Eighty-fourth 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.

November 12, 1918

Weapons have gone silent on the fields of war. The long-awaited peace has been concluded. Still though, people are wary, for the awaited peace has come with many changes to the usual order of the world. We will see how it is all sorted out and what kind of events I will be able to write down on these white pages, whose future is still dark and good that it is so!

People still fear the Bolsheviks the most, but there is one bit of peace – the Versailles conference has announced that the Allies have agreed to fight – with weapons in hand – against Bolshevism in all lands, so that it does not spring up there as well.