ng 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 cond