Norwich bulletin., 1915-07-02
Havoc In Poland.

The devastation of property and the suffering of millions of human beings
 in Poland Is increased so stupendously from day to day that, with communic-
 cation demoralized. it is becoming in
 creasingly difficult to gather anything
 like comprehensive summary of the
 havoc which the war is causing. It is
 evident from facts now at hand that all
 the regions suffering from the conflict
 now so widespread in Europe, Poland
 ent. but that it will require more time
 than any other country to recover
 from the effects of the war.
 The case of the Belgians, which aroused worldwide sympathy and un
 paralleled generosity, for their as- case of the Polanders, which as yet has not been so thoroughly understood by the outside world and which, by
 reason of this lack of information, or
 other causes. has not attracted the in- terest that was aroused by the plight
 of Belgium. In comparison, however,
 the Belgians had an easy time in es- caping the horrors of war by flight to
 England and France, but with the Po-
 flanders it has been a case of facing
 a gun, no matter in which direction
 it's distressed might turn. In the case
 of Belgium the sweep of war was swift
 and final, while with the PolanderS it
 has been, and still is matter of being swept in one direction and then the
 other. The area and population af-
 fected in Poland is also more than ten
 times that of Belgium, considering both the Kingdom of Poland in Russia, and
 Galicia, Austrian Poland, equally de- vastated by the war.
 While at least three large com
 mittees are at work in the relief of the conditions in Poland, they have, un- like the Belgian committees, been Q m hy %ho fan hof hn aT has been waged actively there ever
 since the European conflict began, and
 that it is even more fierce today.
 In attempting a summary of the sit
 uation, The Associated Press has been
 given access to some of the reports
 made by the Central Citizens Com mittee in Warsaw, the Committee for the relief of the kingdom of Poland, and the General Relief Committee for Poland in Geneva, Switzerland, and a
 mass of private correspondence, cov- ering mainly the period between the first of January and the fifteenth of April. It appears from these that out of the eleven provinces or governments of the kingdom of Poland, only one, the province of Siedlce, has accepted in- vasion. The devastated territory of the kingdom amounts to more than forty thousand square miles, in which two hundred cities and towns and nine thousand villages have been partially
 or entirely destroyed. Five thousand
 villages have been razed to the ground
 Railroad tracks for @ distance of one thousand miles have been torn up. Even the plain soil rendered unfit for agricultural purposes by innumerable
 trenches and big holes bored into it by the projectiles of heavy artillery. The agricultural production of this part of
 Poland, representing a value of $500,- 000,0e0 per annum, has been stopped in it's entirety for lack of funds seeds,
 farmhands and cattle.
 An agricultural population of seven
 million people are starving. They hide themselves in forests or under the ruins
 of their former dwellings having as food only roots, bark. rind and decay ing carcasses of horses killed on the battlef1elds.
 The fate of cities and industrial l regions Is no better. Some of them suffered depopulation, some were flooded by tremendous wave of ref
 ugees who had deserted the fighting
 zone. Eighty per cent. of this class of refugees are Jews.
 The city of Kalisz, capital of the
 province of the same naDe, which before the war had a population of l nearly So,000, numbers now 10000 in- habitants. Warsaw the capital of the kingdom. twice as large as Brussels,
 harbors at the present over 100000
 refugees.
 The city of Lodz (5oo 1000 inhab- itants), the center of the great Polish textile industry, twice captured by the Russian and German armies, looks like
 cemetery. Important industrial cen ters like Chenstohova. Sosnoviec and I the coal-basin of Dombrova, have
 shared the same fate. The industrial | output of the kingdom of Poland, val
 ued at $400, 100000 per annum, has been annihilated. Three millions of people earning their daily bread in factories and mines, are starving The coal mines, though not in the fighting zone,
 have been flooded by the Germans for strategical reasons and all the costly machinery destroyed. The kingdom | that used all of its output of 3o,o0o carloads receives now less than 100 carloads of coal from the distant Don Ihasin in Southern Russia Meanwhile