rom Moscow to Warsaw
through Smolensk, was a string of thirteen freight cars, the short,
chunky Russian kind--barely half as long as the American--looking as
flimsy, top-heavy, and unwieldy as houseboats on wheels. No locomotive
was tied to the string, and from the windward side, where the cars were
whitewashed by the biting blizzard that had already stopped all traffic
with its drifted barricades, they had the desolate look of stranded
empties. But the leeward door of each car was open a few inches,
permitting the egress of odors that told any one who chanced to pass
that the big rolling boxes were loaded with human freight, closely
packed and long on the journey.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Refugees from Poland.]

[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