World's War Events Volume II Part 14

The number of prisoners taken by us in the Somme battle between July 1 and November 18, 1916, is just over 38,000, including over 800 officers.

During the same period we captured 29 heavy guns, 96 field guns and field howitzers, 136 trench mortars, and 514 machine guns.

The war fell with special severity upon the people of the poorer cla.s.ses in Russia, many of whom, upon the advance of the German and Austrian armies, were compelled to flee from their homes in a practically dest.i.tute condition. A graphic description of the pitiable plight of these unfortunate people is given in the following pages.

RUSSIA'S REFUGEES

GREGORY MASON

Copyright, Outlook, January 19, 1916.

[Sidenote: A Russian freight train with pa.s.sengers.]

Near Moscow, on a siding of the railway that runs from Moscow to Warsaw through Smolensk, was a string of thirteen freight cars, the short, chunky Russian kind--barely half as long as the American--looking as flimsy, top-heavy, and unwieldy as houseboats on wheels. No locomotive was tied to the string, and from the windward side, where the cars were whitewashed by the biting blizzard that had already stopped all traffic with its drifted barricades, they had the desolate look of stranded empties. But the leeward door of each car was open a few inches, permitting the egress of odors that told any one who chanced to pa.s.s that the big rolling boxes were loaded with human freight, closely packed and long on the journey.

[Sidenote: Old women at work.]

I pushed the door of one car back and looked in. At first in the semi-gloom nothing was visible, but gradually, against a crack in the opposite car wall that let through a streak of gray light with a ribbon of snow that rustled as it fell on the straw-covered floor, there grew the dull silhouette of two old women, who sat facing each other in the straw, laboriously pounding corn into flour in a big earthen bowl between them.

[Sidenote: Emaciated children and dead babies.]

The young Pole who was with me climbed into the car and probed its recesses with a spear of light from a pocket flash-lamp. The old women stopped pounding to lift toward us wrinkled faces that expressed fear and hate when the tiny searchlight was turned on their dim, blinking eyes. Another pair of hags in a far corner, propped against a bale of hay and bound together like Siamese twins in a brown horse-blanket, moved their eyes feebly, but nothing more. They were paralyzed. A score of children that had been huddled here and there in the straw in twos and threes for warmth's sake came slowly to life and crowded around us, lifting a ring of wan, emaciated little faces. Three, too feeble to stand, sat up and stared at the strange light. The bodies of four small babies moved not at all--were, in fact, lifeless.

[Sidenote: Refugees from Poland.]

[Sidenote: Herded like cattle by soldiers.]

These people were refugees from a rural part of Poland, made homeless by the Russian military decree which ordered the destruction of all buildings and the removal of all civilians from the rearward path of the Muscovite army as it fell back before the battering attacks of the Germans from Warsaw to Dwinsk. For ten days these four old women and twenty-seven children had been in that car, with no fire, few warm clothes, and only a little dried meat, corn flour, and water to sustain life in them. This the meager fare had failed to do in the case of the four youngest. Since they had been herded into that cold box like cattle by soldiers at the station to which they had driven or walked from their blazing homes, they had been moved eastward daily in the joggling car, which traveled slowly and by fits and starts, unvisited by any one, not knowing their destination, and now too low in mind and body to care.

[Sidenote: Children forget their families.]

The two old creatures who were paralyzed when they had been dumped into the car were now apparently dying; several of the children swayed with weakness as they stood, clutching at the biscuits and sweet chocolate which we drew from our pockets. Five of them were grandchildren of one of the paralytics, three designated one of the wrinkled flour-makers by the Polish equivalent of "granny," but none of the others knew where their parents were, and six of them had forgotten their own family names or had never known them.

[Sidenote: Moscow and Petrograd overcrowded.]

The other twelve cars were like this one except that all of them had at least two or three--and usually six or seven--feeble, crackly-voiced old men with their complement of women and children, and one contained three young fellows of twenty who had probably smuggled themselves into the car and who cringed when my Polish interpreter lunged on them with his rapier of light and retreated into a corner where two cows stood with necks crossed in affection. These youths knew they had no business in that car, for even in the chaos of retreat the word had been pa.s.sed among the civilian refugees: "Women, children, and old men first in the cars; young men can walk." But there have not been enough cars even for the weak, the very young, and the very aged, and thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, have found their graves along the slushy, muddy roads they were following toward Petrograd and Moscow from the occupied provinces of Poland and the Baltic. These people in the freight cars at least had had transportation and a crude kind of shelter. But of the two million refugees who are overcrowding Moscow and Petrograd, to the great detriment of the health average of the two Russian capitals, many thousands came there several hundred weary miles on foot. And others, less determined or weaker, are still straggling in or are lingering by the way, some of the latter dying and some finding shelter in small towns between the twin big cities and the front.

[Sidenote: Millions of refugees.]

[Sidenote: People of all ranks and stations.]

Some estimates place the number of Russian refugees at from ten to fifteen million; thirteen million is the estimate of the Tatiana Committee, one of the most influential relief organizations in Russia, named after the second daughter of the Czar, who is its honorary head.

By race the refugees are princ.i.p.ally Poles, Jews, Letts, and Lithuanians, but they come from all ranks and stations of life, rich and poor alike, now all poor, thrown from their homes with nothing but the clothes on their bodies by the grim chances of war.

[Sidenote: Thousands must starve and freeze.]

In times of peace and prosperity the sudden impoverishment of such a large ma.s.s of people would tax the relief and charity of Russia to the limit; but now, when all food prices are from one hundred to three hundred per cent higher than before the war--when even the well-to-do have difficulty to get enough bread, sugar, and coal--it is inevitable that thousands of these homeless ones should starve and freeze to death.

Thousands have already suffered this fate, but hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more, will die this way before spring unless relief comes quickly and bountifully from abroad, for Russia cannot cope with the emergency alone. Unless Russia's allies or neutrals begin at once to pour into Russia a stream of food to fill the stomachs of these hungry, homeless ones, this will be the bitterest winter in Russian history, a winter whose horrors will far transcend the terrible winter of 1812, when Napoleon ravaged Poland and sacked Moscow.

[Sidenote: Great Britain must bolster weaker allies.]

Great Britain, who is holding up some of her weaker allies in many ways, sweeping mines from the White Sea for Russia, and with France bolstering the remnant of the Belgian army in Flanders, is doing much to alleviate the suffering of Russia's refugees by unofficial action. The Great Britain to Poland Fund, organized and supported by such prominent Britons as Lady Byron, Viscount Bryce, the Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of Rosebery, and the Lord Mayor of London, at the instance of Princess Bariatinsky, who is better known as the famous Russian actress, Madame Yavorska, is feeding between 4,000 and 7,000 refugees daily at Petrograd, Moscow, Minsk, and at several small towns close to the front.

[Sidenote: The Petrograd "Feeding Point."]

[Sidenote: Sheds for shelter.]

The Petrograd "Feeding Point" is a long, hastily built shed of unfinished lumber a stone's-throw from the Warsaw station. This site was well selected, for the long stone railway station, open at both ends like an aviation hangar, is the center of refugee population in the Czar's city. Not only were several hundred homeless men, women, and children sleeping on the cold stone floors of the draughty station, but other hundreds were lying about in odd corners here and there, in empty trucks and freight cars, lying within a few feet of where the crowded refugee train had left them, with no hope or ambition to make them move on. Still other hundreds, more fortunate than these, were sheltered in three sheds, similar to the "Refugees' Restaurant" in their unfinished board construction, which had been built by the Government. Each of these sheds, about thirty by sixty feet in dimensions, housed between two and three hundred persons. This crowding was made possible by the presence of platforms built one above another in triple or quadruple deck "nests" about the room, where people of both s.e.xes and of all ages slept, cooked and ate such food as they could beg, and lay all day long with expressionless, bulging eyes, half stupefied in the stifling stench of the place.

[Sidenote: Lines before the feeding stations.]

Twice a day a line formed before the door of the feeding station of such persons as were known to have no private food supply, and when the door opened they surged in, getting bra.s.s tickets at the threshold which each one exchanged in the far end of the room for a large square piece of Russian _ch.o.r.n.y khleb_--black bread--and a steaming bowl of good old English porridge served to them by the bustling ladies of the British Colony. Only enough were admitted at a time to fill the double row of board tables, yet every day from 1,000 to 1,400 were fed.

[Sidenote: The gayety of hungry youth.]

It was interesting to stand at the elbow of the buxom, indefatigably good-natured English lady who wielded the porridge spoon and watch the long, hungry file which melted away toward the tables when it reached the tall, bottomless urn that held the fragrant, steaming cereal. First came a dozen boys and girls who had lost their parents but not the irresistible gayety of hungry youth in the presence of food.

[Sidenote: A one-time rich man.]

[Sidenote: Bitterness toward the Government.]

They took their bread and porridge without even a mumbled "_Spa.s.siba_"--thanks--and shouldered each other for seats at the tables.

Then came a blind old man led by his two grandsons. His thanks were pathetically profuse. Next another graybeard, carrying an ivory cane and wearing a handsome fur coat, the only indications of his recent high station in provincial society except the unmistakable reserve and dignity of gentility. After him was a handsome Lett, who had been a station agent in Courland till his station was dynamited in the Russian retreat. None of the children gave any thanks for the food; in fact, hardly any one did except the very old. The att.i.tude of the others seemed to be that of people who were getting only a small part of their just due. Perhaps that was because they may not have realized that they were being fed by England, not by Russia, and toward Russia all of them were bitter even those who lived in the shelters the Government had built. This bitterness was indicated by the refusal of most of them to accept work proffered them by provincial or munic.i.p.al officials.

[Sidenote: No wish to begin over.]

Their att.i.tude is that, inasmuch as the Government has deliberately wiped out their homes and destroyed their means of livelihood, it is the Government's duty to support them in comfortable idleness. They seem to feel that it is adding insult to injury to ask them to begin over again in a new environment and work for their living. I asked a young Lettish railway man, living in one of the board barracks near the Warsaw station, why he had refused an offer of employment in the railway yards hard by.

"Why should I work for Russia?" he asked, bitterly. "Russia has taken from me my pretty home, my good job, and my wife and two children, who died on the road in that awful blizzard recently. Why should I work for Russia?"

"But you will starve if you do not," I suggested.

[Sidenote: Gloomy resignation.]

"_Nichevo!_"--it doesn't matter--he muttered, in gloomy resignation.

[Sidenote: A great mistake.]

[Sidenote: Everything destroyed.]

The majority of the refugees feel the way this man does. I do not refer to the refugees who left their homes voluntarily through fear of the advancing Germans, but to that greater number who were forced to leave by the compulsion of their own Government, which deliberately destroyed their homes as a military measure. Every Russian, even the military officers who were responsible for this policy of destruction, now realize that the adoption of that policy was one of the greatest mistakes Russia has made during the war. For it has cost her the support of a large and important body of Letts, Poles, Jews, and Lithuanians.

The theory was that to leave large ma.s.ses of civilians behind the forward-pus.h.i.+ng German lines would provide Germany with a large number of spies, as well as with sustenance for its armies. To some extent, too, it was believed that buildings left standing in the Russian retreat might serve as protection and cover for German artillery. So everything was destroyed--farm-houses, barns, churches, schools, orchards, even haystacks. Whenever the Russian lines retracted before the unbearable pounding of the terrible German guns, they left only a desert for the Kaiser's men to cross.

[Sidenote: Loss too great to be compensated by gain.]