Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/148

 of the advance of the Austrians in 1915, begins, we entered the zone of villages and towns destroyed and of abandoned farms. But outside the area that has been the scene of military operations it would seem that Galicia and Bucowina are the parts of Europe that have least felt the war.

In the first place, they have this particularity: that it is the only country engaged in war where the majority of the adult population is now at home. They had been called up, of course, during the Austrian mobilization, but they soon returned. The majority of the soldiers from that part of the country only awaited, as a matter of fact, an opportunity to be made prisoners by the Russians, so as to be able to return to their homes. They were well aware that the Russians granted great freedom to prisoners of Slavonic origin. Cases have been known where entire units of the Austrian army, composed of Slavs and Ruthuanians, surrendered without fighting, on the express condition that they were allowed to return to their farms in the occupied part of the country. And thus it is that the majority of the