The Bamberg herald. [volume] (Bamberg, S.C.) 1891-1972, 1922-02-09
lMBERG, S. c., THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 19z
Human Skeletons
Line Snow Trail

An Associated Press dispatch from
Volga, Russia says:
When the SHOWS melt next spring
the Russian steppes will be strewn
with skeletons. They will resem-
Bile the high prairies of the Amer
lean cow country in the days when
big cattle outfits had insufficient hay
to carry their stock through a hard
winter.
But among the skeletons of cat
tie and camels there will be bones
of hundreds of thousands of men,
women and children who fell ex-
hausted in their quest for bread;
who lived the simple lives their peas
ant ancestors lived for centuries and
had little conception of the political
upheaval which made this famine
more terrible than that of 1891.
They wandered, and millions OF
them are still wandering. There was
nothing to eat in their homes, so they
started on the trek for bread. Some
drifted westward to the Volga and
found death in the typhus-ridden rail-
oway centers, or among the horrors of
refugee camps along the Volga; 9TH
ers started for Turkestan; still 9TH
ers moved eastward toward Siberia,
the land Of gold and wheat which
has always been so alluring to the
Russian moujik, who heard little of
it's vastness, its hardships and its
heartlessness. The peasants knew
nothing of modern ways. They were
unable to get rides on the trains
burdened with the Red army and food
for Moscow and Petrograd. When
their animals dropped dead the fami-
lies walked on always hoping that
food lay over the next knoll.
But the country districts have no
grain. or if peasant families have a
small supply they conceal it in the
effort to prolong their own lives until
another crop is harvested. In the
larger towns there is food for sale at
fabulous prices but the starving refu-
gees have neither money nor goods
to exchange and can only sit down to
await death or trudge on until they
sink of exhaustion.
The bodies that lie along the rail-
roads are collected on cars and haul
ed to centers where they are piled In
frozen, snow-covered heaps to await
burial. Freezing refugees remove all
garments from the dead, so the froz-
en- bodies are nude when the scaveng-
ers collect them.
Families drift apart and wander
aimlessIy on their inevitable fate.
Human instincts are lost and they be-
come little better than beasts. The
cities and town populations are so
hardened to suffering that they are
little moved by the misery which lies
all about them. Death seems more
merciful in the country for the refu-
gees; they sink into the white cover
ing of the endless plain, and wolves
strip their bodies.
From Perm and Ekaterinburg to
the Caspian sea death is stalking
over the steppes. Russians, Cossacks,
Kalmucks, Kirghiz and Tartars alike
are meeting their end with hopeless
ness and patience begotten of centu-
ries of unequal struggle against po-
litical extortion and unfavorable cll-
matte conditions made worse by ig-
norance of scientific methods OF till
ing the soil.
American corn will be too late to
save many of these wanderers
through the steppes as well as the
families who have elected to make
their fight in their villages remote
from the railways rather than endure
the lhardships and death their neigh
bors have suffered along the main
lines OF transportation.
Entire village populations have
died in the provinces east of the
Volga and the animals which survive
are so weak it is impossible to get
adequate horsepower to deliver food
to the thousands of snowbound destl-
tute settlements far from food sta
tions.
| El~.~l>Isn E1orfn0Nnfnd HriNQV.