Seventeen-year-old Rakovsky, like many new recruits, was sent to the front after completing three months of recruit training at the Bohemian boot camp in Wils.

At Wells training camp, Rakovski experienced one of the toughest physical trainings of his life. The officers were almost demanding of the recruits, and after each day of training, Vilkoka would be exhausted and immediately fall asleep like a dead dog after falling into bed.

Rakovsky did not resent such a day, but was filled with an impulse of joy, like a boy in general, a desire to make a mark on the battlefield. He was just the child of an ordinary Polish family in Cechchin, and his father was a miner. In November 1914, an enlarged conscription order was issued, and for the sake of the family's livelihood, Rakovsky, who was not yet 18 years old, entered the new barracks in place of his father.

Recruits of one regiment left the boot camp and, after walking five kilometers, came to the railway station in Mladha. The station was filled with military trains, and one military train was filled with hundreds of cannons covered in canvas. Rakovsky wondered what these new heavy guns looked like, and in the training camp in Wells, they had seen only light infantry guns and mortars, as well as some old, obsolete old guns.

The officers with the troops blew a whistle in their mouths, and the recruits boarded a train in the direction of Northeastern Galicia.

The train carried more than 2,000 recruits through the mountains of the Carpathians.

Bang dang, bang dang......

Amid the dull sound of the collision between the wheels and the rails, the train took him through the Carpathian Mountains after more than a day of travel, and finally reached Tenopol on the south-eastern side of Transnistria. The border between Austria-Hungary and Russia has been crossed here.

"Look we are now on Russian soil!" Lizhakov shouted excitedly as he leaned over the window, and Rakovsky looked out the window and followed his finger to see a wide and desolate valley covered with residual snow, and the river had just melted, and large chunks of ice floe were churning in the water. Both sides are flanked by sparse woods, which sway with bare branches that look particularly desolate in the wilderness.

Here the recruits got off the bus and then walked 15 kilometers to Letik.

Rakovsky's recruit company was replenished to the 3rd Regiment of the 3rd Lancer Division of Galicia, which was stationed here.

In early spring, the air is chilly in the Transcarpathian Podol Heights, the valley is surrounded by steep mountains on both sides, and there are jungles full of huge fir and birch trees. They walked along a muddy forest road, through the woods, and finally came across a large open area of the river beach.

There, a fairytale village is in front of you.

In the open space in front of a small wooden church, the recruits lined up in a neat line, and from the church came a dozen officers wearing epaulettes. The sergeant who led the team shouted orders, and the recruits stood up again, their chests straight, and the heels of the leather boots on the feet of more than 150 people were still neatly bumped.

After a brief welcome ceremony, an officer took a piece of paper and began the roll call, and the recruits were assigned to various companies by class, and were taken away by some of the officers. Rakovsky and Lizakov's squad was assigned to the 7th Company, and they followed a non-commissioned officer, who was probably thirty years old, and left the town of Kutakania, where the regimental headquarters was located, to the company's station, about three kilometers to the east.

A dilapidated Ukrainian village.

There were only a few old people left in the village, and most of them had fled after the outbreak of the war. In Austrian propaganda, the Russians were portrayed as murderous demons, so large groups of Ukrainian refugees fled like sheep to Hungary last summer.

All that was left were some old people and children who couldn't run.

Rakovsky and his men put their luggage on a wooden bed in a house, which was empty enough in the village to accommodate a battalion.

After a while, the whistle sounded, and the new squad leader, Valuzzi, shouted: "It's time for dinner!" Rakovsky realized that his stomach was grumbling with hunger, and they had walked for most of the day without eating anything, except for a few biscuits on the way. The recruits, armed with steel military lunch boxes, lined up behind the veterans to receive food from the cooks: a piece of cheese, a piece of salted fish, a spoonful of beet soup and a large piece of brown bread.

The soldiers crouched down against the wall and began to eat, and Rakovsky soaked the cheese in the beet soup, but Bruno, who was beside him, used a knife to cut the hard cheese into small pieces, and then put it in his mouth and chewed it, making a creaking sound. Lizhakov also finished receiving the food, and as he walked, he nibbled on black bread.

"Where's our horse?" Lizhakov said as he walked.

"Without horses, our two legs are horses." Veteran Hillenwitz said loudly from the sidelines.

"Aren't we cavalry?" Lizhakov said.

"Now our mounts have been requisitioned to pull the carts, and the poor horses have been put on the wheels." Hillenwitz shouted, in a mocking tone, "We are now officially called the Royal Bohemian Lancer Archers, which have long since been changed to infantry, recruits. ”

Then a whole bunch of veterans laughed, as if laughing at the ignorance of the recruits, whimsically believing that the Lancer Regiment was cavalry. After eating, the soldiers were called to a spacious room, where the sergeant major gave a lecture on why Austria-Hungary was fighting this war.

It doesn't feel like much, and it's understandable to drive out the brutal Russian bandits, but most of the people living here are Ukrainians, and it's hard to figure out how to rescue the Ukrainian people who were enslaved by the Russians and live in dire straits. How miserably did the Ukrainians live under the oppression of the Russians, and what does it have to do with the Poles?

"It doesn't matter, but if you don't kill those Russians on the battlefield, you will have to be killed by them!" The sergeant major said viciously in the face of the question, this is the truth.

In the next few days, there were no orders, little training, and only one target shot. Except for the necessary assembly and morning exercises every morning, the rest of the time is nothing to do. The veterans were complaining in boredom that there were no girls in the village, not even old ladies, and then they began to tell all sorts of dirty jokes and stories.

The Russians were still far away, about seventy kilometers from the front line, and only occasionally a few artillery shots could be heard, coming from far ahead, reminding the soldiers that they were still fighting.

The snow continues to melt, the water level of the Dniester River is rising day by day, and the weather is getting warmer.

The following days were not so good, and orders were given from the division headquarters to build fortifications along the Dniester. The veterans had dug a lot of trenches last year, and now they need to be deepened and reinforced.

But the order to retreat was given suddenly.

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