[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: Moscow and Petrograd overcrowded.]
The other twelve cars were like this one except that all of them had at least two or three--and usually six or seven--feeble, crackly-voiced old men with their complement of women and children, and one contained three young fellows of twenty who had probably smuggled themselves into the car and who cringed when my Polish interpreter lunged on them with his rapier of light and retreated into a corner where two cows stood with necks crossed in affection. These youths knew they had no business in that car, for even in the chaos of retreat the word had been passed among the civilian refugees: "Women, children, and old men first in the cars; young men can walk." But there have not been enough cars even for the weak, the very young, and the very aged, and thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, have found their graves along the slushy, muddy roads they were following toward Petrograd and Moscow from the occupied provinces of Poland and the Baltic. These people in the freight cars at least had had transportation and a crude kind of shelter. But of the two million refugees who are overcrowding Moscow and Petrograd, to the great detriment of the health average of the two Russian capitals, many thousands came there several hundred weary miles on foot. And others, less determined or weaker, are still straggling in or are lingering by the way, some of the latter dying and some finding shelter in small towns between the twin big cities and the front.