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 weake