Chapter 2 - A Polish Army
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys-An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
- Wilfred Owen
Carpathia - 1917
The Carpathian mountains were shrouded in a mantle of snow, the sky grey-to-white, dissolving from sky to ground so the horizon could only be guessed. It was cold, and the men of the Austrian 22 Territorials corps huddling in the snow had to fight to keep warm, and fight to keep from dying. It was the bloody Eastern Front, and in this third year of The Great War the fighting against the Russians was bitter and without quarter. An anonymous Austrian officer would later remember:
"Everything was wrapped in a mantle of snow, whose virginal whiteness soothed us and made our thoughts turn calmly to death, which we longed for as never before. The men dug coffin-shaped trenches, so that when in the evening I went to inspect them lying in these ditches covered with juniper, they looked to me as if they had been buried alive." http://www.firstworldwar.com/diaries/carpathianmemoir.htm
Henryk Pientka struggled just to keep his feet from freezing. An Austrian officer trudged through the snow toward his small band of soldiers, his boots making almost a mocking squeaky noise in the snow. At his command, the men began to slowly stir, painfully standing on feet close to frostbitten, joints stiffened by too little sleep and too little hot food.
The terrain in the Carpathian mountains was torturous at best. The Rumanian soldiers serving in his company were used to these extremes, and would mock the Austrians, calling them "fleașcă" and "fofoloancă" - sexless and flaccid sissies. Henryk hated them for their taunts, but could not help but admire them for their fortitude. When the call to move forward came, the Romanians were always the first to take the lead.
Henryk spent three short weeks at a training camp in southern Poland after he and his brother had been taken from their village. They had few working rifles to train with, and the uniforms were a motley collection of miscellaneous woolen coats, bad shoes, and moldy shirts. He was sent straight into the infantry and never saw Lukasz again after they were separated.
The early fighting was wide open and mobile. The Austrian, German, and Russian armies whirled around each other - retreating and counterattacking, then retreating once again. When advantage stalled for both sides, the armies began to dig in, and the all too familiar horror of trench warfare took over the battlefield. Henryk's company trudged into the high country of the Carpathian Mountains on foot, and remained there for what seemed an eternity. The war was supposed to be over in three months. It was now three years. There was no leave.
Today, the orders were simple. A company on their right flank had been attacked at dusk the night before and scattered through the woods down a ravine. This exposed the main route to the supply station - the only source for food and medical supplies - and had to be retaken. That explained why there was no food the night before. Another night without hot food, and half the men would be dead by morning. There was little to fear from the Russians. All they could offer was a quick death instead of slow and painful starvation and frostbite.
Henryk roused his aching body, smashed the action of his rifle on a large rock to free the frozen bolt, and forced himself to follow a soldier he did not know who stepped in front of him as they emerged from the trench. Just follow, and either live or die. It made little difference today. Tomorrow would be no different.
