It was misery. It was poverty. It was wretchedness. But it was home—the one fixed point in their existence. If they once forsook that, they were exposed to the merciless uncertainty of life. So they clung to it obstinately and faithfully in spite of all they had to bear and suffer, both when the Russians advanced, and when they retreated. Among their other miseries they had also learnt to know famine. When the Russians advanced, they did not leave much behind. Many a time these people begged our last slice of bread from us, to stay the worst of their hunger.
We gave to them willingly. I felt at times, that their lot was far worse than ours. We indeed might lose our lives in many different ways, and we also knew what it was to be hungry. But we had not to listen to our children crying for food, or see our tiny infants sicken and die because there was no milk to be had and the mother's breasts were empty.
I can well understand why wherever we came, the people greeted us as their deliverers.
I understand their joy and their often boundless gratitude in word and deed. I understand why the old men and the trembling women so often fell upon our necks with tears of joy.
It must be heart-breaking to see the plot of ground you love laid waste and trampled down, without being able to do anything to save it. It must be still more heart-breaking to see the home that you have cherished devoured by flames, and then, on dark and stormy nights, taking your children by the hand or on your back, and followed by terror-stricken women and bewildered old people, to flee from that home and wander along toilsome roads to uncertainty, in company with hundreds of others who know just as little where to go for help or safety.
We met many such crowds of homeless wayfarers on our march, people who could hardly drag themselves along for hunger and cold and terror.
There were miserable carts drawn by miserable, starved horses and wretched bits of furniture, piled up anyhow in haste and fear. There were people huddled together under the lee of a hedge or in a wood, or sheltering in the holes they had dug into banks of earth or dykes, wrapped in rags, starving with cold and still terror-stricken. Men gazing towards the homes from which they had fled, looking in bewilderment and despair at the down-trodden and ruined country; women lying down and trying to warm their little ones at a naked, impoverished breast, or groaning in misery and hopelessness over the dying eyes of a child; old men and old women with only one wish in the world—the sum and substance of their prayers from hour to hour being that God would take them away from all this misery, which they could not in the least comprehend and which they had not strength enough to bear.
II—"WHAT APPALLING THINGS THEY TOLD US"
And what appalling things they told us, in trembling voices and shaking with sobs!
Not only their homes, their domestic animals and their furniture had been harried by fire and sword—it cannot be otherwise in war, I suppose, for it has no mercy.