Motor automobiles sprint down the center of the street. The lighting fixtures in their carbide lamps flow in lengthy rows towards Halicz at the highway from Stanislau. among the published guards I climbed over the hedge gate and around the ditches of the embankment. My platoon awaited me, saddled up, and we stood prepared for additional orders. whilst morning dawned, the inhabitants used to be pouring out of the town in lengthy documents. On carts, taking walks, on horseback. every body making shift to avoid wasting himself. them all wearing away what they could. And exhaustion, dirt, sweat, panic on each face, poor dejection, soreness, and pain. Their eyes are anxious, their routine craven: ghastly terror oppresses them. as though the dirt cloud they stirred up had mounted itself to them and will no longer flow away. I lie sleepless along side the line and watch the infernal kaleidoscope. There are even army wagons muddled into it, and at the fields taking flight army, routed infantry, misplaced cavalry. now not a guy of them nonetheless has his complete gear. The exhausted throng pours throughout the valley. they're working again to Stanislau. What Kelemen is witnessing as he lies on the roadside is the results of one of many first bloody and careworn clashes with the invading Russians. Like every body else concerned, he has just a very hazy photo of what has really occurred and it'll be years prior to someone pulls jointly the entire a number of impressions right into a narrative referred to as the conflict of Lemberg. however it doesn't require an absolutely worked-out account from the final employees for somebody to appreciate that this has became out to be a defeat for the Austro-Hungarian military on a scale that's as gigantic because it is unforeseen. FRIDAY, 28 AUGUST 1914 Laura de Turczynowicz meets a German prisoner of warfare in Suwalki Laura hasn't ever understood this conflict, not to mention welcomed it. She is without doubt one of the many of us for whom what has occurred is sort of a usual disaster, a gloomy and eventually incomprehensible tragedy that has abruptly swept down on them from nowhere. yet she has additionally spotted how the preliminary terror has quick turned into a wierd euphoria, which has affected even her. the traditional quarrels among Poles and Russians appear to have vanished thoroughly. It says greatly concerning the present temper that after a hearsay went around one night before everything of August suggesting that the conflict was once probably not likely to ensue, it was once the reason for a few sadness. (Great Britain used to be it sounds as if hesitating approximately going to battle, and that was once surroundings off alarm bells one of the rulers in St. Petersburg. ) at the present time is Laura de Turczynowicz’s thirty-sixth birthday and before her lifestyles has had the entire components of a fin de siècle dream. Born in Canada, she grew up in ny and was once a proficient opera singer who had played on the Metropolitan and in different places. She moved to Europe to “study and sing … and play,” completed good fortune at Bayreuth and Munich—her German is good—and stumbled on a husband within the form of an enthralling Polish aristocrat with an upturned moustache, a professorial name and a substantial fortune.