Blood and Thunder (25 page)

By 3 December
2
he had finally reached his regiment at Samborzec. He found the Hussars billeted in the village, covered in snow. They didn't anticipate any fighting soon. There might, perhaps, be skirmishes, but nothing serious until they had gone through one of the Carpathian passes which was a ludicrous idea in such weather.

He was being made to feel welcome. Several of his officers spoke English; in fact one even spent much time living in London when he was not at war. George was not the only ‘gentleman ranker' either, so socially things were not as trying as he might have feared. His fellow troopers found this cheerful little foreigner immensely interesting, rather like an exotic pet. ‘After talking to a group of them for about half an hour, one man said “your language is nearly the same as ours”.' George thought it was hilarious. ‘The dear lad thought my Russian was English!'

Ludicrous as the idea was, the Austrians set out to traverse the forbidding Carpathians in the depths of winter. George found himself south-east of Krakow in the far corner of Russian Poland at Lesko. The Russians had arrived as a precursor to advancing into Hungary and up into Silesia but the balance of power was changing. Germany had rushed reinforcements down to bolster the crumbling Austro–Hungarian armies who were racking up hundreds of thousands of casualties on this front and against Serbia who were pinning them back in the Balkans.

It was a bitter winter. The men of the Artirsky Hussars found themselves facing Austrians on raised banks either side of a stream in some woodland over the festive period. Whilst his namesake George Fletcher was swapping cigarettes on the Western Front, George Schack-Sommer spent Christmas 1914 gnawing on a chicken leg in the snow and eyeing the Austro–Hungarians in the trenches opposite. His cavalry regiment was a prestigious one and had as an honorary commander the Tsar's sister, Grand Duchess Olga. Gifts flooded in from well to do friends and families, in fact so many boxes had arrived that some were passed on to regiments who had not been so fortunate.

The snow and the terrain made it impossible to work like cavalry, except as occasional scouting parties. There were repeated skirmishes as small groups harassed the enemy with rifle fire and there was a consistent exchange of artillery fire from mountain batteries but little else. Russian suspicions were soon raised though when the retorting Austrian guns grew feebler and feebler and one afternoon stopped altogether. Perhaps they had retired completely? The officers of the Artirsky Hussars got together and considered a move forward to see what had become of the enemy. Under the confusing circumstances it was considered rather reckless. Instead it was decided that they would send out some scouting patrols under cover of darkness to see if they had properly retired or were bluffing. George volunteered to go immediately and with eight companions set off that night.

They crawled through the trees until they arrived at the bottom of the slope on the banks of the stream. ‘From there another chap and I crept forward, trying to look like stumps,' he later retold. ‘There was no moon and it was snowing but the snow on the ground made it light enough to faintly see and be seen.' They got to within 20 yards of the Austro–Hungarian lines and heard muffled voices. They lay low for almost half an hour, counting several enemy soldiers. Suddenly two of them looked up and spotted George. ‘I beat a hasty retreat. They fired twice but either very wide or low as I didn't hear the bullets.' For this excursion George received a promotion and a recommendation for the Cross of St George. Reserved for non-officers who had acted with conspicuous bravery, there were four classes, two silver and then two gold. A colonel arrived to distribute his and several other medals and went down the line, asking each man what he had got it for and handing them out. Then, to George's bemusement, he gave each man a kiss: ‘most embarrassing when you haven't had such a mark of affection for so very long'.

After a few weeks working as a sapper of sorts George re-joined his squadron to take up normal duties. He soon went out on a scouting party with a dozen or so men. They went with the intention of taking any stragglers prisoner as the village they intended to infiltrate was still occupied by Austro–Hungarian troops. They trotted through the town and then galloped full pelt in a mad charge towards the enemy troops that they found dotted about amongst the buildings. ‘They started to run but we soon caught them up.' Their little flurry of activity soon became violent. Two horses were wounded. Of their prey, five were struck by lances and as George so eloquently put it, ‘It was necessary to chop one about a bit to make him drop his rifle.'

‘I'm glad to let you know I was well up with the hounds,' he wrote to another Etonian. The enemy soldiers had apparently taken them for the leading men of a larger cavalry force. Thrown into a total panic by the frenzied Hussars galloping towards them ‘spurs in and hell for leather' they fell apart. In all, fifty-three of them surrendered but George had not finished yet. ‘I spotted some on the other road and with two fellows galloped over and bagged fifteen.' They put up no resistance at all. He then trotted back into the town and rounded up twenty more of the enemy they found scurrying about. So eight Russian cavalrymen had taken eighty-eight enemy prisoners. A second St George's Cross was struck in George's name. ‘It was a fine rush,' he claimed proudly, but recognised that it had played out largely owing to the confusion and panic amongst the surprised enemy troops, ‘as the idiots instead of running along the road could have run into deep snow.' But they didn't. As George surmised, ‘nine galloping horses, not to speak of cold steel is a formidable spectacle and so we bagged our game.'

George was soon involved in more daring enterprises. On another occasion he and three other troopers were sent with cases of ammunition to supply other Russian troops at a critical moment in battle. His three companions ‘funked at running the gauntlet' and declined to carry out their orders. George, perturbed though he might have been, was not about to follow suit and resolved to go on his own instead. ‘All very well, but the next time I have to run to music I hope it won't be through snow, with a long coat, sword and five cases of ammunition.' Luck remained with him. ‘Don't be anxious,' he gloated to his mother, ‘these Austrians can't shoot for nuts.'

The 12th Artirsky Hussars eventually came to a bedraggled stop just to the north of Kolomea. Shivering and with empty stomachs they rounded off non-stop fighting with nearly forty-eight hours in trenches during a blinding snowstorm. Visibility was so bad that George described it as dangerous to go more than a few yards from the trench for risk of being completely lost. During this lull in the fighting he found time to sit down and pen a letter to a fellow OE serving on the Western Front. Charles Le Blanc-Smith, imaginatively nicknamed ‘Blanco', had been in Mr Radcliffe's house with George before moving on to Trinity College, Cambridge where he was president of the University Boat Club. He was about to embark for France with the 8th Rifle Brigade and would survive the horror of Hooge in July. George wrote to him excitedly. ‘I shall look forward to saluting you in Berlin,' he began. Excitedly he told him about the circumstances surrounding the award of his two medals as he gave absolutely no hint of regret at having joined the Russian Army instead of making the journey home to offer his services against Germany and her allies. He was quite at home and found that he was not the only British subject now serving the Tsar. He had found two in the Motor Division and a former Dragoon Guard in the British Army was also serving with a friendly but mad Caucasian cavalry regiment nearby, although George thought it rather tactless to ask why.

The Gallipoli campaign was about to commence and they had some inkling of what was going on on the Eastern Front. ‘We await with the greatest excitement the fall of Constantinople,' George told Blanco excitedly, ‘which we all here think will make a great difference and hasten the end … No one expects the war will hang on longer than July, so you will probably shoot grouse as well as Germans this summer. Well my old dear pal. Till Berlin.'
3

By the end of March 1915 the regiment had moved again; south-east to a spot on the River Dniester where it wound backwards and forwards on itself. Employed to spy on the enemy across the river, one particular scouting trip was a rather trying ordeal of four days and nights. Whilst the regiment proper was engaged in a fierce battle at Zalishchyky several miles back upriver, a dozen men and a single officer had been told to protect 6 miles of the Dniester down towards Moldova. Opposite were three villages all occupied by the enemy and five boats tied up for their use. It was clearly impossible to man this entire stretch with such a small unit, so four men were allocated to watch each village.

‘For three days and three nights I didn't once close my eyes,' George explained. ‘By day we occupied points of vantage where we could see but not be seen and at night lay on the bank of the river approximately opposite the boats, all eyes and ears strained to be ready to prevent a crossing. In the middle of the river it was light enough to see and aim at a mark, but all the banks were quite dark and we feared they would move the boats to another place and cross.' Whenever they heard a noise at the boats they blazed away with their rifles in their direction and then got out of the way. ‘They certainly misjudged our forces,' George said, ‘because they always cleared off and only once seriously tried to get over.' In time an entire infantry regiment arrived to relieve them of their posts, which gave some indication of just how big their task had been.

‘Tell Winston to hurry up and take Constantinople,' George instructed his family. On 22 March over 100,000 Austro–Hungarians who had been besieged at Przemysl finally surrendered. This triggered an offensive by the Tsar's armies in Galicia aimed at putting the beleaguered and tortured Austrian armies, who had already suffered more than two million casualties, out of the war. On George's front he was awaiting orders to push east through Russia proper and attempt to come round and outflank the Germans before turning north to Czernowitz. Then, if things progressed rightly, they would clean up Bukovyna which was proving troublesome with its Austro–Hungarian inhabitants.

First though Zalishchyky must be secured. On Easter Sunday George experienced his most brutal action yet. In front of the Artirsky Hussars were solid Austrian trenches protected by barbed wire, eight pieces of artillery and a dozen machine guns. The regiment was ordered to dismount and at 4 a.m. 130 of them contributed to some 1,600 men making an attack on the position. As dawn broke they surged forward and overran the defenders, taking some 1,200 prisoners who were mostly Serbian but obliged to serve in the Austro–Hungarian army. However, ninety-four Hussars were killed or wounded, some three quarters of those that had gone forward. The enemy though had proved reluctant, perhaps unsurprisingly given their ethnicity. Many turned and ran when they saw the extent of the Russian attack and the conquerors also took a gun and several machine guns before seizing the palace on the riverbank where they found some forty horses and stores of ammunition, provisions and barbed wire.

Unfortunately for the Russians, their victims had already phoned through to Czernowitz 30 miles away and by mid afternoon reinforcements had arrived in the shape of heavy guns which began pounding the Tsar's troops. Infantry followed in the early evening, fiercely and overwhelmingly outnumbering the Russians. At 6.30 p.m. they were forced to retreat. Few were killed but they lost nearly a thousand men to captivity. ‘It was heart breaking after our brilliant success in the morning,' lamented George.

The collapse of the Austro–Hungarian forces appeared imminent and Germany had no choice but to begin pulling men from the Western Front in an attempt to bail them out. By 10 April the Russian offensive in Galicia had come to an end. Shortly afterwards George was plastered all over the British press as the young Etonian gentleman who fought for the Tsar. He wasn't over keen on the fame but his antics, which now included another Cross of St George for carrying the ammunition crates alone under heavy rifle fire, could not fail to get him noticed.

The fighting petered out for now. Spring had arrived and George was tortured by the sight of the Dniester sparkling in front of their trench so invitingly. ‘I am all for challenging the enemy to a game of water-polo – stakes five prisoners, or a machine gun, or something.' They were now guarding the Dniester from Zalishchky east to the corner of Galicia. Officers returning from leave were full of optimism. ‘We should take the Dardanelles in a month and Austria should breathe her last by June,' George claimed emphatically. There was talk now of getting him a commission, almost unheard of for a foreigner. Nobody in the regiment objected at all having seen his conduct and in fact he was essentially living as an officer already, dining and sleeping with them, and walking in and out of their quarters at will.

At the beginning of May, after many attempts to distract and deceive the Russians, the Central Powers launched an assault. They rolled over the Tsar's force, sending them cascading back towards their own borders. Entire Russian corps to the north were evaporating and the Austrians were sweeping through the Carpathians. Insufficient defensive preparations had been made and ragamuffin remnants of regiments and nearby men scraped together were all that existed to stem the tide.

To the south, George's sector had not yet reached such a parlous state. By mid May they had in fact claimed much of Bukovyna as the Central Powers attempted to push them over the Dniester and failed. Indeed by the end of the month the Artirsky Hussars had got as far as the Prut, 30 miles south of Czernowitz by way of a strong advance steering well clear of Kolomea, which was still occupied. Czernowitz itself had been cleared, but as it lay in a valley it would have been dangerous to occupy it when the enemy could have begun shelling them. By night they watched the river and by day they slept out in the open. George was in his element despite a shortage of food. ‘I'm brown as a chestnut and very fit and cheerful.'