There was not a sign of human habitation, not a roof or a wall left standing; and yet people lived there. How? In the timbered dug-outs which the Germans had constructed; in old gun-emplacements; in shell-holes. They lived like foxes, anywhere and anyhow by burrowing underground. And what do they feed on? In many parts of the devastated areas they are eating grass as though they were cattle. They boil it into a kind of soup. Where they have no flour of any sort, they bake bread out of a mixture of bark and acorns. But our Gray Samaritan informed us that there was almost no ruined village that we had passed, where an American Children's Relief Station had not been established. She knew, for she had established them; that was her job. Whoever dies in Poland, the children will be saved as long as America recognises their necessity. But if America were to grow forgetful, most of them would be dead before another summer. The cruelty of the situation is that only the children can be fed; the parents, the grandparents and the boys and girls above the age of fourteen have to take their chance. The melancholy of dusk was settling over this old battlefield, where for long years men had cursed and hated and butchered one another, when we drew up at our first point of call in the trench-dwellers' colony of Switniki. Floundering in the mud and making a strong effort to keep our footing, we crossed a trench and approached a hut constructed out of the debris of the battlefield. Quarter sections of corrugated iron, 'which the Germans had used for their gun-emplacements, had been riveted together, and the sides and top had been covered with sod. The place was in darkness when we knocked at the door. It was still in darkness when we were allowed to enter. Then, very sparingly, the only candle was lighted. It would be blown out the moment we departed. By its illumination we saw an old man and woman—they looked old, but they may not have been more than fifty. The woman's gray hair hung loose about her face; she was kneeling in a praying position in her bed. Perhaps it was the Three Kings she was expecting. This was the night when they were supposed to come, riding out of the East to leave their presents at the doors of the needy, just as twenty centuries ago they had tapped on the door of a stable in Bethlehem and found the Christ-Child in his poverty, asleep upon his mother's breast. We gazed round the little room. It was speckless. All the rooms which we visited in this colony were. The people might be dying of starvation, but they were determined to die cleanly. That is the difference between your peasant and your city-dweller. One missed the abominable smells which accompany destitution in Warsaw. These people had the native gentleness of a race which has always been self-respecting, inventing their own music and poetry, and owning their little plot of land. They were not going to become disrespecting now.