allowed to remain here. The Germans are
approaching and the Germans will torture you all to death if they
catch you. Take with you whatever you can carry. Everything else must
be burned and destroyed, so that the Germans won't find anything that
they can use.' That was enough to make these poor, ignorant farmers
take leave of their homesteads. By the thousands they wandered off
quickly and without much hesitation. Some were driven away like so
much cattle, day by day farther into an uncertain future. Others were
carried in long columns of wagons to the nearest railroad and still
others were led orderly by their own mayors and village elders. In
the inland of the Empire they were to found for themselves new homes.
The czar was going to look after them. Russia is powerful and rich. It
will lure the Germans into its swamps so that they will drown there
miserably. It will draw them all the way to Moscow and there they will
experience the deadly fate of 1812. Just like Napoleon will the
Germans suffer this time. This patriotic hope, however, did not
compensate the farmers for their lost homes. It is true they get
enough to eat every day. At their resting places they are fed from
field kitchens supplied and equipped by the Russian army and
administered by civil committees. Hunger they did not need to suffer.
But for all that, their home-sickness will not down, and the dislike
of the continuous wandering, the aversion to strange places, the
loathing of the unorderly, irregular life of nomads strengthens their
determination to turn off their road at the first opportunity and to
seek the long way back to their village, in spite of the terrible
Germans.

"But in the meantime the world has been turned upside down, their
homes are unrecognizable; nothing, absolutely nothing, is as it used
to be. Wherever there is the smallest nook that has remained
inhabitable, some stranger has built a nest. The new authorities speak
German, rule German, and run things in a German way. The need to
protect themselves against epidemics, and political prudence, demand
that these homeless wanderers should not be permitted to wander around
any longer at will. Into cities they are not allowed to enter, or even
to pass through them. Out in the country, the field police watch them
carefully, for more and more frequently adventurous groups are
formed--states in a very small way and without any regard for anybody
else. Strong fellows with plenty of nerve