And when I come here in the morning, whilst the ground all around is covered with hoar-frost and the half-expired bonfires glimmer beside the marsh on which the camp is set, the spectacle is dreadful. How reckon up the sufferings? It's no use even thinking of going across the station platform. For passage there is only the merest margin above the rails where one might go along as on a tight-rope, and sideways. The whole platform is occupied by the fortunate ones. By those who have gone through all the trials of the way of affliction, lost their horses, frozen in open camping-grounds for weeks whilst they waited; by the people who have at last obtained: --Their turn. And they will travel, no one knows where, no one knows to what end. On immense bundles, on top of mountains of household furniture, lie people, lie or sit, and you can see that no force could prevail on them to abandon their positions. When the bell rings, indicating the arrival of a goods train, wild scenes are enacted. In the cattle-trucks it will at once become warm, because of the many people, and the fugitives rush to take the train by storm, crushing one another as they push forward. And they lug along their bundles. And how much of the strangest, most unnecessary rubbish do they pull along with them into the trucks, and heap up in the places which might otherwise be occupied by extra people! Rubbish for us--but the last possessions for them. That is all that remains. * * * * * I return to the town. In endless series, meeting one another and passing on, go the two processions up and down the street. They come, they come, they come, without respite, without interruption, the gray carts. They are all like one. One like another. And on the other side of the road come the fugitives on horseback, to sell their horses. And in this whirlpool of the river of human grief, little and dreadful Roslavl has choked and drowned. Such was the coming of the fugitives into Great Russia. (The Russian narrator tells many tragic stories of "Meeting the Fugitives;" "Along the Kief Road;" "The Forests of Mogilef," and many other vivid sketches of Russian suffering.) FOOTNOTES: [3] All numerals relate to stories herein told--not to chapters in the book. [4] A notorious district in Moscow, where beggars, tramps and thieves congregate, and where there are many doss-houses. THE ADVENTURES OF AN AMERICAN ATTACHÉ _A Despatch Bearer in the Diplomatic Service_ _Told by Eric Fisher Wood, Attaché at the American Embassy in Paris_