Chapter 4 - The Blight

Summary

From the Russian army I turned aside to the still more terrible picture of the homeless hordes of the noncombatants. That which I saw of these homeless hordes is more terrible because while the Russian soldier gives all for Russia it appears that the Russian refugee has all taken away.

I awoke one morning in a little town in the middle of western Russia to the realization that I had tossed about, disturbed in sleep by voices which, in the gray dawn, had mumbled along under my window. Like the flow of a stream, the voices were going by in the narrow street below, and at first I thought they were the voices of new Russian regiments swinging onward toward the front again with the rhythmic marching swing of the Czar's armies. But it was a stranger and even more tragic procession upon which I looked.

During the night snow had fallen upon the streets and upon the two-storied pink, gray, green, and pale-blue plastered shops and houses of the place. With their uncertain, plodding, stumbling feet causing this dry snow to creak beneath, a straggling irregular procession of children, women, and men moved onward in the gray of breaking morning. Some walked straight, bearing parcels and sacks in their hands; others were bent by the burdens of their possessions, or by mere weariness, or as if the eternal cold had broken the spirit. The heads of all, even of the young children, were set doggedly. All talked or shouted or whined, but none save one of all the hundreds turned to look behind, and so it appeared that the mind of each ragged creature was traveling a little faster than the body toward an unknown goal. The one who looked backward was an old man, and because, while he remained within sight, he stopped, turned, stared at the night which was retreating over the western horizon, gazed far away wistfully, and shook his head as if he could not understand, I thought that he was a sadder sight than all the rest and perhaps more to be pitied. He could not forget the years he had lived nor his home. Foolish Russian: all that made life for him had been wiped out, and it was evident that he still hoped that this fact by strange magic would disappear into the haze of dreams!