202 THE ZEMSTVOS DURING THE WAR
the Zemstvo Union from the Caucasian front, where the Turks had
launched their offensive on Sarakamysh and the Russians were moving
 into Turkish Armenia. The Trans-Caucasian Committee of the
Zemstvo Union which had been formed in Tiflis had no hospitals at
its disposal. The headquarters at Moscow therefore decided to order
the Seventh Detachment at once to the Caucasus, and instead of
East Prussia, the leaders of the detachment found themselves compelled
 to work in the wild territory of the Caucasus and on the
banks of the Euphrates. Now they had to organize camel convoys to
transport equipment over scarcely passable mountain trails and to
carry the sick and wounded hundreds of miles, changing from
camel stretchers to sleighs, from sleighs to automobiles, and so
on. Practically the entire hospital work of the Zemstvo Union in
Trans-Caucasia was carried out by this detachment, which opened
hundreds of hospitals, dispensaries, and other institutions for the
transport and treatment of the wounded and sick.
With the exception of the earlier detachments, all of them were
organized along the same lines as the Seventh. They had all been
designed for the general care of the wounded during battle; they
were all designed for rapid maneuvering and abundantly supplied
with transport facilities; they could be divided up into several independent
 units, which came to be known later on as “flying squads.”
The only difference between the detachments was in detail of organization
 and in size, and consequently also in the cost. Thus, the
Fourth Detachment cost 77,000 rubles, whereas the Fifth had cost
140,000 and the Sixth 180,000 rubles. Subsequently the average
cost of equipping a detachment was fixed at 100,000 rubles, with an
sstimated monthly expenditure of 20,000 rubles.
Each detachment was attached to a certain military unit, an army
corps as a rule, and it was expected to move with it. It was not always,
 however, possible for the detachments to operate at full
strength. The flying squads, which were attached to smaller army
units forming part of the corps, would frequently be detached from
their bases, as well as from each other, and forced to work under dissimilar
 conditions. This splitting up of detachments was especially
common during the spring and summer retreats of the Russian
army in 1915, when many of the flying squads were forced to make
andless marches over deep sand through swamps and forests in the
dead of night, in unfamiliar localities and often under the enemy’s