Forty-ninth installment from the diary of my great-grandfather’s sister Alise, written during the First World War. When the diary starts, she is living just a few miles from the front lines of the Eastern Front, and is then forced to flee with her husband and two young daughters to her family’s house near Limbaži as the war moves even closer. Her third child, a son, was born there in February 1916. The family has now relocated to a home near Valmiera, and the Russian Revolution is in full swing. For more background, see here, and click on the tag “diary entries” to see all of the entries that I have posted.

If there is mention of a recognizable historical figure and event, I will provide a Wikipedia link so that you can read more about the events that Alise is describing.

November 1, 1917

Everything is going topsy turvy. Latvian riflemen have returned from the front, arrested their officers, broken open Valmiera church and are holding rallies there. They’ve burned all of the arriving newspapers at the station. Each rumour is more outlandish than the next. Petrograd is fully in the hands of the Bolsheviks. And all of their sheep in the towns. Battles are not happening, the enemy is waiting, when the real civil war will start in Russia, and then he will come and bring order.