f they are successful. But what
if they fail? At any rate they, as well as the troops who fight under
them, have the glamour of fighting, the promise of glory, the sense of
duty well done, to sustain them. But what of those others, equally or
even more numerous, on whose fields and forests, in whose streets and
market places, around whose houses and churches the battles rage and the
guns roar? What of the women and children, the sick and the old, whose
fathers, husbands and sons are doing the fighting or, perhaps, have
already laid down their lives upon the altar of patriotism? What is
there left for them to do when they see their houses go up in flames,
their few belongings reduced to ashes, their crops destroyed and even
their very lives threatened with death and sometimes--worse yet--with
dishonor?

All this and more, millions upon millions of Russians and Germans, rich
and poor alike, had to suffer most cruelly. And on the eastern front
this suffering in a way, perhaps, was even more severe than in the west.
For there the actual fighting, while extending over an equally long
front, was much more concentrated, and after the first few months did
not move forward and backward; and existence, except in the immediate
vicinity of the firing line, was at least possible, even if dangerous
and precarious. But in the east thousands upon thousands of square miles
in East Prussia, in West Russia, and especially in Poland, the fighting
passed in ever advancing and retreating waves as the surf rolls along
the beach, and soon gunfire and marching millions of armed men had
leveled the country almost as smoothly as the waves of the ocean grind
the sand.

In East Prussia the devastation wrought by the Russians, some through
wanton lust for destruction and in unreasoning hate for the enemy, but
mostly through the pressure of military necessity, was terrible,
especially east of the Mazurian Lakes and south of the Niemen. But
there, at least, the poor inhabitants had the consolation of being able
to return to their destroyed homes after the Russians had been finally
driven out and to begin to build up again what war had destroyed, and in
this they had the help and support of their highly organized government
and their more fortunate compatriots from the interior.

In Poland, however, especially in the rural districts, even that
consolation was lacking. For after German and Russian armies alike had
passed over the country again and ag