Crossing.

This is coolbert:

Here with two anecdotal accounts - - descriptions of a landscape, as seen by two soldiers, moving across an invisible but nonetheless discernible boundary, "virtual" but apparent to all observers. A crossing over from one cultural domain to another:

1. From M. de Fenzensac:

"When we crossed the frontier we were struck by the surprising contrast which the two countries presented, and by the rapid change in the ways of the inhabitants. Everything in Prussia bespeaks prosperity and civilization; the houses are well built, the fields cultivated. As soon as one enters Poland one encounters only the image of servitude and misery, brutish peasants, a detestable class of Jews, fields that are scarcely tilled, and for houses, miserable huts that are quite as filthy as their inhabitants."

2. From Yaroslav:

"what an extraordinary country Germany was, and how unlike his own. Steep roofs half the height of the houses were enough to make the view a foreign one, but even stranger were the villages of two-story brick houses, the stone byres, the the concrete wellheads, the electric lighting . . . the electrical installations on farms, the telephones in peasant houses, the cleanliness - - no smell of dung, no flies in spite of the heat. Nothing left half done, nothing spilled, nothing out of place - - and the peasants of Prussia certainly hadn't made everything so spick and span for the benefit of their Russian visitors! . . . "

In the case of the former [# 1], M. de Fenzensac, an officer in the Grande Armee of Napoleon, invading Russian, 1812, moving FROM WEST TO EAST. Moving from a nation of civilization [Prussia] into a nation [Russia] of semi-civilization!

In the case of the latter [# 2], Yaroslav, an enlisted man in the Russian 2nd Army, the year being 1914, the very beginning of the Great War [WW1], the movement across the invisible "boundary" in this case from EAST TO WEST, from the semi-civilized cultural domain of the Russian to the civilized of the Prussian!

[the account of Yaroslav is found in the book by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: "The Red Wheel". A work of fiction, the descriptions of Yaroslav still being authentic!]

The book [THE RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN, 1812] of Monsieur de Fenzensac is worth reading. A personal account of the campaign in Russia by one of the few survivors. A man who saw it all and was lucky to emerge alive [only 30,000 of the 530,000 troops in the Grand Armee came out of the disaster unscathed!!]! Very short, can be read in an entire evening, and coming with the highest recommendation!

"I read the tale at one sitting and anyone who takes it to hand will probably do the same. Nothing that I know in military literature quite compares with it and I marvel that it wasn't famous long ago." - - S.L.A. Marshall.

coolbert.