# The Way of the Cross (Doroshevich)/II

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 some places where the fugitives have been out and foraged, the people complain:
—Lord a' mercy! The oats which were being brought to us have fallen into the hands of the fugitives on the road. So much oats was sent, and we have the ​invoice for it. But only half arrives. The fugitives have stopped the wagons on the road and taken away what they wanted.
At one of the points on the road I met a substantial local farmer.
He was selling unground oats.
No dearer than five copecks above the price of hay a pood.
—It doesn't matter how cheap it is, cried he in despair. The fugitives rob the wagons all the same.
At another point I was told of a local landowner:
—He goes about with a revolver. The fugitives have dug up more than a hundred acres of potatoes belonging to him.
There's no stopping people who've come to the end of things.
Near Gomel a by-road goes over a ravine, and the fugitives puilled the bridge to bits.
​For their bonfires.
In the towns and villages you hear of country squires who have fled by night with their families from the coming of the fugitives.
You hear of some who have asked for a guard of soldiers.
—If only for the night. Entirely at our expense.
Their fear is quite understandable, when at night-time a great crowd overtakes you.
But no personal assaults of any kind have been heard of.
However, regarding property, no one asks:
—Whose?
You understand that by the carts of the fugitives.
One is full of wood, of fresh wood just chopped, and on top of it is tied a great bundle of hay, whilst behind hang sheaves of rye.
​What do the peasantry think about this?
Along the whole road to Bobruisk, no matter where I asked the question:
—Don't the fugitives do you a lot of damage?
—Nitchevo! Nothing, that's all right.
—Don't they dig up your potatoes, and take away your hay?
—Yes, they take it. How not dig them up?
And for hundreds of versts, just as if it were a conspiracy, you will hear these phrases:
—Let them dig them up!
—They've got to eat, haven't they?
—Perhaps we shall have to do it ourselves!
I often heard:
—They take things in extremity. They ask for more, and we make them a present of it.
​Not once did I hear the word which would be used to apply to beggars:
—Podaem, We grant.
But:
—Daem, We give.
Or, more often:
—Dareem, We present.
The peasants, especially the women, are distressed by the "unsung corpses," the dead which the fugitives have to bury by the roadside as they go.
In many places the people have told me:
—We said to them,—Give us your corpses. We will put them in their shrouds, sing the service, and bury them as Christians. But they have no time to do anything. They dig the grave the night before and next morning they go on.
The channel softly receives the river into itself.
​In the great misfortune that has befallen these fugitives, the peasantry, by their humanity and good-will, have taken upon themselves half the burden of the calamity.
The peasants say:
—The first fugitives really did offend us.
—At first, in a way, they were rude.
Clearly, we ought specially to increase the number of relief stations,
—To lessen all this.
Oh, these relief stations beginning to be built after the fugitives had already arrived!
The peasants were really affronted by the people of Holm province
—The Holm people, these are the ones who were rude to us.
This is the general saying
In Kaluga province, in Mogilef, in Smolensk, and in Minsk.
​The Holm peasants—are the most exasperating people.
Especially exasperating
How they talk of their own province!
—And is your land good?
—Our land? There's no such land anywhere else in the world. Do you call your ground land? I shouldn't think it worth cultivating. Now ours is land. One could eat it—that's the kind of land it is. Like bread!
—Were you well-off?
—Were we well-off? You people who live here couldn't dream what our life there was like.
—Did you have fine cattle?
—Such cattle I had! And such a house I had with a grove round it and money spent on it! How our children grew up! What cattle perished on the way hither, how many we sold for a mere nothing!
​The rumour often went round among the Holm peasants that they were to be driven
—To Siberia.
And they were afraid.
—Such winter there! Nothing will ripen.
They are angry to have lost
—Such riches.
And according to the peasants, it is only those from Holm province who have been rude to them.