Having taken Christine Zduleczna aboard, we ploughed our way out of the mud of Kovel and travelled due east towards the Front The signs of war were becoming more recent and frequent. Freight-cars in the railroad yards flapped in ribbons, tom into shreds by shells. Engines lay on their sides, as full of holes as pepper boxes. Carcases of animals were strewn about. At one point there was a pile of bones, as high as a house, picked clean of flesh. Then the rusty red of barbed wire commenced and the dreary maze of abandoned trench-systems.
There was not a sign of human habitation, not a roof or a wall left standing; and yet people lived there. How? In the timbered dug-outs which the Germans had constructed; in old gun-emplacements; in shell-holes. They lived like foxes, anywhere and anyhow by burrowing underground. And what do they feed on? In many parts of the devastated areas they are eating grass as though they were cattle. They boil it into a kind of soup. Where they have no flour of any sort, they bake bread out of a mixture of bark and acorns. But our Gray Samaritan informed us that there was almost no ruined village that we had passed, where an American Children's Relief Station had not been established. She knew, for she had established them; that was her job. Whoever dies in Poland, the children will be saved as long as America recognises their necessity. But if America were to grow forgetful, most of them would be dead before another summer. The cruelty of the situation is that only the children can be fed; the parents, the grandparents and the boys and girls above the age of fourteen have to take their chance.
The melancholy of dusk was settling over this old battlefield, where for long years men had cursed and hated and butchered one another, when we drew up at our first point of call in the trench-dwellers' colony of Switniki.
Floundering in the mud and making a strong effort to keep our footing, we crossed a trench and approached a hut constructed out of the debris of the battlefield. Quarter sections of corrugated iron, 'which the Germans had used for their gun-emplacements, had been riveted together, and the sides and top had been covered with sod. The place was in darkness when we knocked at the door. It was still in darkness when we were allowed to enter. Then, very sparingly, the only candle was lighted. It would be blown out the moment we departed. By its illumination we saw an old man and woman—they looked old, but they may not have been more than fifty. The woman's gray hair hung loose about her face; she was kneeling in a praying position in her bed. Perhaps it was the Three Kings she was expecting. This was the night when they were supposed to come, riding out of the East to leave their presents at the doors of the needy, just as twenty centuries ago they had tapped on the door of a stable in Bethlehem and found the Christ-Child in his poverty, asleep upon his mother's breast.
We gazed round the little room. It was speckless. All the rooms which we visited in this colony were. The people might be dying of starvation, but they were determined to die cleanly. That is the difference between your peasant and your city-dweller. One missed the abominable smells which accompany destitution in Warsaw. These people had the native gentleness of a race which has always been self-respecting, inventing their own music and poetry, and owning their little plot of land. They were not going to become disrespecting now.
Our host was a Pole—an exception to the community, most of whom were White Russians. He told his story simply. Before the war he had owned three acres, two cows and a team of horses. He had had a son who had gone to America and had been in the habit of sending him money. When the Russian armies were driven out of Poland by the Germans, he had been forced to move back into Russia. His farm had been cut up into trenches, as we could see for ourselves. After the Armistice he had returned to find a rubbish-heap, full of foulness. He had set to work with the little money he had to buy a horse and implements; then last summer had come the Bolshevist invasion, eating up everything like a plague of locusts. Now he had nothing. One could not fill in trenches and level a land blown about by shells without implements, merely with one's naked hands. And worst of all, during his long exile, he had lost touch with his son in America. Probably the son thought him dead. If he could only discover his son's address, everything might yet be well. So perhaps it wasn't for the Three Kings that the old mother had been listening so intently, when she had heard our footsteps in the mud and our sudden tap. As I had expected, the moment we departed the candle was blown out.
We came to another hut. This time they were White Russians. Outside the door the Soltys, or head-man of the village, joined us. Inside we found a family of seven children and a mother who was a widow. Her husband had died of typhus, but it was more true to call it starvation, she said. Here they had no candles, so they lit shavings of wood. Again, in spite of the poverty, everything was proudly speckless. An oven of baked mud had been built in one corner and the top of it afforded two of the children with a bed. And what pretty children they were, from the baby to the eldest who was a girl of seventeen! The walls were decorated with branches of spruce in case the Three Kings should come.
The story was the same as the last. They had been prosperous, owning their little farm and earning extra in the summer by hiring themselves to the big estates. Then the German invasion had driven them into exile and on their return they had found the industry of centuries blotted out. How did they live, we asked. The American kitchen took care of the children. All the children in the village would have died the Soltys said, if the Americans had not come to their rescue. In this particular family the girl of seventeen and a son of fifteen were the main supports. The boy was not present; he slept with the pony—their only possession—to prevent its being stolen. The boy and girl travelled the country in the spring and summer, hiring themselves and taking flour in payment. Very often they were cheated by the farmers, who after weeks of work would turn them adrift with nothing. And then, of course, there was the trouble of bringing the flour back—a hundred miles sometimes, from far outside the devastated areas—carrying it. They spoke uncomplainingly, merely stating facts. The girl of seventeen, who took these risks and journeys, kept smiling and nodding her confirmation. The children peeped at us from behind the mud furnace like startled rabbits.
The last family that we visited had been rich by peasant standards. They had owned forty acres, three teams of horses, six cows, many pigs and geese and hens. All that they had found on their return from exile was forty acres of polluted mud. The household consisted of a grandfather, with a white beard and a shock of black curly hair. He had the eye of a hawk and the face of an intellectual. There was his wife, the grandmother, a lean woman with a humorous mouth and eyes which held you at bay with a veiled defiance. There was their daughter, a widow, very little and meek. And then there were her four children.
“You must not judge us as you see us now,” the old man said. “You should have seen us once with all our cattle. Should I live as I do, if I could help it?”