WORK IN THE ARMY 
available at the moment. Lastly, modest little canteens were opened 
in connection with the bathing stations, for the sale to soldiers at 
cost price of various articles in most common use. 
It would be difficult to enumerate all the activities of these zem- 
stvo detachments. Suffice it to say that they served the needs of the 
army with genuine devotion; a representative of the army had 
merely to hint at the existence of this or that particular need, and 
the Union at once made every effort to satisfy it. Sometimes this 
would be done even without any request from the army authorities, 
the detachments themselves taking the initiative. For instance, the 
detachments took a very active part in the work of inoculation 
against cholera and typhoid fever. Among other things, they ob- 
tained from Moscow large numbers of gas masks and distributed 
them among the troops. Their care for the hygiene of the army went 
so far that they undertook to remove and bury the carcasses of dead 
cattle and horses, and to look after the general sanitary conditions. 
At the very first request from the military authorities the detach- 
ments organized carpenters’ shops, machine shops, shops for the re- 
pair of harness and even rifles, and there were instances in which 
the technical experts of the Union set idle sawmills to work again in 
order to provide timber for the trenches. Another branch of activity 
was the maintenance of field post offices as near as possible to the 
trenches for the benefit of the soldiers. The detachments also, when- 
ever requested to do so by the military authorities, undertook the 
feeding of labor battalions and other workers connected with various 
army establishments. 
The relief of refugees and of civilian population was not confined 
to the supply of food and medical assistance. Many detachments 
used to lend their horses to the peasants for agricultural work. They 
also assisted in the harvesting of the crops which the refugees had 
been obliged to abandon in their flight. Other detachments, again, 
collected the children who were left either without parents or with- 
out homes and sent them in groups to the various Moscow asylums 
under the care of specially appointed attendants. 
It is impossible to reduce the manifold activities of these detach- 
ments to mere figures. Nor is it at all desirable that the work ac- 
complished by the detachments should be regarded solely in its 
statistical aspect, since that would give us, after all, a very limited 
conception of its true importance. These undertakings inevitably 
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