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.
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.
Refugees from Poland.
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.
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.
Moscow and Petrograd overcrowded.