"Your high nobility! Permit me to explain. The starosta advised me to wait for the Germans and not go away. I did not agree. He got angry and refused to give me a certificate. Decide for yourself! Show God's mercy, and give me one now."
VII—STORY OF THE WANDERING MULTITUDES—AND THEIR PRAYERS
Down below, under the cliff, is an immense marshy meadow, and there, what a wild, what a strange picture.... At that point I thought of the late V. V. Verestchagin. Only he with his gray tones could have painted the gray horror of this life, only he could have painted the dreadful picture in all its horror.
For several acres the whole meadow was covered with abandoned and broken carts. The iron parts had been unloosed and taken away, wheels lay separately, tilts separately. How many were there there? Tens of thousands. The whole plain was gray with carts, with wheels, with shafts and single shafts. Having sold their horses for cash, the fugitives abandoned their carts here, only taking with them the iron parts they could unfasten.
Among this gray wilderness of ruin fugitives were wandering. These people who preserved their horses and could still go on—in their own carts. They sought here any bits of harness or shafts or wheels that could serve them better than their own. From various separate parts they put together whole carts. Some of the branded horses had come here. Seeking perhaps, by scent or by instinct, the carts to which they had once been harnessed. They wandered and stumbled like shadows, hardly keeping their feet. They fell. There lies one. He breathes heavily, suddenly quivers tremulously. In his round, glassy eyes there is suffering. He tries to raise his head from the ground. He has not strength to hold it up, and lets it fall again. Then suddenly he begins to wail, just like a man. A little farther off lies a horse already stiff, and its long, long, lean legs stretch out.
The crowd does not melt away but increases. Here it is cold, here there is no forest. And the fugitives press together closely, family to family. Only warming themselves in the smoke of their bonfires. There are bonfires day and night. Wandering women go from house to house in the neighbourhood. They stop outside the doors, crying:
"Give, for Christ's sake, give us wood."
And, the heart anguished, they give.