gayety of hungry youth in the presence of food.

[Sidenote: A one-time rich man.]

[Sidenote: Bitterness toward the Government.]

They took their bread and porridge without even a mumbled
"_Spassiba_"--thanks--and shouldered each other for seats at the tables.
Then came a blind old man led by his two grandsons. His thanks were
pathetically profuse. Next another graybeard, carrying an ivory cane and
wearing a handsome fur coat, the only indications of his recent high
station in provincial society except the unmistakable reserve and
dignity of gentility. After him was a handsome Lett, who had been a
station agent in Courland till his station was dynamited in the Russian
retreat. None of the children gave any thanks for the food; in fact,
hardly any one did except the very old. The attitude of the others
seemed to be that of people who were getting only a small part of their
just due. Perhaps that was because they may not have realized that they
were being fed by England, not by Russia, and toward Russia all of them
were bitter even those who lived in the shelters the Government had
built. This bitterness was indicated by the refusal of most of them to
accept work proffered them by provincial or municipal officials.

[Sidenote: No wish to begin over.]

Their attitude is that, inasmuch as the Government has deliberately
wiped out their homes and destroyed their means of livelihood, it is the
Government's duty to support them in comfortable idleness. They seem to
feel that it is adding insult to injury to ask them to begin over again
in a new environment and work for their living. I asked a young Lettish
railway man, living in one of the board barracks near the Warsaw
station, why he had refused an offer of employment in the railway yards
hard by.

"Why should I work for Russia?" he asked, bitterly. "Russia has taken
from me my pretty home, my good job, and my wife and two children, who
died on the road in that awful blizzard recently. Why should I work for
Russia?"

"But you will starve if you do not," I suggested.

[Sidenote: Gloomy resignation.]

"_Nichevo!_"--it doesn't matter--he muttered, in gloomy resignation.

[Sidenote: A great mistake.]

[Sidenote: Everything destroyed.]

The majority of the refugees feel the way this man does. I do not refer
to the refugees who left their homes voluntarily through fear of the
advancing Germans, but to that greater number who were forced to leave
by the compulsion of