There is no repudiating the situation. The streets swarm with soldiers recently returned from an ignominious war, in which they never had an interest—released to starve upon the streets. War is not the root-evil, but the war was largely responsible for the situation here so far as the beggary is concerned. With so large a portion of the able-bodied men of the country called away on unproductive campaigns of destruction, the women and children were forced to fight the wolf themselves. Warsaw’s traffic in prostitutes is as extensive as it is world-wide. The total population of the city is 750,000. The number of professional prostitutes, carrying “yellow passports” (i.e., passports issued by the authorities to prostitutes), in the city is between fifty and sixty thousand. It is asserted on reliable authority that there are regularly organized companies dealing in young girls, who supply not only Europe, but distant places, like South American capitals. Piccadilly and Regent Street, in London, which so frequently horrify Americans, are as nothing compared to Warsaw’s boulevards.
More than this, business was at a standstill and industry disorganized and deteriorating. Strike following strike in the trades necessity supports. One week the bakers were trying to get enough of the bread of their own baking to fill the mouths of their children. Another week the men of some other trade, but ever and always somewhere the hopeless, heartbreaking struggle was on. Violence is an instinct with the Poles. A few of the bakers stuck to their ovens. The result was that the early nights of the week were characterized by riots, usually suppressed by a volley from Cossacks’ rifles. The day I arrived in Warsaw there were twenty-five reported clashes between the authorities and the people. The following day there were thirty. For weeks before the hospital ambulances had been called out on an average of thirty times a day for casualties resulting from lawlessness—either on the part of the people or of the authorities, for no one is guiltless here.
The wounded from a recent Jewish massacre were in a hospital on the outskirts of the city. Driving to visit the place I inquired at my hotel how much I should pay a cab-driver to take me there. “Must you go, sir?” said the hotel porter. “Do not go, sir, if it is possible to avoid doing so.”
“Why?” I asked in surprise.
“It is a dangerous road.”
“But at ten o’clock in the morning?”
“A man was killed there yesterday afternoon in daylight. Many have been shot there recently.”
The hospital was located three quarters of an hour’s drive from the center of the city, in a district which somewhat suggested the Bowery, but more closely resembling Commercial Road in Whitechapel.
On the way I met cavalry patrol after patrol—Cossacks and dragoons. All rode in “open order.” That is to say, two abreast in the center of the road, then one at either side of the road, and so on. This was the current precaution against bombs. Rifles were unslung and held in the right hand ready for instant action. The advance guard of an army scouting a battle-ground for the enemy would take no greater precautions. A few days before there had been a fusilade directly in front of the hospital. No one knew exactly what started it, but members of two political parties had begun dueling in the open street. The matter was reported to military headquarters and a special troop of Cossacks detailed to the scene. They arrived one hour after the incident, but having been sent out to do something and not knowing what else to do they fired several volleys at the hospital, breaking a few windows, but fortunately doing no other damage.
What with the injured from Warsaw riots and the wounded from the massacre, this hospital, except for the women and children who lay there, punctured by bullets and slashed by swords and bayonets, was not unlike an army hospital. I found a child of four years whose leg had been broken by a soldier’s rifle. According to a young girl who was very bright and intelligent, she and the youngster of four and a young boy were standing together on the doorstep of their home. A company of soldiers were coming up the street on their mission of murder and horrors unmentionable, when one of them deliberately fired at the trio. The bullet struck the boy first, killing him, then the child’s leg, breaking it, and glanced upward, lodging in the girl’s stomach.[16] To say that these were “dangerous” persons to the Russian government is the absolute extreme of absurdity.