Captain Mikelėnas' story about the formation of the 1st Infantry Regiment

Capt. Mikelėnas read in the "Dabarties" newspaper that Lithuania had declared Independence. Upon learning this, he asked to be released from the prisoner of war camp and on September 19. released from captivity, he hurried to Vilnius. Capt. Mikelėnas said that his heart burned and rejoiced when he was accepted as an officer in Vilnius and joined the Lithuanian army. Then, after visiting his family, he began his military service in the State Council building in Vilnius.

The officer testifies to how the first volunteers arrived in the Lithuanian army on October 16, 1919. The assembled soldiers sang the Lithuanian anthem, secretly sought and received weapons from the German army, and emphasized that the Germans wanted to disarm the soldiers of the fledgling Lithuanian army.

Finally, Capt. Mikelėnas left for Alytus, where the 1st Infantry Regiment was being formed and the first battles against the Bolsheviks took place. The memoirs also mention the first Lithuanian officer to die, Antanas Juozapavičius. Capt. Mikelėnas tells about his death while trying to cross the bridge over the Nemuma River: “We couldn’t ride over the ice with Juozapavičius,” the memoirs say, because the horses didn’t want to go over the ice, so we rode over the bridge to Alytus to pick up weapons, the Bolsheviks fired on us, and “I don’t know how I escaped alive.” After the Bolsheviks fired, Juozapavičius fell on the bridge, and the regiment scattered in two directions.