No one believed that we really captured the trenches

The newly created Russian Legions counted about 3,200 volunteers by the summer of 1917. The until then scattered units of the Czechoslovak Brigade, as the unit's name went, formed for the first time before the Battle of Zborov. They were very poorly equipped, yet they distinguished themselves right in their first combat operation, when they overthrew the Austro-Hungarian and German positions in a crushing attack. The battle took place on July 2, 1917. "No soldier could understand that we had captured those trenches," recalls the witness of the battle, Alois Vocásek, "the trenches were five meters deep, had electricity, water supply and there was a machine gun each five meters next to each other. They had written there: Whoever conquers these trenches will conquer Austria-Hungary'. And we got them in two hours! Just with bombs. I went in the front line and I had just two bombs in my hands and eight more strapped to my body. In this way we got as far as to the third line!" Alois Vocásek believes that the success can also be partly credited to the enthusiasm of the attacking Czechoslovak soldiers. There was a big surprise waiting for them in the third line of the trenches: "We found a field kitchen there with lunch waiting for us! The Austrians fled and left it all behind. One of our men feared that it had been poisoned. But I told them not to be afraid as the Austrians surely didn't have time to poison it and I ate it myself. So we all ate it and nothing happened to us." 197 Czechoslovak legionaries fell in the battle of Zborov. However, the opposing side suffered far greater losses: more than three thousand soldiers were captured. Vocásek recalls: "The Russian general Brusilov came to thank us on foot and said: 'it would not be appropriate to come on horseback to heroes like you are. Soldiers like you would get me to Vienna in two days!'" However, as the allied Russian troops had failed in the battle, the Czechoslovak Brigade ultimately had to withdraw to Ternopol.