Стр. 24 - V

Электронное приложение к журналу «Международная жизнь»
Author : N. Postnikov
Assistant Professor, Moscow Region State University, Candidate of Science (History)
WORLD WAR I, which began 100 years ago, was the pro-
logue to an age of blood. In those days, the values and
achievements of refined European civilization were merci-
lessly thrown into the furnace of war. They were replaced
by dirt and blood that became the lot of millions upon mil-
lions of people. Barbarity crushed human dignity, distorted
people's thinking, and played havoc with their emotions.
Death and terror became an everyday nightmare and stuck
firmly in people's minds. Overwhelmed, they started seeing
the true face of the war: devastated cities, burned villages,
battlefields covered with dead bodies, the groans of the
wounded lying in "no man's land," the agonies of dying soldiers, and the suffering of sur-
vivors. They came to know the sickening smell of war.
Depersonalized official documents such as military orders, reports, or dispatches fail to convey
the human or moral dimension of that war. That comes across if one reads letters from the
front. Then one can see the war with all its horrors "from within," through the eyes of an or-
dinary combatant. That is the chief and eternal value of frontline letters as a source of his-
torical research.
Typically, letters containing censorable military information also described the personal ex-
periences of those who had written them. It was no accident that personal feelings about the
war caught the attention of censors. The latter saw them as a vague threat to Russia's ruling
regime. There were no statements of opposition views or, least of all, radical appeals in letters
from the front. But they described human suffering, wrongdoings, mendacious propaganda
and much else that could have been interpreted as indications of public-spiritedness; this
alarmed military censors, and that is why many of the letters have survived and become such
an asset for researchers. This public-spiritedness, even if barely traceable in some of the
letters, is the leitmotif of this article.
The battles on the Bzura and Rawka were sheer hell for the Russians and Germans alike.
Whole regiments would get massacred in a matter of days.6 People would be killed by thou-
sands. Corpses lay in heaps so high that they prevented the two sides from firing at each
other.7 There were so many bodies that there was no time to bury all of them. "Up to 1,000
Germans have got killed, but only 300 to 400 have been buried, and the rest have just been
"Wherever You Look There Is a Specter of Death" Battles on the
Bzura and Rawka as Described in Letters From the Front (Decem-
ber 1914 and January 1915)