The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1921-09-21
By HARRY l.. ROGERS,

q. N S. Staff Corespondent-)
 Washington, Sept 21-At the little land, an eXiled people numbering more than two million souls is being repatriated after seven years of wan derig in the fastnesses of Russia. plague, and drawn by the desire for homes which many of them never ex- pected to see again, these peasants of White Russia are swarming across the border from Soviet Russia at the rate of ten thousand a week.
 Advices reaching nere from the Polish receiving camp tell of facili- ties taxed to the utmost in the task ragged. vermin-infested horde which comes on trains. in ox-carts and on foot.
 Baranovitchi was not unprepared for the herculean undertaking, for the Grand Duke Nicholas had his headquarters there for many months during the great war. and just out side the town proper there is a camp with accommodations for a division. In another sense the place is historic, too. It was the highwater mark of the great German advance, and only a few miles beyond the deserted fields are still scared with the trench lines which the Germans built to with stand theo nslaughts of the Czar's fighting men.
 3'Vfa Deioresa-''
 When the Muscovite hosts rolled back across the uplands of Lithuania and through the Pinck marshes they swept everything before them. Fields were burned, orchards felled, and the peasant-folk, urged by the Cossack's knout, were driven along with the army, in order that the conquerinS Germans might find no advantage in the land they occupied. Thus were hundreds of square miles laid waste and the broad highways which lead Poland ntn Pd into rivers of pity-provoking human ity.
 Now they are coming back. Un- der the terms of the Treaty of Riga, Soviet Russia and Poland agreed to an exchange of nationals, and since May the stream of human wreckage has flowed toward Baranovitchi, it's cOlume ever-increaSing. The reser- voir which feeds this stream Is the entire peasant population of White Russia, carried away in the great re- treat of 1915.
 The Riga convention stipulated that 4.000 a week should be repatriated through the two receiving stations of Baranocitchi and Rovno, but, owing | to the interruption of railway traffic l in the south, the movement through Rovno has been negligible. With the | pressure of famine and cholera the | motley throng has increased until it l three trainIoads of 5000 each to ar i rive at Baranovitchi within a single | day.
 | 300, 900 Wait to Move. l The normal capacity of the Barano- | citchi camp is 4,000. put more often l than not there are 3o,000 vernlin-rid- l den unfortunates bivouacking under | shelters of fir boughs surrounded by | the precious household goods which 1 they have preserved through all their | wanderings. The number en route l from Moscow at any given time is es- | timated at SC,000, and there are said
 
 times of 300,O0O.
 For the most part the travellers are | women and children. Able-bodied T young men are few and far between. | Fully 50 per cent. are women, while 1 another 25 per cent. are children un- | der Is years of age. Most of the men are over 40, the strong young | fellows having been kept by the Bol- sheviki for the Red Army or the in- dustria1 cohorts of Lenin.
 One gets an impression, says an ob- server, of the handkerchiefed heads
 of hundreds of simple, brown-faced
 peasant girls, with here and there a
 dash of color from shawl or petticoat
 and here and there the grave, beard
 ed face of some village patriarch l. the little Jew trader, who, in Poland and Western Russia. forms the eco
 homie link between the peasant and
 the outside world. They squat about the earth, old men chipping with ar
 ax at some homemade wooden tool old women rocking cradles or crouch.
 ing over their crooks; small girls per forming sisterly duties for smaller brothers by picking over their hail