Part 35

I had an electric pocket lamp, with which I made an examination. He was cut across the jaw with a fragment of shell and bleeding freely. I bandaged him with our handkerchiefs, Bass, as always, uncomplaining and treating the wound humorously.

Several shells followed, each too near for comfort, but we were now reaching the limit of the guns' range, and we came without further incident clear of their fire.

Bass's Story

CHICAGO, Jan. 7.--John F. Bass, the staff correspondent of The Chicago Daily News, who with Perceval Gibbon had a remarkable escape from being blown to pieces by German shells while returning from a visit to a Russian first-line trench in Poland, cables to his paper his version of their experiences, which duplicates largely that by Perceval Gibbon cabled to THE NEW YORK TIMES.

Recounting their arrival at the trench held by the Bielojevski Regiment, in the centre of the battle line, he says:

"The officers, in small underground bomb-proofs, gave us a hospitable welcome. The men had cut small recesses in the front wall of the trench, where they were comfortably housed in straw with bagging in front to keep out the cold. The trenches were in good condition and clean for war time.

"In the loopholes rifles lay ready for firing. One man in every four watched while the other three slept. As we walked through the trench we stepped over dead bodies of men who had recently fallen. Two of the regiment's battalions are commanded by Staff Capt. Podjio, one of the finest specimens of a conscientious, hard-working line officer I have met. He passed the night traveling the trenches, keeping a vigilant watch and encouraging the men, who seemed to be in fine condition.

"It was bitterly cold, so we lay for a time on the straw of a bomb-proof, watching by candlelight a giant orderly sending and receiving messages on a buzzing telephone from different parts of the line. It is a habit of Germans to make night attacks that bring them within fifty yards of the Russian trenches before they are driven off.

"We saw indistinctly across the trenches the Russian videttes in front. It is reported that the Germans do not take the precaution of posting a line of sentinels before their trenches. Just before morning the videttes came running to report activity in the German trenches. Quickly the sleeping soldiers were roused to man the loopholes. The machine guns cracked and the rifles rolled out volleys in the cold morning light. The Germans answered and bullets kicked the top of our trench. Some of the bullets seemed to crack on striking and it was reported to us that the Germans were using explosive missiles. Under the Russian fire the Germans failed to leave their trench.

"When the light swelled into day the German artillery began shelling the houses, the tall chimney, and the trenches. Black clouds of smoke rose from the spots where the shells struck. On our trench they used shrapnel, which burst for the most part beyond us in white puffs. The German infantry continued a heavy fusillade, but our machine gun fire, which seemed to sweep the dust from the top of the German trench, caused their rifle fire to go high and the bullets hissed overhead.

"Two German aeroplanes swept down the line above the Russian trench, but retired when chased by a Russian biplane. In the distance a German observation balloon hung in the sky like a huge sausage."

Who Was Forced to Resign as First Sea Lord of the British Admiralty.

(Photo (C) by Pach Bros., N.Y.)]

From a Photograph Taken on His Eighty-second Birthday.

(Photo by L.N.A.)]

The Waste of German Lives

By Perceval Gibbon.

ZYRARDOW, Poland, Jan. 5, (Dispatch to The London Daily Chronicle.)--Once again Poland has seen a great German general attack along the whole line of the Bzura and Rawka positions from Gradow to Rawa. For thirty-six hours the battle has shifted like a moving flame in a long line. Now that its intensity is abated, it is clear that the German purpose has again failed of accomplishment, and at several points the Russian line has advanced.

We have no key to the German mentality which inspires these attacks so wasteful in lives of soldiers, so ineffectual in their general result. In the records of this struggle along the courses of the two little rivers I have notes of upward of 100 attacks in considerable force, of which not a single one resulted in shifting the imperturbable Russian infantry from a trench, but each of which has been accompanied by ghastly loss to the Germans.

A fight characteristic of the operations on this front took place west of Gradow, where the German attack was exceptionally heavy throughout New Year's Day, culminating in an assault by infantry on the same night. Throughout the day they shelled the Russian trenches, spending ammunition with their customary lavishness. The day's shelling justified the Russian opinion that of the German forces their artillery and cavalry are the weakest arm and their infantry is the best. The positions are not greatly disturbed by the day-long aspersion with shrapnel, and the Russians are more than ready for the attack. On this front the infantry attacks usually in line, but this night they came up in dense columns. The Russian guns were at work promptly with the fuses of the shells reduced, so that they burst almost at the gun's mouth, and from the trenches a steady, schooled infantry fire tore gaps in the masses of the enemy.

At Gradow the Russians were utterly outnumbered. To this extent the German concentration of forces was successful, but no further. They succeeded in reducing the Russians' tactics from a mere defense of the trenches to delivering a counter-attack; but this was the limit of their success.

I have talked with three Russian officers here who were wounded during the counter-attack. Five machine guns were at work on them as they left their trenches in a charge. One of the officers was shot through the chest as he climbed the bank of the trench; the second got perhaps twenty yards before being hit in the head; the third, however, led his men home into the German trench. Of the Russians who set out only eighty were alive and unhurt when they reached the German trench, but this eighty took it with the bayonet, killing about five times their own number of Germans.

At Gradow, on the morning of Jan. 2, the ground resembled the strewn battlefield of Brzezny or the body-littered valleys between the woods of Augustowo in October. As in those other tragic defeats where the ruthless Generals sacrificed their soldiers like water, there were heaps and ridges of gray-clad dead. Gradow is only one single point in the line which the Germans assaulted, yet here alone they lost upward of 6,000 killed. The same night they attacked positions corresponding at the villages of Guzow, Radziwillow, Msczonow, and Rawa. In every place they were beaten back with heavy losses. The estimates from various sources, some official, state that their losses for the single night's abortive fighting, giving them nowhere an advance of a single yard of territory, were assuredly not fewer than 30,000 dead on the ground and three times as many wounded or dead within their own lines.

I am cured of prophecy, but through the fog of imminent events certain happenings are dimly indicated. Roughly speaking, the next fortnight is Germany's final opportunity. During that time they may pour out lives with the same hope as hitherto of making an impression on the steadfast line of the Bzura and Rawka. Then that last glamour of hope of success in Poland vanishes.

In the highest opinions the Austrian Army is finished, and it remains only to clear up the mess they have made and then again the great advance on poor, dim, beautiful Cracow will proceed. Przemysl is at its last gasp, and then the Russian armies will be in Silesia, the source and headquarters of Prussia's industrial wealth, the one province she cannot afford to see invaded. Within a time, which I hear estimated between three and six weeks, these wind-swept, icy plains of Poland must see a stage in the war completed.

Germans have been captured lately in whose possession was found the last proclamation of the Kaiser that "if compelled to retire from Poland, leave standing neither house nor town; leave only the bare earth underfoot." Well, the road to Berlin does not end at the Polish frontier.

The Flight Into Switzerland

By Ethel Therese Hugli.