Down below, under the cliff, is an immense marshy meadow, and there,
what a wild, what a strange picture.... At that point I thought of the
late V. V. Verestchagin. Only he with his gray tones could have painted
the gray horror of this life, only he could have painted the dreadful
picture in all its horror.
For several acres the whole meadow was covered with abandoned and
broken carts. The iron parts had been unloosed and taken away, wheels
lay separately, tilts separately. How many were there there? Tens of
thousands. The whole plain was gray with carts, with wheels, with
shafts and single shafts. Having sold their horses for cash, the
fugitives abandoned their carts here, only taking with them the iron
parts they could unfasten.
Among this gray wilderness of ruin fugitives were wandering. These
people who preserved their horses and could still go on--in their own
carts. They sought here any bits of harness or shafts or wheels that
could serve them better than their own. From various separate parts
they put together whole carts. Some of the branded horses had come
here. Seeking perhaps, by scent or by instinct, the carts to which
they had once been harnessed. They wandered and stumbled like shadows,
hardly keeping their feet. They fell. There lies one. He breathes
heavily, suddenly quivers tremulously. In his round, glassy eyes there
is suffering. He tries to raise his head from the ground. He has not
strength to hold it up, and lets it fall again. Then suddenly he begins
to wail, just like a man. A little farther off lies a horse already
stiff, and its long, long, lean legs stretch out.
* * * * *
The crowd does not melt away but increases. Here it is cold, here there
is no forest. And the fugitives press together closely, family to
family. Only warming themselves in the smoke of their bonfires. There
are bonfires day and night. Wandering women go from house to house in
the neighbourhood. They stop outside the doors, crying:
"Give, for Christ's sake, give us wood."
And, the heart anguished, they give.
--More still is stolen!
* * * * *
Irritated by fear for themselves, frightened at these "unheard-of
people," the little towns and hamlets and the "all-understanding"
villages ... one can only express astonishment at the celerity with
which man adapts himself to circumstances. Where and when have
these peasants of yesterday learnt so quickly to build dens and
dwelling-places from any sort of rubbish? It's as if they were born
nomads. It simply makes one wonder. Out of what was all this put
together? How does it hold? Some slates stolen from one place, a
paling broken somewhere else, an armful of hay, rags brought in by the
children--and behold, a dwelling-place.
"And, O Lord, how to thank Thee that there is no longer any rain!"
--They freeze, get ill, watch their children die, and wait. It's not
possible to breathe. All around is human filth. In certain stinking
horrible ponds, the peasant women with feet blue from the cold, are
washing clothes. And these ponds also are tainted with filth....
And when I come here in the morning, whilst the ground all around is
covered with hoar-frost and the half-expired bonfires glimmer beside
the marsh on which the camp is set, the spectacle is dreadful. How
reckon up the sufferings? It's no use even thinking of going across the
station platform. For passage there is only the merest margin above
the rails where one might go along as on a tight-rope, and sideways.
The whole platform is occupied by the fortunate ones. By those who
have gone through all the trials of the way of affliction, lost their
horses, frozen in open camping-grounds for weeks whilst they waited; by
the people who have at last obtained:
--Their turn.
And they will travel, no one knows where, no one knows to what end.
On immense bundles, on top of mountains of household furniture, lie
people, lie or sit, and you can see that no force could prevail on them
to abandon their positions. When the bell rings, indicating the arrival
of a goods train, wild scenes are enacted.
In the cattle-trucks it will at once become warm, because of the many
people, and the fugitives rush to take the train by storm, crushing one
another as they push forward. And they lug along their bundles.
And how much of the strangest, most unnecessary rubbish do they pull
along with them into the trucks, and heap up in the places which might
otherwise be occupied by extra people! Rubbish for us--but the last
possessions for them. That is all that remains.
* * * * *
I return to the town. In endless series, meeting one another and
passing on, go the two processions up and down the street. They come,
they come, they come, without respite, without interruption, the gray
carts. They are all like one. One like another. And on the other side
of the road come the fugitives on horseback, to sell their horses. And
in this whirlpool of the river of human grief, little and dreadful
Roslavl has choked and drowned.
Such was the coming of the fugitives into Great Russia.
(The Russian narrator tells many tragic stories of "Meeting the
Fugitives;" "Along the Kief Road;" "The Forests of Mogilef," and many
other vivid sketches of Russian suffering.)