To be wounded is also not such a bad experience. But you begin
to think after the battle. To bear the horrors of war a sort of ideal is
necessary. Once, when I took my Slovacs into an attack, we passed a
cross by the wayside. Many of them knelt down for a moment and said a
prayer. That was sincere and sublime. The ideal which makes it possible
for me to bear everything is to be a good officer on the
battlefield--under the circumstances my duty toward the social aggregate
to which I belong."
The Battle of New Year's Day
By Perceval Gibbon.
[Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES.]
ZYRARDOW, Poland, Jan. 3, via London, Jan. 8, (Dispatch to The London
Daily Chronicle.)--The lines of trenches, the position of which I am
able to observe from here, are those extending south from Sochaczew, and
to the west of Msczonow. The chief German efforts are being directed
against the centre of this line.
They have made a concentration of their best troops opposite our
positions west of the village of Guzow, against the trenches of the
second army at a point where an army corps of veterans have turned their
position into an earthen fortress. Here within the last few days the
Germans have brought up guns of all but the largest calibre and
generally displayed considerable increases in their artillery. Here also
their infantry attacks, those tragic and wasteful assaults in force
which send so many thousand German corpses down the streams of the Rawka
and Bzura to the Vistula, and so home, are most intense.
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