New York Times Current History The European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January Part 29

*The First Invasion of Servia*

[By a Correspondent of The London Standard.]

NISH, Servia, Aug. 31.--After the butcheries and atrocities which I witnessed during preceding battles I thought I would get accustomed and insensible to these scenes of blood, but from my last visit to the slaughter house I have brought such visions of horror that their very thought makes me shudder. The object of the Austrian Army seems to have been complete devastation.

The fierce battle which the Servians gave them incessantly for more than a week may be divided into two conflicts of equal intensity which raged along the ridge of the heights of Tser. Each of the two slopes, descending one to the Save and the town of Shabatz and the other to the Drina, is now nothing but a charnel house.

I could not say which of these two conflicts was more murderous, but this admirably fertile region, with its countless fruit trees, is now sheltering the last remains of hundreds of butchered men, women, and children.

When after three days and three nights of truceless fighting the Servians succeeded in surprising the enemy in the middle of the night at Tser, the toll of dead was so colossal that the Servian troops were constrained for the time being to abandon burying the corpses.

Everywhere the fighting was of the fiercest conceivable nature, for to resist the invaders was to the Servians a question of life and death. At several points they fought right up to the last man, succ.u.mbing but never falling back.

The volunteer corps of Capt. Tankositch, the famous leader whose head Austria is so anxious to gain, was charged to defend Kroupage, situated south of the battle front, between Losnitza and Lionbovia. Considerable Austrian forces attempted to advance with the view of driving the Captain back.

For two days and three nights Tankositch and 236 volunteers held their position. At last three whole Austrian regiments surrounded them, but rather than yield to the enemy Tankositch and his gallant miniature army resolved to fight to the last. In the dead of night he sent out a small group to meet the Austrians. This group, consisting of a mere handful of soldiers, hurled a shower of bombs at the enemy, cutting up his ranks, and secured a free pa.s.s.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Battlefield in Servia.]

At the first break of day, when Tankositch counted his men, only forty-six answered the call. They surrounded more than a hundred prisoners.

It will be realized that in the course of such sharp fighting the Servian losses must have been considerable, although they were much smaller than those of the enemy.

The most pitiful and heartrending aspect of these scenes was presented by the long procession of Servian survivors from the neighboring villages, consisting of old men, women, and children, bringing in the heavy toll of mutilated human beings. At Valievo, the nearest town to the field of battle, large ma.s.ses of Servian and Austrian wounded kept pouring in incessantly. About 10,000 have already arrived. All had to be examined, all had to have their wounds dressed, and at Valievo there are only six doctors.

In spite of this appalling shortage of medical aid, I witnessed yesterday a most touching spectacle. A car drawn by oxen brought to the hospital at Valievo its load of mutilated soldiers. In the first portion of the car were three wounded Austrians and in the second two wounded Servians and two more Austrians. The convoys wanted to carry the Austrian wounded to the dressing room before their own wounded. A Servian doctor stopped them.

"Bring the wounded in in the order in which they come," he commanded, and, without any regard for the nationality of his patients, the doctor and his colleagues commenced their humanitarian work.

What are the Red Crosses of the neutral countries waiting for? Why do they not come here? In the name of gallant little Servia, in the name of a humane and pitiful people, I make urgent appeal to the Red Crosses to send a portion of their staff here. There are thousands of lives to be saved.

Now I must begin a chapter of sorrows. I wanted to witness the Austro-Hungarian excesses a second time before speaking of them, so that I could give an exact and genuine account of actual facts. Courage failed me to see all, but what I have seen can be summed up in one phrase. In the environs of Shabatz the vanquished put the finis.h.i.+ng touch to their acts of fearful savagery by butchering their Servian prisoners, whose corpses were found heaped up in the town.

Yesterday and the day before I ran across country through Valievo toward Drina. Further north, barely forty miles from Valievo, at Seablatcha, the poor refugees who had fled from their houses before the onslaught of the Austrians showed me eight young people, tied one to another, who were all pierced by bayonets.

Five miles from there, at Bella Tserka, fugitives of the village with indescribable despair were burying the mutilated, bodies of fourteen little girls. Six peasants were found hanging in an orchard.

At Lychnitsa, on the Drina, about a hundred old men, inoffensive civilians, were ma.s.sacred before the eyes of their wives and children.

All the women and children were led over on the other side of the bank of the Drina in order to compel the Servians to stop their fire.

It is not war that Austria-Hungary tried to make on Servia. That great nation wanted to exterminate the Servian people. She thought she would succeed before Servia had time to defend herself.

Austrian prisoners affirm that they received orders to hang all those striving against their country, to burn all the enemy's villages, and put all their inhabitants to death.

The Servian Quartermaster General is drawing up an official list of these Austro-Hungarian deeds.

*The Attack on Tsing-tau*

*By Jefferson Jones of The Minneapolis Journal and The j.a.pan Advertiser.*

j.a.pANESE HEADQUARTERS, Shantung, Nov. 2.--I have seen war from a grand stand seat. I never before heard of the possibility of witnessing a modern battle--the attack of wars.h.i.+ps, the fire of infantry and artillery, the manoeuvring of airs.h.i.+ps over the enemy's lines, the rolling up from the rear of reinforcements and supplies--all at one sweep of the eye; yet, after watching [Transcriber: original 'watchnig']

for three days the siege of Tsing-tau from a position on Prinz Heinrich Berg, 1,000 feet above the sea level and but three miles from the beleaguered city, I am sure that there is actually such a thing as a theatre of war.

On Oct. 31, the date of the anniversary of the birth of the Emperor of j.a.pan, the actual bombardment of Tsing-tau began. All the residents of the little Chinese village of Tschang-tsun, where was fixed on that day the acting staff headquarters of the j.a.panese troops, had been awakened early in the morning by the roar of a German aeroplane over the village.

Every one quickly dressed and, after a hasty breakfast, went out to the southern edge of the village to gaze toward Tsing-tau.

A great black column of smoke was arising from the city and hung like a pall over the besieged. At first glance it seemed that one of the neighboring hills had turned into an active volcano and was emitting this column of smoke, but it was soon learned that the oil tanks in Tsing-tau were on fire.

As the bombardment was scheduled to start late in the morning, we were invited to accompany members of the staff of the j.a.panese and British expeditionary forces on a trip to Prinz Heinrich Berg, there to watch the investment of the city. It was about a three-mile journey to this mountain, which had been the scene of some severe fighting between the German and j.a.panese troops earlier in the month.

When we arrived at the summit there was the theatre of war laid out before us like a map. To the left were the j.a.panese and British cruisers in the Yellow Sea, preparing for the bombardment. Below was the j.a.panese battery, stationed near the Meeker House, which the Germans had burned in their retreat from the mountains. Directly ahead was the City of Tsing-tau, with the Austrian cruiser Kaiserin Elisabeth steaming about in the harbor, while to the right one could see the Kiao-Chau coast and central forts and redoubts and the intrenched j.a.panese and British camps.

We had just couched ourselves comfortably between some large, jagged rocks, where we felt sure we were not in a direct line with the enemy's guns, when suddenly there was a flash as if some one had turned a large golden mirror in the field down beyond to the right. A little column of black smoke drifted away from one of the j.a.panese trenches, and a minute later those of us on the peak of Prinz Heinrich heard the sharp report of a field gun.

"Gentlemen, the show has started," said the British Captain, as he removed his cap and started adjusting his "opera gla.s.s." No sooner had he said this than the reports of guns came from all directions with a continuous rumble as if a giant bowling alley were in use. Everywhere the valley at the rear of Tsing-tau was alive with golden flashes from discharging guns, and at the same time great clouds of bluish-white smoke would suddenly spring up around the German batteries where some j.a.panese sh.e.l.l had burst. Over near the greater harbor of Tsing-tau we could see flames licking up the Standard Oil Company's large tanks. We afterward learned that these had been set on fire by the Germans and not by a bursting sh.e.l.l.

And then the wars.h.i.+ps in the Yellow Sea opened fire on Iltis Fort, and for three hours we continually played our gla.s.ses on the field--on Tsing-tau and on the wars.h.i.+ps. With gla.s.ses on the central redoubt of the Germans we watched the effects of the j.a.panese fire until the boom of guns from the German Fort A, on a little peninsula jutting out from Kiao-Chau Bay, toward the east, attracted our attention there. We could see the big siege gun on this fort rise up over the bunker, aim at a wars.h.i.+p, fire, and then quickly go down again. And then we would turn our eyes toward the wars.h.i.+ps in time to see a fountain of water 200 yards from a vessel, where the sh.e.l.l had struck. We scanned the city of Tsing-tau. The 150-ton crane in the greater harbor, which we had seen earlier in the day, and which was said to be the largest crane in the world, had disappeared and only its base remained standing. A j.a.panese sh.e.l.l had carried away the crane.

But this first day's firing of the j.a.panese investing troops was mainly to test the range of the different batteries. The attempt also was made to silence the line of forts extending in the east from Iltis Hill, near the wireless and signal stations at the rear of Tsing-tau, to the coast fort near the burning oil tank on the west. In this they were partly successful, two guns at Iltis Fort being silenced by the guns at sea.

On Nov. 1, the second day of the bombardment, we again stationed ourselves on the peak of Prinz Heinrich Berg. From the earliest hours of morning the j.a.panese and British forces had kept up a continuous fire on the German redoubts in front of the Iltis, Moltke, and Bismarck forts, and when we arrived at our seats it seemed as though the sh.e.l.ls were dropping around the German trenches every minute. Particularly on the redoubt of Taitung-Chen was the j.a.panese fire heavy, and by early afternoon, through field gla.s.ses, this German redoubt appeared to have had an attack of smallpox, so pitted was it from the holes made by bursting j.a.panese sh.e.l.ls. By nightfall many parts of the German redoubts had been destroyed, together with some machine guns. The result was the advancing of the j.a.panese lines several hundred yards from the bottom of the hills where they had rested earlier in the day.

It was not until the third day of the bombardment that those of us stationed on Prinz Heinrich observed that our theatre of war had a curtain, a real asbestos one that screened the fire in the drops directly ahead of us from our eyes. We had learned that the theatre was equipped with pits, drops, a gallery for onlookers, exits, and an orchestra of booming cannon and rippling, roaring pompons; but that nature had provided it with a curtain--that was something new to us.

We had reached the summit of the mountain about 11 A.M., just as some heavy clouds, evidently disturbed by the bombardment during the previous night, were dropping down into Litsun Valley and in front of Tsing-tau.

For three hours we sat on the peak s.h.i.+vering in a blast from the sea, and all the while wondering just what was being enacted beyond the curtain. The firing had suddenly ceased, and with the filmy haze before our eyes we conjured up pictures of the j.a.panese troops making the general attack upon Iltis Fort, evidently the key to Tsing-tau, while the curtain, of the theatre of war was down.

By early afternoon the clouds lifted, and with gla.s.ses we were able to distinguish fresh sappings of the j.a.panese infantry nearer to the German redoubts. The j.a.panese guns, which the day before were stationed below us to the left, near the Meeker House, had advanced half a mile and were on the road just outside the village of Ta-Yau. Turning our gla.s.ses on Kiao-Chau Bay, we discovered that the Kaiserin Elisabeth was missing, nor did a search of the sh.o.r.e line reveal her. Whether she was blown up by the Germans or had hidden behind one of the islands I do not know.

All the guns were silent now, and the British Captain said: "Well, chaps, shall we take advantage of the intermission?"

A half-hour later we were down the mountain and riding homeward toward Tschang-Tsun.

To understand fully the operations of the j.a.panese troops in Shantung during the present Far Eastern war one must be acquainted with the topography of this peninsula, as well as with the conditions that exist for the successful movements of the troops.

Since the disembarkation of the j.a.panese Army on Sept. 2 everything has seemingly favored the Germans. The country, which is unusually mountainous, offering natural strongholds for resisting the invading army, is practically devoid of roads in the hinterland. To add to this difficulty, the last two months in Shantung have seen heavy rains and floods which have really aided in holding off the ultimate fall of Kiao-Chau.

One had only to see the road from Lanschan over Makung Pa.s.s, on which the j.a.panese troops were forced to rely for their supplies, partly to understand the reason for the German garrison at Tsing-tau still holding out. The road, especially near the base, is nothing but a sea of clay in which the military carts sink up to their hubs. Frequent rains every week keep the roadway softened up and thus render it necessary for the j.a.panese infantry to rebuild it and to construct drainage ditches in order that there may be no delay in getting supplies and ammunition to the troops at the front.

The physical characteristics of Kiao-Chau make it an ideal fortress. The entrance of the bay is nearly two miles wide and is commanded by hills rising 600 feet directly in the rear of Tsing-tau. The ring of hills that surrounds the city does not extend back into the hinterland, and thus there is no screen behind which the j.a.panese forces can quickly invest the city. Germany has utilized the semicircle of hills in the construction of large concrete forts equipped with Krupp guns of 14 and 16 inch calibre, which, for four or five miles back into the peninsula, command all approaches to the city.

The j.a.panese Army in approaching Tsing-tau has had to do so practically in the open. The troops found no hills behind which they could with safety mount heavy siege guns without detection by the German garrison.