The Way of the Cross. Vlas Mikhailovich Doroshevich

doctors work as hard as they can.

      They work with superhuman energy.

      But how can one cope with elemental calamity?

      And it is truly elemental.

      What can we do? said a doctor to me.

      Yesterday I had an experience. Side by side. A man was dying, a woman gave birth to a child.

      THE CHANNEL

       Table of Contents

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      II

      THE CHANNEL

      THE peasants and peasant women—in war time the village is a woman's country—come out and look at the oncoming fugitives with great curiosity.

      —Not our faces. Not our caps. They're not dressed like us, they don't speak plainly.

      The peasant women look at them closely.

      —Where do they come from?

      Everyone is rapturous concerning:

      —The people from below Riga.

      That is how the peasants designate the German colonists from the Baltic provinces.

      ​They came "with the autumn," while lit was yet warm.

      They did not hurry themselves. They took care of their fine horses.

      They came in large, fine, spacious covered carts.

      With all their household goods.

      In the provinces of Moscow, Kaluga, Smolensk, Mogilef, and Minsk, all the peasants speak of them with envy:

      —You see where these people come from. From below Riga.

      They speak with envy of the people from Holm province.

      —Especially of those who came first.

      They managed to get away in the warm weather.

      When there was something on the road for the cattle to eat.

      They drove their herds with them.

      —There was something to look at. What fine cows!

      ​The peasants also approve of the Grodno folk.

      —They have fine horses. No comparison with otirs.

      The peasant women especially admire the people from Lomzha and Lublin, and cry out:

      —What fine clothes! They're dressed up like butterflies! It's beautiful to look at them!

      When one sees them first they create a strange impression.

      Suddenly amidst the grey line of fugitives are seen—bright patches.

      Peasant women come along in bright new shawls.

      Ornamental, sumptuous.

      With such tired and mournful faces and yet dressed in their festival clothes.

      This is the most dreadful of all.

      These people have come to the very last.

      ​Everything else has been worn out, it has all gone to rags, changed to tatters.

      And at the last stopping place the peasant woman has taken out of her box or from the bottom of some little tub, her best clothes which she has hidden there till then.

      The very last.

      A ragged fugitive has still something left.

      But these well-dressed people have nothing more.

      All has gone.

      Soon they'll have nothing more to put on.

      The farther you go, the more you meet of these

      —Peasants in their best clothes.

      The people of the villages say

      —She's put on her last skirt. Yet you can see what sort of people they were.

      And our village folk say, enviously:

      ​—They've put the horses in by twos. How smartly they trot! It's evident they've been well fed. Not like ours.

      The villagers are, above all, practical.

      The peasants and their wives have bought up the fugitives' cattle.

      Ask the peasant women who guard the flocks—the women do this work now:

      —Have you bought any cows from the fugitives?

      Every one of them will answer:

      —Why not? There goes one of their cows, there's another, there's another.

      They're not willing to talk about the price they paid.

      —How much did we give? They were dear. Thirty roubles.

      But their neighbours, who have not bought cows for themselves, will tell you:

      —It's impossible for her to pay such a price! She ought to say outright that she practically got them for nothing.

      ​The villages round about make a lot of money through the fugitives.

      They do nothing but bake enormous quantities of black bread and cart it to the relief points.

      At a rouble and a half, at a rouble seventy, even at two roubles the pood.

      Unheard-of prices!

      And there are places through which pass 12,000 fugitives a day.

      There is some fear that the villagers have given themselves up too much to bread making.

      Will they have enough for themselves by and by?

      Has the harvest been so good as to allow them to feed not only themselves but hundreds of thousands of others?

      The towns, villages, and hamlets along the road are filled with terror.

      —The fugitives will eat us all up!

      —They're like locusts.

      ​Utterly worn out, the fugitives turn in from the highway and make their camp in the forest at the very edge of the road.

      They stay there for days, for a week, upon occasion for two weeks.

      They chop wood and make fires.

      They cut it down, not asking

      —Whose is it?

      They cut wood indiscriminately, continuously.

      When they have absolutely made a space bare, they move on farther.

      They eat into the forest.

      And behind them they leave the fresh-hewn stumps of trees, the bare glade, the black traces of the bonfires.

      They trample down everything.

      No grass remains, not a bit of hay, no leaves from the trees which they've cut down, no branches—the ground is covered only with a sort of grey dust, with a litter of light rubbish.

      ​All around is a stench from the filth they've left behind.

      Sometimes—indeed often—by the side of the road they leave a new-made grave marked by a white, roughly cut wooden cross.

      As you go along the road you can see the forest smoking here, there, and in every direction.

      These are the bonfires of the fugitives.

      At night the fugitives wander about in the neighbourhood.

      They dig up the potatoes, take all the cabbages, drag off stacks of corn waiting to be ground, and piles of hay.

      At