee, and tried, very unsuccessfully, to get out of the howling, bitter wind.

- - -
One of the old [Serbian] ladies explained volubly that she had once had something - I never could quite make out whether it was a husband or a cat - and had lost it, and I was now to take its place in the family circle.

- - -
The Serbians laugh at me because I declare that they always pick their gendarmes for their good looks.

- - -
He had never seen a thermos flask before, and when he brought it back and I shared the tea with him he was perfectly thunderstruck to find it still hot.

- - -
The Bulgarians kept up a heavy bombardment with their big guns over the Struga road, responded to by our little antiquated cannon. We looked right down on it, and watched the shrapnel bursting all day and the enemy gradually coming closer. Some of our artillery was concealed in a little wood just below the village, and presently the enemy got the range of this beautifully, and the shells were falling fast among the trees.

- - -
These Albanian villages were a perfect picture of squalor and filth. I don't know what the people subsist on, but they seem to live like animals.

- - -
And prided himself upon always having a "reserve," from a tin of sardines or a piece of chocolate when you were hungry and had nothing to eat, to a spare bridle when someone's broke, as mine did one day, although he seemed to carry no more luggage than anyone else.

- - -
One officer with an old wound through his chest, and another bullet still in his side, just dropped on his face when we got to the top, though he had not uttered a word of complaint before.

- - -
We lay there and fired at them all that day, and I took a lot of photographs which I wanted very much to turn out well; but, alas! During the journey through Albania the films, together with nearly all the others that I took, got wet and spoilt.

- - -
The inhabitants were as hostile as they dared to be, and used to refuse to sell us anything.

- - -
I presented her with a small pocket mirror. I do not think she had ever seen such a thing before, and gazed into it with the greatest delight though she looked about a hundred and was ugly enough to frighten the devil.

- - -
The Serbian Christmas is not till thirteen days later than ours, but we celebrated my English Christmas Eve over the camp fire that night. A plate of beans and dry bread had to take the place of roast beef and plum pudding, but we drank Christmas healths in a small flask of cognac, after which I played "God Save the King" on the violin, and we all stood up and sang it.

- - -
We passed a company of Italian soldiers, and some of the officers came up early in the morning and visited our camp. Durazzo was being bombarded from the sea, and we could hear the boom of the big naval guns in the distance, but it was all over before we arrived.

- - -
There were several wrecks round there, one of them a Greek steamer, which had hit a floating mine. There were a great many of these floating mines about, and the Austrian submarines were also very active, adding immensely to the difficulty of getting food and supplies, which all had to be brought by sea to the troops.

- - -
We all stood at the salute and repeated the oath all together, sentence by sentence after the priest, swearing loyalty to Serbia and King Peter, and after that we marched in single file past the table, removing our caps as we did so for the priest to sprinkle our foreheads, and then kissed the cross, the priest's hand, and, last of all, the regimental flag. It was a very impressive ceremony, winding up by the band playing the Serbian National Anthem while we stood at the salute.

- - -
They could not be buried in the small island, dying as they were at the rate of 150 a day, and the bodies were taken out to sea. The Serbs are not a maritime nation, and the idea of a burial at sea is repugnant to them.

- - -
We all - guests, officers and men - danced the "Kolo" and all the other Serbian national dances together until evening.

---

Mais:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2566552/INCREDIBLE-story-Flora-Sandes.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sqvNeaHQDg

A queda

AVENTURAS NA HISTÓRIA
1 de outubro de 2007

Czar Nicolau II: a queda do tirano

Abandonado pelas elites, odiado pelo povo, atormentado pela guerra, o czar Nicolau abdica do trono. Instaura-se o governo provisório, fustigado pelos bolcheviques.

(Giovana Sanchez, Eduardo Lima)

A Rússia enfrenta um dos piores invernos da sua história. A temperatura chega a 25 graus negativos e nevascas paralisavam as ferrovias, dificultando ainda mais a chegada de mantimentos para a população e de matéria-prima para as indústrias. Fábricas estão fechando e uma multidão de trabalhadores demitidos começa vagar pelas ruas das cidades. Estamos em 1917. Mais de uma década se passou desde a onda de insatisfação que abalou o regime czarista em 1905. Assim como naquele ano, os operários estão se organizando para protestar contra o governo.

O principal motivo da revolta, desta vez, é a catastrófica entrada da Rússia em mais um conflito: a Primeira Guerra Mundial. O czar Nicolau II acreditava que a guerra faria despertar na população um fervoroso sentimento nacionalista, unindo-a em torno do czarismo e da defesa da pátria. Essa avaliação era integralmente endossada pelos principais generais do Exército imperial, que apostavam em uma campanha militar curta e vitoriosa. O monarca e seus aliados estavam enganados.

Em 1915, com a Primeira Guerra apenas na sua fase inicial, o número de soldados russos mortos no front já beirava os 2 milhões. A maioria dos combatentes não passava de meros camponeses uniformizados, sem qualquer treinamento militar, que deixaram de produzir alimentos para empunhar baionetas e disparar canhões. "Começaram a faltar gêneros essenciais e a indústria, concentrada em atender às necessidades do Exército, não produzia bens de consumo corrente", escreve o historiador Daniel Aarão Reis Filho, da Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), em A Revolução Russa: 1917-1921. Esse cenário era mais que propício para uma escalada inflacionária sem precedentes. Os salários dos trabalhadores, é óbvio, não acompanhavam a elevação dos preços. E o fantasma da fome voltava a assombrar diariamente as populações urbanas.

Dois anos mais tarde, em 1917, o Império Russo apresentava o quadro mais sombrio e desanimador entre todas as potências engajadas na guerra. "Entre mortos, desaparecidos, feridos e prisioneiros, já haviam caído cerca de 5,5 milhões de soldados", afirma o historiador da UFF.

ESTRELA SOLITÁRIA

Uma passeata feminina em comemoração ao Dia Internacional da Mulher, em fevereiro de 1917, dá início a uma série de rebeliões. A manifestação rapidamente se transforma em uma greve, abraçada por mais de 100 mil trabalhadores. Os dias seguintes são marcados pela violência. Tropas ainda fiéis ao czar reprimem os manifestantes com extremo rigor.

A essa altura, as elites também estão cansadas da guerra e da permanente tensão social. Nada satisfeitas com as seguidas denúncias de corrupção no governo e com a influência cada vez maior que o místico Rasputin exerce sobre a família real, elas também já pensam em se livrar de Nicolau II. O czar está cada vez mais isolado e sua autoridade é questionada a todo momento. Até os soldados do Exército, pouco a pouco, passam a desacatar suas ordens, recusando-se a conter as manifestações de rua.

Em meio a tamanha agitação, Nicolau tenta dissolver a Duma - a assembléia legislativa eleita por voto popular. Mas os deputados resistem, em mais um desafio à autoridade do monarca. Enquanto isso, o Soviete de Petrogrado - em uma repetição da experiência de 1905 - volta à atividade, inspirando a criação de mais sovietes. De novo, eles funcionam como verdadeiros governos paralelos.

Em março de 1917, o czar já não encontra quem possa sustentá-lo no trono e é obrigado a abdicar. A Duma elege o chamado Governo Provisório, formado principalmente por liberais e socialistas moderados. Em tese, são esses os novos donos do poder, com atribuições constitucionais para tomar decisões. Mas eles não controlam as massas. O poder de fato, exatamente como tinha acontecido 12 anos antes, é exercido pelos sovietes, que reúnem deputados operários de cada fábrica e soldados de cada regimento do Exército.

EXPRESSO ALEMÃO

Percebendo que o caminho para uma revolução nunca esteve tão aberto, Lenin retorna do exílio na Suíça. Para chegar a Petrogrado, ele faz um acordo com o governo alemão, inimigo declarado da Rússia na guerra que está em curso. "Como os alemães esperavam que os revolucionários tirassem a Rússia da guerra, eles permitiram que Lenin e outros líderes cruzassem o país rumo ao território russo, em um trem fechado", explica o historiador americano Philip Clark no livro A Revolução Russa.

Lenin é recebido como herói. De volta à Rússia, defende a retirada imediata da guerra, a nacionalização de todas as terras, o controle da produção industrial pelos operários e a formação de um governo radical, sem a participação de liberais. São as famosas Teses de Abril - logo de cara, uma ruptura dos bolcheviques com o recém-instaurado Governo Provisório. "O governo demonstrava insensibilidade face às reivindicações populares", escreve Reis Filho. "Ele recusara aos operários a jornada de trabalho de oito horas, considerara prematura a reforma agrária e não reconhecera aos não-russos o direito a uma pátria."

Não tardaria para que as teses de Lenin se transformassem em ação. Entre os dias 16 e 18 de julho, trabalhadores e soldados liderados por ele tentam tomar o poder, em uma revolta que entraria para a história como as "Jornadas de Julho". O problema é que Socialistas Revolucionários e mencheviques também exerciam influência sobre os sovietes. Ou seja: os bolcheviques ainda não contavam com as bases necessárias para uma revolução. O golpe fracassa. Acusado de ser um espião a serviço da Alemanha, Lenin volta para o exílio. Mas vários de seus camaradas acabam na cadeia.

REVOLUÇÃO À VISTA

À medida que o ano avança, a radicalização de operários, camponeses e soldados só aumenta. No campo, senhores de terras vinham sendo sumariamente expropriados e, em alguns casos, executados. Nas cidades, greves e mais greves sucedem-se. O príncipe George Lvov, um latifundiário, é substituído no comando do Governo Provisório por Alexander Kerenski, um socialista moderado. Kerenski acredita ser possível pacificar a Rússia por meio de negociações. Mas o comandante do Exército, general Kornilov, defende o uso enérgico da força. Sua intenção é aniquilar sovietes, comitês de fábrica ou qualquer outro instrumento de organização das massas. Na verdade, o que o general almeja é assumir o poder. Kerenski percebe que seu Governo Provisório está em risco e busca o apoio justamente dos bolcheviques, libertando presos políticos e entregando-lhes armas. "Com essa manobra, ele impede o golpe de Kornilov, mas praticamente entrega o poder aos camaradas de Lenin", escreve Philip Clark.

No final de agosto, pela primeira vez, verifica-se maioria bolchevique no Soviete de Petrogrado. O mesmo acontece em Moscou, Baku e outras 50 cidades. O poder, mais uma vez, está dividido: de um lado, a Duma; do outro, os conselhos populares. Mas a palavra de ordem que mais ecoa por toda a Rússia antecipa o que virá pela frente - "Todo o poder aos sovietes!". O cenário para o "Outubro Vermelho" finalmente está completo. A revolução bolchevique aproxima-se.

---

Fonte:
http://guiadoestudante.abril.com.br/aventuras-historia/czar-nicolau-ii-queda-435624.shtml

Mais:
http://garethrussellcidevant.blogspot.com.br/2011/04/michael-ii-real-last-tsar.html