THE HOMELESS HORDES OF RUSSIA.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11686, 1 May 1916, Page 2

THE HOMELESS HORDES OF RUSSIA.

MILLIONS OF OUTCASTS REE FROM WAR. (By RICHARD WASHBURN CHILD, in " Collier's.") Ha,ring tossed about, disturbed in Bleep by voices which mumbled along under my window, I awoke" at last and realisod that I was in a little town in ! the middle of western Russia, and that | it was grey dawn. I Like the flow of a stream, the voices I were going by in the narrow street below, and at first I thought they were tho voices of new Russian regiments swinging onward toward the front again with tho rhythmic marching swing of the Czar's armies. But it was a stranger and even moro tragic procession upon which I fixed my gaze. During the night snow had fallen upon the streets and npon twostoreyed pink, grey, green and pale-blue plastered shops and houses of the place. With their uncertain, plodding, stumbling feet, causing this dry snow to creak beneath, a straggling, irregular procession of children, women and men moved onward in tho grey of breaking morning. Some walked straight, bearing parcels and sacks in their hands; others were bent by the burdens of their possessions, or by mere weariuess, or as if the eternal cold,had broken the spirit. The heads of all, even of the young children, were set doggedly. All talked or shouted or whined, but none save one of all tho hundreds turned to look behind, and so it appeared that the mind of each ragged oreature was travelling a little faster than the body towards an unknown goal. The one who looked backward was an old man, and because, while he remained within sight, he stopped, turned, stared at the nigLt whioh was retreating over the western horizon, gazed far away wistfully, and shook his head as if he could not understand, I thought that he was a sadder sight than all the perhaps more to be pitied. He could not forget the years he had lived nor his home. Foolish Russian; all that made life for him had been wiped, out, and it was evident that he still hoped that this fact by strange magic would disappear into the haze of dreams! He and his fellows, plunging onward, half fed, half starved, half clothed, and half frozen, had come, no doubt from a village near the front which the Russian officers had ordered evacuated and burned for military necessity." Tbey were refugees. TEN MILLION OUTCASTS. In Russia, when one speaks of refugees, one does nob mean, as one might in other belligerent countries, those who, for safety's sake only, have moved away from danger; one means men or women or children who have fled from the scorch of war, as couwtless animal and insects fly before tho approach of fire in grass or timber. In Russia "refugee" usually means one who has had all past association permanently rubbed out, as one rubs writing from a blackboard; the Russian refugee usually has lost village, home, animals, personal belongings, and often nil friends, relatives, and even sense of the points of tho compass. In front of him is the vast Russian plain and the future; behind him is the lost past. Life, constructed year- after vear • the cup from which he drank, the room in which h, s grandfather died, and even the new from the back dooi; have been wiped away now. Life is erased. Dazed frost-bitten sick, footsore, a human being stripped of most of the distinctions ithich had separated him from Ins cow I or his p, g dinging now to existence I as nia most precious possession, herd. jng w*h others, as sheep in * s ?ormor ~mmal falls behind: on and on h a goes. uu

Where? God knows. 1 as i ed a member of one of the war committees in Moscow how manv refu «e» were in Russia. He said: < * Fou^ 1 ', /fr ob , abl y eleven million." i said: 'I do not believe tint wo realise this thing in the United Stats " The Russian artillery officer at vSetok o whom I spoka then replied: -Nor «o we. But it has been exaggerated Srj&S'™ eight -"1 Eight or nine million! His low es imate was more than the total popu latiou of Canada! p p ? a time I asked: •< Where do He"said: "Ah, about such a thin* who can tell? There is nothing so saf I have seen with my own eyes a womar' whose journey over the field* and S She had to stop. \± ej ■ were both f

T Jw P * tro g™d there are a rnii.h'on new indents and many of these are7eS%l° n ««>od the long journey front t/ on the ™ I «-ir Q Mo^? w the number is over ?ha?w°?-l T1 "V S the contribution i 5,,! m ? ln ,t ,? s a contribution of individuals whose lives have been upmdwUr h Past * are °Miterate£ and whoso futures are as blank as imprinted pages. " What will be their destinv?" J asked of one of tho editors best/known in Kussia.

He said: I f ear that destiny has too much just now in her head to make any plans for these migrating millions. Tho bP *T V - S ft 11 ° f tile has assumed treat significance as compared to the fate of one of these." Nowhere could I receive anv clear answer to the question.- of what was to become of all this homeless horde. I went to Vladislas Zukowski. perhaps the most prominent man in the public affairs or the Poland of yesterday, and considered the Polish leader in tho Ihird Duma.

He shook }h head. "I can orlv speak for Poland," he said. "The number of Polish refugees in Russia, as distinguished from tho other refugees, probably is nearly a million and a half ine Russian Government contributes five or eix millions of roubles every month for their maintenance and about ten millions of roubles hare been spent en their clothing. Bnt " He paused and we both understood that sua million roubles a month meant an expenditure of a little over a dollar per refugee. * "In August and September, and' even later, no relief action had been organised." he -went on. "Thousands upon thousands of children lost or perished from exposure and exhaustion all over the fields and roads of Western Russia. The land is loaded with unidentified burials. Polish national institutions have centred their efforts of relief to-day in the Congress of Polish Institutions in Moscow. The Russian Government regarded the relief action favourably and granted large credits. Many of our refugees are SECURE FROM STARVATION. "It is not only tho peasant who has suffered; understand that tho landowners and professional classes ha-vo also lost everything. No compensa tion is in sight. Sometimes the armj authorities can act quickly to protect those who have lost everything bj army service, but the civil authorities will have to delay indefinitely relief to ruined _ land owners and those in the professions. Owing to the uncertaintj of what is to heconio of them, the refugee. Poles in Russia, whether peasants

or not, are in terrible bitterness. Moral depression is evident. There is nothing to live for. " Perhap3 this depression could be relieved materially by sympathy from the western nations. But remember that such expressions of sympathy must not bo of the kind to irritate. Russian opinion, for that would be fatal. Remember, too, that after the Russian army retired from Poland the Polish question was no longer an internal question of tho Russian Einpiro; it is now an international question." The real truth is that Russia herself cannot conceive the magnitude of the hordes of homeless staggering out of the west, wandering over Russian fields aud roads, fleeing this way and that without plan or purposes, dazed by war; old men and women and children driven eastward across the great plain, as insects scurry out of fields aflame, and in their countless numbers making ridiculous the importance of tho human individual.

With refugees, educated and uneducated, Polish and' Russian, Jew and Gentile, young and old, directly when I could, through an interpreter when I could not, I talked. The similarity of their stories produced a strange effect. The, repetition time after time of a series of events by which war and fate had caught each one by the throat, torn each away from life aud left him little but dawn and dusk, pain and chaos and the dull remnants of his senso of self-preservation, produced a feeling that destiny had a like fate in store for us all. It was hard to realise that my people in tho United States were busy distinguishing between good cooking and bad, between becoming clothes and those clothes which are unbecoming, between mattresses of felt and thoso of hair. Why. here in Russia, seven, eight, ten million people had stumbled forward, all going at life blindly, and some were dropping into roadside ditches morning," noon and night. Always the story was the same, and so at lavst there looms tip

A GREAT PICTURE OF THE REFUGEE HORDES.

War is afar. News comes of battles and the changing fortunes of the conflict en the great Russian front. Day after day troops pour by out cf Russia's great reserve of men toward the conflagration of war. And then, little bv little, war creeps toward the village or the town. Those who livo in the houses stand at their doorways at d'usk to see waggon and motor trucks laden .with wounded rumble away toward railroads aud hospitals set up in the rear of the army. The fighting front is writhing like a snake, they say. Soldiers limning back from field hospitals tell of the gains and losses and of the terrible spray of metal from coneen< trated German artillery fire. War is coming toward the village! The people instinctively look toward the west waiting for war to lift its head over the horizon, to come.flowing like molten metal through the grove? of trees beyond the town. "There was something childish about that," said a refugee doctor to me. " All our people ■ kept looking and looking." I thought of tho way children stand on a kerb listening for the first strains of tho band and watching for the first flecks .of colour of the circus parade. But here in these villages the people, lifting their noses to the faint breeze from the setting sun, could smell war. Wax was coming. At night, _ miles away, there were red flushes in the skv! It was always the same. People, frightened, began to send their valuables to friends in cities. Rumours poured into the villages. Soldiers, Red Cross nurses, refugees from farther west, camo hurrying through, bearing endless, conflicting stories from which no conclusion could be reached. War might swallow the town, and it might not.

•' Those who flee show their folly/' said tho keeper of the meat shop. But the Russian priest, in his long, black, threadbare robe, shook his head. Some of the landed proprietors had gone.; they had money enough to reach the railroad and Kiev; others of them able to go still remained, doubtless because it was incredible. that destruction could come, and in one swoop wipe out tho picture of a lifetime. The sound of the guns was so far away; rarely were they heard. There were miles and miles between the village and the Unbelievable. And, as for the peasants, the ablebodied men left were not many, and women and children could not bo expected' to rise from, the supper table and fly headlong across the stubble fields into the Russian winter. Tho moment bad not come, and so tho life of the village went on. SUFFERERS DELUGE THE CITY. It went on until there came a daybreak which brought the sound 'of cavalry in the village streets. A dozen Cossacks escorting ono of their officers had ridden out of the. night, and in front of the telegraph station _ they sat astride their horses in slouching attitudes, suggestive of the lack o.f sleep. Not long after their arrival an officer of infantry sent four men out with posters to plaster against the walls aud posts. The order had come. The village was to be evacuated! When the clatter over this order was at its height a crackling sound was heard, and anyone who looked up at the mansion of the richest man in all the town could see smoke bellying out of its open doors and flames licking through its roof and igniting the oily tops of _ evergreens which overspread it. It, was the first. In substance the story was aL ways the same. In advance there is destruction, but in no advance is there destruction such as that which goes" on in retreat. Therefore the village which might become for the, Germans a haven and a resting place in which some vestige of shelter or remnants of food might be- found must be turned' into a coal-black waste of smoking ruins hissing beneath the fall of the cold rain of winter.

The time had come for flight. Some-r times tho notice was given days beforehand; sometimes there was no notice but that of red-eyed, blue-mouthed' soldiers marching in a broken burlesque of the wonderful Russian march rhythm, dragging field pieces through the mud in retreat. And (sometimes whole towns must be on the move before nightfall, fleeing toward—Nowhere.

In flight there develops the communal spirit. I have seen refugees come out of tho fields and off the roadsides west of a Russian railroad town in groups of fives and tens. Though these groups had tramped and ridden from evacuated places far apart, and had never seen each other before, thev were all possessed of the one idea of'reaching together a main thoroughfare. This idea bound group to group until the station was

CROWDED WITH WANDERING HUMANITY, the floor so covered with the prostrate bodies of old men and children, sleeping off their exhaustion, but sticking together as if_ mere numbers had virtue* of salvation, and tho goneral accumulation so great that the railroad was forced to furnish box cars to move the soggy crowd onward again. For it is the madness of the refugee to seek the railroad. So it is always: the field to the path, the path to the roadway, the roadway to the thoroughfare, the thoroughfare to the railroad, of which there arc so few. in Russia, and then on to the city; to the centre, to the place—any place—where the rest of living beings have crowded together! Tho railroad .and Moscow, Kiev and Petrograd are like magnets toward which the refugees, like tiny iron filings, are dragged. They feel within then tho answer to some irresistible call of gregariousnoss. And such lias been tho movement of the homeless millions.

The number of those who have died on the way will never be known. How many unburied corpses are covered by the snow of the JJivsinn plain cannot bo rruosvod ; 'ln- thaw of tho *■ priii g v.iil \<_'il. I'll.mi- mimes have.

gene; they will bo forgotten. Thousands will never know whether mothers, fathers, child ron, brothers, sisters, or wives are dead or merely lost forover.

The stream of drivon humanity which eddies around the metropilitan railroad terminals, in spito of all efforts of the Government to shut off tho unwelcome Hood, is mado up of great numbers of young women and almost no young men. There are old .men, infirm or aged women, and endless children who stil! laugh, chatter and fall asleep like young tired kittens or puppies wherever a bit of warmth causes drowsiness, without realisation of the calamity behind them and the chaos of life into which they fare forward. But it is the youug women who stare ahead so blankly out of their frightened brown and blue eyes. The others, thoughtless, dull with age or ignorant in youth, find tho drama 'of the day in a plate of soup or a scrap of rag to wind about a cold red wrist; it is only the young women who seem to sense tho menace of tomorrows. The cities themselves are dazed by the situation; the accumulation of hordes coming from somewhere and going nowhere is frightful. These people cannot be allowed to die; there would be difficulty iu finding means to bury them all! And so the dazed and frightened composite face of tho refugee stares into the dazed, frightened face of the city and each challenges the other for an answer.

EFFORTS MADE FOR RELIEF. Into the gullets of the cities pours the flood, and the cities cannot digest and assimilate it I counted 600 refugees coming in dripping with melting snow through the gate of a soup kitchen in Petrograd; surely not over 100 were capable of any productive labour. It was a crowd of dependents. They, were a selected lot because they were the individuals who had reached the end of their, pilgrimage by hook or by crook. They had started for Petrograd, and, while others had fallen on roadsides or interned themselves iu hospitals or waysido relief stations or been considerate enough to die on the mad journey, these had arrived. But even these constituted a mob without a leaven of hope. "They are mostly agricultural people," said the bureaucrat who deals with tho committees of relief. " Children, useless old men, a few women of maturity and young women who cannot read or write. At the best not one in four can be said to be self-supporting, and tho 25 per cent who are capable, of labour have no education for labour in cities.. Nor have the Russian cities any vast labour market to absorb their terrible numbers. Do you know what General says? Ho says it would b* a great mercy to set up a guillotine at all tho railroad stations; that the guillotine would save so much suffering to the millions of the lost and to Russia."

In a crude way the cities try to keep together the refugee's body and his soul. Great barracks have been built of wood. Warehouses have been opened;

I went to one of these hopeless hotels. There one can see straw laid along the two walls with a walking space between, and hurrying down this dimlylit pathway, with hundreds of human beings from anywhere (stretched out upon the straw, one can find that memories of cattlo shows and exhibits of live stock come back to the mind so vividly that it is hard to reli'se that these odours rise from humanity. That terrible infections have not been sweeping along with these herds of mankind is something to make one gasp; that epidemics may not come down upon the homeless hordes is the. SUBJECT FOR A THOUGHTFUL RUSSIAN PRAYER.

No ono knows how -fhe hundreds of thousands are fed. Not all the feeding stations which have been established can take care of the demands of the mouths. Tho hunger of the refugees is/ like the hunger of young birds helpless in the nest with mouths agape creating nothing and ready to consume anything, and t|iis hunger has the usual, animal insistence that to be fed is the trade made with Nature when one consents to go on living. In exactly the same spirit the refugees take, that which is given them. Their insjstence to be fed. is inspiriting because it measures the strength of purpose of mankind to live. That they are ablo to complain that they have not had enough or that the food which they have is not goad is a pleasant fact to observe, because it indicates that humanity, even in the last ditch, eternally cries out for better and for more.,

I was watching a group of soldiers between Mogilev and the fighting front sharing their rations with a "half-starved group of refugees. The dirty, frostcracked hand of an old bent man roso in tTio air holding a piece of white bread aloft,' and from beneath this breacT the old man roar6cl his execrations to the skies. " The Russian soldier is a good fellow," said I to the officer who sat beside, me in the army motor-car. "Apparently he is always willing to share his food with these wanderers driven out of the burned-over country." " Yes. And stand ingratitude like that of the old man who is whining because the bread is not black," said the other. "But who cares? The loss of everything is enough to spoil one's temper."

And yet. in that group which, having fed, trudged on in pairs or in single file toward Nowhere, there was more than the mere living up to the obligation not to die. There was something of the picturesque. Three of the young women whose cheeks were pink in the cold wore their hair in peculiar braids bound about their neclcs so that the hair would serve to keep out the fine, dry snow which the icy wind blew across the Russian plain. The children, whose short, tired, legs dragged on, were clad in materials of many colours, and one wore a meal sack through which armholes had been cut and beneath which a stuffing of slraw made the slender body

APPEAR TO BE THE BODY OF A GNOME.

Privation has aged the faces of tho children., hut still they laugh as thev go. The older figures bend forward. Women too old to leave the hearthsicio trudge along toward uncertain nightfalls, aJid men, who have lived long years and accumulated a maze of wrinkles upon patient peasant faces under and near a single thatched roof in Galicia or Poland, now lift their rope-bound feet mechanically, one after the other, because suddenly fate has said that there is no one spot in which they may stay.

The typical refugee band was picturesque because it was clad in many colours and .many .strange and ragged draperies. And it. was a band, not only of tragedy, but also of romance because it was more itinerant than the gypsies s<nd its end was more unreal and mythical and mysterious than tho pot of gold behind the rainbow. It is difficult to read the thoughts behind the peasant faces. "They are expressionless as platters," said a. Russian Red Cross nurse. "They must lave been contorted when war crept upon them and drove them from their little world. But now all emotion is worn out." "RICH BECOME BEGGARS." So it is! I .have watelied them enter feeding stations with countenance after countenance of the hundreds as bare of meaning as the bottoms of so many milk pails. Peasants and occasional former shopkeepers and artisans aiike 6kow the same look of dulled sensibilities. There are almost no flashes of joy, of grief, of hope, or self; thero are hunger, weariness and the other expressions of animals. Sometimes in the crowds, undistinguished by clothes or cleanliness, will appear one figure whose bearing and whose eyes show a different state of mind. To one of tbese I asked an interpreter to speak. "I was a doctor," said tho lonely man. •''.[ had the position of '.lie »vel!l-

loved physician in a group of towns. I owned several houses and I lived woll. I had been to Berlin and to London. But the army swept back upon us in the retreat from "Warsaw. Finally all wont and left burning baggage waggons closo to tho wooden houses. A groat wind blew, and the fire- swept all away. My own roof was higher than any, and from it tho flames jumped into tho woodland. All night long, as we ran away, tho. sky was red. The people were driving pigs and cattle before them and pushing cars piled high with their belongings over the fields. None wished to go too far, because they dreamed that they could go back after a time and build up their homes again. Tho sky was rod, and I could see tho faces of my old friends. At tho end of two days there were twonty-five of us in one lot and there was nothing to eat. An old man died under the full sun- There was not a, treo or a shelter standing anywhere. We could hear artillery far away, and then as far as we could see everything had been burned—fields, woods, fenaes, houses, all the grass. There was no food for tho animals and so they were abndoned. ALL THE WORLD WAS CHARRED BLACK and dusted over with grey ashes. Sometimes we found a horse which had foundered."

The interpreter asked him other questions. He said that he had a wife. He had left her at a refugee camp, while he had gono out to find food and water.

" But when I came back soldiers had driven all before them. I have never seen her since. There were no telegraphs, no, trains, no news. The world was blank. She had gone. Days later I found a little girl of five in the woods. She.had been with us. But she could tell me nothing. I began to forget all I know of my profession. I can do nothing or very little now. All is strange. And here is whevo I must feed—there is no other way to keep w'fe in my body."

He reached for his bowl of soup and stared at tho steam which arose from it as if the vapours were those ascending around an oracle which might speak of the future.

"The peasants suffer most in body." said the Russian nurse, smoothing her starched white headdress. '' But the educated persons, used to'luxury, suffer more in the mind. I have heard of the suffering in Belgium, but there, at least, is shelter and familiar surroundings. Here in Russia refugees have been driven hundreds of miles from a land which few will ever see again. Men who were rich—landowners, teachers and professional men and their wives and children—are like beggars of the gutter." "What will become of them? No one can say," replied an official of the Department of the. Interior. " We have tried to arrange colonies in Siberia, The Siberian members of the Duma opposed us. Some of those who acted as if they were representatives of tho refugees opposed us. Some money has been appropriated for relief. Then the Jews—whatever one may think of them in Russia—have done wonderful things to help their own kind. Wo want to .keep the refugees out of the cities. We ought to be shipping carloads to Siberia. That would be wisest."

One evening I went to supper with a Russian family in Petrograd. The other guests—more than two dozen in number—were grave old men and healthy young women. Some played violin, 'cello and piano, while others chatted in corners. _ There were music and some low singing, and after a time nearly all joined in Polish dances, whirling this way and that and emphasising the rhythm of tho music by stamping the feet. Under the light from the chandelier in the high ceiling it was possible to see, for the first time, that of all these Polish guests, so welKpoised in manner, so equipped to converse entertainingly o.f worldwide affairs, and so plainly accustomed to luxury, the clothing was shabby. ALL WORE AN AIR OF POVERTY.

"My friends are all refugees from Poland," said the hostess. Besides attending a family of seven children, this hostess has a position of importtance as the statistician of one or the large Government bureaus; she represents the large class of Russian women who are showing more ability, more skill in organisation, and more cool constructive sense than any like class of Russian men..

'•Refugees!" " That stout old man over there was one of the large landholders," she said. "He now has nothing. Landholding is a business in itself. He has no training for anything else. What can he do? Well, you see, his life is ended. " There is a young girl with ' the mass of golden hair," she went on. '; She has lost all the members of her family. She was engaged to a young officer. Ho was shot. She came to Petrograd without so much as an extra handkerchief. Sho has been here for months and has' not seen anyone she ever saw before or heard news from anyone she ever knew. And yet she can laugh. "The bearded gentleman who joins in none of this merrymaking is a professor from Warsaw. His name is • .. tie always appears to be deep in thought. He is a learned man. but he cannot understand. Some think he is going mad. but that, is absurd. He i* reflecting. It is so hard to have one's country destroyed and life blown away as if it were a fine powder to disappear in one puff of war. Oh, Moscow and Petrograd are full of such refugees with their brooding minds."

THE PEASANTS WITH THEIR PLATTER FACES

sometimes show flashes of realisation. Perhaps no peasants are as meditative as the Russians; among them are many illiterate philosophers.

Ono of these sat on the stone kerbing near the Warsaw station staring iuto the gutter or dully watching the new regiments of tan-coated soldiers who were drilling in the square under a blinding snowstorm.

"You see there is a man who cannot ht* a soldier," said the army doctor who was with us. "He is knotted by rheumatism, There is a man who has suffered pain, T tell you." "Don't sit rhere," he said in Russian.

"Why not?" asked the refugee, caressing his bandaged legs with his flannel-swathed hands. " The snow is cool."

He spoke again, leering at the doctor with one eye closed.

"What does he say? I asked. • "He says there is no past —there is no future, the doctor told me. "Ho says that, when there is neither, it is wise to remain seated."

But in spite of all the misery of the great, homeless hordes of Russia, the number and woe of which have never been equalled, and in spite of the fact that life is rubbed out behind them and that they stare toward Nowhere, the hundreds one can see. suffuse a kind of a glow. T think it is the glow of tho human instinct to keep on.

THE SPARK OF HOPE.

Thousands of square, miles ore empty and blackened by the scorch of war; over the charred country lies an unbroken blanket of snow. More persons than live in the whole of Canada are driven haphazard over the Russian plain or into the. overloaded cities. Sumo, half mad, have forgotten their names. These millions are almost like animals pursued, herded, driven., desperate. But. not quite. The millions—the- seven —the ten —the fourteen millions—whatever one may guess —arestill suffusing a. glow which animals could not. It is the glow of human instinct to press on toward intelligent and eternal purposes. Tho horse-, the cow and the pig lio down and die on the Russian roadway, lb is only tho refugee who reaches the cities.

The refugee is often nearly an animal, but never quite an animal; the refugee stripped of all else still carries with him tho human Will.