It is no wonder that, when we consider that these levies were made on a population that was already starving, the destitution of thousands became appalling, and in especial the mortality among infants. In many towns milk and all fats were absolutely non-existent; we read of children so soft of bone that they could not stand upright, and of a plague of scurvy in Warsaw, which affected 90 per cent. of the poorer classes. Food-riots were frequent, and were suppressed with Prussian thoroughness. Yet when the British Foreign Office asked Berlin for a guarantee that supplies let through the blockade should be used for Poland and not for Germany, and that the native foodstuffs should not be used for the maintenance of the occupying armies, it was refused. Needless to say, a chorus of vituperation burst from the Press at British inhumanity, which inhumanity consisted precisely in this, namely, that the British Government did not see its way to let the charity of other countries revictual Germany. Such relief as reached Poland by land routes was put into the hands of Hindenburg to administer, which augured well for the comfort of German soldiers, if not for that of those for whom it was sent. This policy of starving the Poles in order to supply their own wants both Germany and Austria continued brutally to exercise, and as late as November, 1917, innumerable trucks of fruit, corn and potatoes were passing out of the starving country into that of its occupiers. We may judge from this what fraction of foreign supplies would have been allowed to feed the people for whom they were to be sent.[14] The starvation which was intended to further Polish emigration into Germany failed in its effect, and we find that only about 21,000 Poles were induced to go, of whom a certain number were taken by force. They did not respond at all eagerly to the bait of “peace and plenty” in the Fatherland, and they viewed with a suspicion that their “deliverers” could ill understand, letters purporting to come from their countrymen there who spoke of the delightful conditions prevailing in Germany. On one occasion von Beseler, the German Governor of Warsaw, sent such an account to the Editor of a Warsaw paper, who refused to publish it unless he inserted a footnote saying that the entire communication came from the German military authorities. For this contumacy he was fined 4,000 marks. Those of the Poles who went were, like the Jews and natives from Lithuania, not permitted to return, and we hear of some of them at work in the Zeppelin sheds at Oldenburg, while interned Polish prisoners were trained and sent to the front.