Without History or Memory – The Battle of Lake Naroch

[fortchoteau]

Swallowed by Space and Time...
The Battle of Lake Naroch was a disaster, but a relatively unknown one. It could be called “missing history,” as it falls into an abyss of space and time unique to Russia. It was swallowed in the vast spaces of the Eastern Front, where large battles with untold casualties took place. Much of this has been lost to history, as historical consciousness has never really grasped the sheer breadth and brutality of this front. Lost in that space as well, a vast sea of humanity that drowned or froze in the marshes, swamps and slate gray waters of Lake Naroch.

The battle was also lost in time, as it was swept away by the whirlwind of the Bolshevik Revolution. The valor and tragedy so indicative of the Russian soldiers experience in the First World War at battles such as Lake Naroch was eventually written out of the history books. According to the Bolsheviks, these imperialist forces were fighting for the wrong cause, not one worth dying for. Yet the Bolsheviks failed to mention that without the folly of this war, without those men wading into those icy waters, there would have been no revolution.
Read the rest at this link:
http://europebetweeneastandwest.wordpre ... ke-naroch/

[KathyQ]

Hi, I am transcribing and translating the letters of a young German doctor stationed at the Eastern front for most of the Great War. He was at Lake Naroch for the entire period of the battles there.
You can read his letters on my site if you are interested. In particular, there is a very interesting letter from March 28, 1916 which we have annotated. I have transcribed the letter with annotations first in German then in English.
The address is: http://ettlingenww1.blogspot.de/p/lette ... ields.html

[fortchoteau]

Thanks Kathy! That really good stuff and helps add context and color to what the soldiers endured.

Cjew

[James A Pratt III]

There is an 1930s Soviet account of this battle somewhere I believe on this site. The battle is mentioned in a number of accounts of the war in the East in WW I
The Eastern Front N Stone
With the Russian armies A Knox
and others:
This battle was important because it convinced many Russians that they could not defeat the Germans.