Ferdinand Huszti Horvath - Captured!

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Burtyrki Books 2020, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publishers Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

CAPTURED!

By

FERDINAND HUSZTI HORVATH

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER

PREFACE

WarsureisHell says an American Captain of Marines in his excellently written war bookand to be sure it is. There is the quintessence of war in these four simple words. I heartily agree with the Captain, though I was shooting on the opposite side. Ordersof course. General Sherman said a trifle less, others have said considerably morelibraries have been written about the war. Well established writers, and especially war correspondents, have shown us how not to write books of the war. Many have made out of war something glorious and out of soldiers, heroes. For a while the public took it, devoured itand then left it. Split bodies and torn limbs alone do not make a war book, nor hatred nor untrue bombast.

Those who knew what war really meant were silent, long after the war was over, but others spokevery loudlywho knew nothing about it.

Then the hard crust of the war wore slowly off the silent menthe combatant soldiers. Unknown, common soldiers began to speakand all the world sat up.

No heroes are thesejust ordinary plain men, who know what it is to carry a pack in the mud, and not what it seems like, from the comfortable cars of war correspondents. Just plain, common, muddy infantrymen who dare admit that the first battle is less a glorious feeling than the deadly fright of hissing bullets.

On these pages I want to take you to a place of action, where the war was less machine-made than in the West, where the last gigantic, classical open warfare was staged, where a strategical straightening of the line meant so many hundred weary miles of marching in advance or retreat.

The war had a ruder flavor herethough that on the West was undoubtedly more deadly. But we had more of the lice and more of the mud and more of other hardships that were spared to the soldiers of the West.

F. H. H.

New York, September 1929

CHAPTER I

The Innsbruck Kaiserjgers were entrained for the Russian front. A soldier was standing on the narrow board atop of the cowcatcher of the locomotive and with chalk wrote on the front of the boiler the words: On to Moscow!

For five days we rattled, but we did not get quite so far as Moscow. In Lemberg we got out, with rather stiff joints. Moscow was still eight hundred miles farther. We were still a little enthusiastic, but not much.

Lemberg had just been evacuated with feverish haste. Long trains with wounded stood at the station and the faces behind the windows looked dirty, worn and haggard.

Some of the wounded took Russian bullets out of their pockets and we looked at them. We had never seen a Russian bullet before. They were pointed; ours were blunt, cone shaped.

Large Red Cross marks were painted on the sides of the box cars. Wounded men stood in the open doors. Some had bloody and torn blouses. There was contempt in their eyes, looking down on us, green troops from the hinterland. After our baptism with fire, of course, it would be a different thing; but now we were not much more in their eyes than mere civilians.

Look out, you snot-noses, said a dragoon from a car window; look out for the machine guns. Theyll hide in hollowed out haystacks and let you walk up close. Ra-ta-ta-ta and your company is going to hell.

Get all the spades you can in Lemberg, said another swarthy fellow, and learn to dig. Youll feel more than youll ever see of them.

Other Red Cross trains rolled in, and still others; there seemed to be no end to them.

We marched out of Lemberg towards the east. As soon as we had left the suburbs, we held our rifle muzzles high and loaded. A strange feeling that was, to load for the first time with the intent to kill. It was noon. When it grew dark, we were still marching. We had to keep to one side of the road to leave passage for retreating troops. They came in an endless stream: infantry, train, artillery.

Now and then the shrill horn of an automobile howled, and we had to crowd into the ditches. Generals and staff officers whizzed by and were gone. Then we got back to the road and marched on.

More wagon trains came and still more troops from the opposite direction. There was no moon, just the stars, but the road was smooth; we could march without lights.

Sometimes, at a cross road we were halted, to let another column pass. We were tired, but those troops coming from the opposite direction seemed to be still more so. A thick candle was burning in a dusty lantern hanging from the rear axle of a train wagon. Very faintly it lit up the legs of the soldiers, standing close together. You could see steel lined rifle butts and sagging knees. The shoes were white with dust and the feet in them were smarting. Then our column moved again and we marched on. After midnight we swerved from the road and halted in a stubble field.

Outposts spread out in all directions, like oil dropped on water. We stacked our rifles in long rows of pyramids. Food came and we ate hastily, in order not to lose any sleep. When the dawn came, we marched on.

So we marched for nine days. It seemed to us that we were led around and around in an endless circle. Most of the time we marched in columns; then one of our battalions branched off here, another there, and for long hours we lay in a ditch, crowded close to one another, expecting something finally to happen.

So far not a shot had been fired, and we were very tired and disillusioned. We really felt inferior to those battered troops, retreating, that we were always meeting. Here we were on the march for over a week and we had not yet seen one of those plate shaped Russian caps!

Newspapers used to print stories about thundering cannonswe wondered what became of them. And this marching was very tiring. Many of the men had blistered feet and there were always more and more stragglers.

Then, on a pitch dark night, a furious shooting began. Wellhere were the Russians at last! When the fire stopped, finally, we found out that it was just a mistake. We had been attacked by one of our own battalions. There were polite apologies on both sides and the little incident was settledeight dead, six wounded, and three men shot blind. Of course this did not count as a regular baptism of fire.

At day we sweltered in a terrible heat on those wide plains, and at night thin ice formed over the pools and icy crystals jingled in the canteens. We froze miserably. One day we advanced twenty miles; next day we retreated just as much. It seemed as if we were getting nowhere.

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