Seventy-fifth 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 (again) 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. It is with this entry here that the calendar in Latvia changed from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar.

August 15, 1918 (July 31 Old Style)

People are confused… some are celebrating festivities and birthdays by the old calendar, others by the new, others both, however they wish. Oh, what times we live in! Instead of real tea, now we are preparing apple leaves, which we boil and then dry in the oven. Instead of tobacco, now they use dried raspberry leaves, whose smoke is quite similar to tobacco. It already feels like fall, looking at the plowed rye heaps. Thank God, we have prevented famine. The song of the young rooster brings us closer to fall storms.