LAND AND WATER 
November 27, 1915. 
Silently after hini. ami witlumt wioping. st rules his 
jx-asant wif. . and clinging to her skirts, chilled, bare- 
footed children also' without words and without 
cries. 
" Look, here comes a large coffin from which folds of 
a bright cotton dress are hanging. It is a girl who has 
died. 
" Four girls are carrying the coffin. They go back 
to the town, that she may b? buried in the right waj-, with 
the due ritual, in the proper place. 
A Funeral Procession. 
■■ Tile little procession goes past, simple, beautiful, 
melancholy, but no one stops to look round or even turns 
the head. No one meeting the procession crosses himself, 
nor draws off his cap, nor gives anv attention. It is as- 
if the people had ceased to sec with "their eyes. 
" And there stretches, stretches along" the footways, 
along the margin of the road, without respite, without 
intenal, without interruption, the two processions, ever 
commg towards one another and passing. 
" Grey carts, carts, carts. Horses, horses, horses, 
fugitives wandering like shadows, horses, children's coffins, 
and again horses, horses, horses. The head turns giddy 
looking at the tuidless movement. It becomes difficult 
to breathe because of that which passes before the eyes." 
There are masses of people who have sold their 
liorscs, and who now go afoot. And among them you see 
wonien wh;< are ikon bearers, women who carry slowly, 
patiently, unweariedly, large framed pictures of the Virgin 
and Child. On the roadside graves lie little ikons of the 
Virgin, Orthodo.x ikons, Roman Catholic ikons. There 
are stretches of the road where crosses have grown up 
like a harvest, the improvised cemeteries for the aged and 
the lately born. 
Famihes break down, whole caravans of stricken 
\yanderers come to a halt and encamp in the woods and 
hght fires and spend days, weeks, lacking the will to go on. 
And they cat into the living wood hke worms, cutting 
down all the trees and the scrub and treading the herbage 
to dust. Broader and broader grows the black traces of 
their bonfires and vaster the circle of gregarious misery 
and destruction. 
Or they flock into the rich country not yet threatened 
by the enemy and thev tread down the crops of other 
peasants or dig up the "potatoes, thev dig up whole acres 
of potatoes, miles of potatoes. And" the brother peasant 
on the spot docs not complain. These other unfortunate 
ones must live somehow. 
Sold for a Song. — 
The cows wander off and get lost, or are sold for a 
song ; the horses are sold. The women sell their precious 
gala dresses with gorgeous embroideries. All is lost. The 
woeful and astonishing wave of human beings goes on 
ever Eastward, patiently, though all is lost ; young giris 
in the brightness of their first bloom, stiff in t"heir supple 
limb;, rheumaticky old greyboards trudging mechanically, 
worn-out children lagging behind or carried in the 
arms. 
The same Russian describes the most dreadful scene 
of all the great plain covered with abandoned carts, the 
carts left behind bv those who have sold their horses 
" I thought of the late V. V. Verestschagin," says he 
" Only he, with his grey tones could have painted the grey 
horror of this life, only he could have painted the dreadful 
picture in all its horror. 
" For several dessiatinas the whole country 
covered with abandoned and broken carts. The 
parts had been unloosed and taken away, wheels 
sei)arately, tilts scparatelv. 
" How many were there ? 
" Tens of thousands. 
"The whole plain was grey with carts, with wheels 
with shafts and single-shafts. Having sold their horses 
for i-ash the fugitives abandoned their carts here, only 
taking with them the iron parts thev could unfasten. 
" Among this grey wilderness o"f ruin, fugitives wciv 
v.andcnng. These were people who preserved Ihcir 
horses and .still went on in their own carts. They sought 
any hits of harness or shafts or wheels that could sei\c 
them 1) tter than their own. From various seiwrate parts 
they put together whole carts. XewU-brandcd horses 
also wandered about ; horses latelv bought from the 
was 
iron 
lay 
r.-fugoiT-; by relief societies or contractors, and you might 
think' th:'y sought by sense of sTiiill or by instinct, the 
carts to which thev" had lately been harnessed. They 
wandered and stumbled —like shadows. Tiiey hardly kept 
their feet — they fell." 
The Ever Spreading Tide. 
Day by day and week by week, the tide reaches ne\v 
places, and even to-day there are scores of new paints in 
the wideness of Russia where the psasants are receiving 
the first of the refuge:'.^, whore the oncoming wave of 
misery is breaking. Happily for the time being, the 
G.^rman advance is held, and the tide must .spend itself 
quietly before Christmas, in the depths of quiet Russia. 
All who survive will find new places and start life afresh. 
The people who receive them arc kindred and friendly. 
There never was such hospitality as that which is being 
give-.i now by peasant to peasant, by on 3 part of the 
nation to another. And the women of the middle and 
upp3r classes are in the field helping. Relief cars run 
along the side of these mournful processions and pick up the 
broken, the feeble, the disease stricken, carry them to 
rehef points, to trains, to hospitals. All Russia is working, 
has been working for these people. And Russia has made 
no appeals whatever to the West for help. Generally 
speaking, those funds whose appeals in the Pres; of Eng- 
land are so familiar to our public, ought to have Govern- 
mental authorisation. Board of Trade inspection, and at 
least as great a publicity in Russia as they have here. 
The extent to which they help iis not clear, and there is a 
certain amount of unpleasant gossip about them. I am 
repeatedly asked to write " sob-raising " letters to America 
to enable people to gather money to help these unfortunates , 
but I cannot be sure that the money so collected would 
ever reach the people. The Governments of Britain and 
Russia have much to do just now, but I think it would be 
worth their while to give official sanction to one fund, 
put it on a proper footing with regularly certified balance- 
s'-iccts. 
At some later stage of this winter's campaign Germany 
and Austria may assume the offensive once more, and this 
time perhaps in the south, aided by other races, and ele- 
mental catastrophe will overwhelm new populations and 
set the tide rolling anew. And it would be a pity to 
think of any material help given by kind people of our own 
afflicted land failing of its aim. Still, in any case, Russia, 
the real Russia, is endlessly generous and hospitable, 
not cast down by material calamity, but ready to give 
ever more, not only to hcv own who are suffering, but to 
us and to all. She lays everything upon the altar of our 
holy cause. 
Readers of My Vagabondage and Sea Pie will welcome 
this third volume ' (" Epistles from Deep Seas." Simpkin, 
Marshall and Co. los. 6d. net) in the same vein from Mr. 
Patterson's pen, while those who do not know the two pre- 
vious works will welcome the book for its own sake. The 
author spent sufficient years before the mast to enable him 
to make the details of a sailor's life interesting, and the liosts 
of sailors' yarns with which he diversifies the descriptive matter 
of a voyage in a wind-jammer, add to the interest of his work. 
In detailing the incidents of voyages, or in spinning yarns 
of the sea, he is at his best ; jihilosophising, as he do'es at 
times, he is apt to become wearisome, but as this concerns a 
matter of a dozen or two pages out of the whole it is not of 
much consequence. There is fine literary quality in the work, 
and for dramatic force such stories as that of Oskar, the dying 
steward, and the shark that followed the ship, have few equals. 
Mr. Patterson c( mnnes with the practical experience of a 
sailor's life a fine sens e of literary and dramatic values, which 
place mucii of this book on a level with Conrad's sea studies 
;-and he lacks the relentless pessimism of the eadier Conrad. 
Ihe best parts of the book are those which relate simply the 
daily life of Curly, Sails, Spunyani, Dobey, and the rest of the 
men in the fo'cs'le, for in such passages as these the author 
forgets himself- at least, that is the impression the work gives 
—and tells without effort the things that he has li\ed through. 
Th 
tin 
10 ixihcy of the Ro\(t Companv, as demonstrated m 
annual report, is on the linos of "the Rover car, somid 
111 every i)avticuhir In spite of a successful year of business, 
a di\Klend of lo jjer cent, is recoininendcd, the rest of the 
proiits being devoted to strengthening the reserve and 
rts 'rve funds, with a substantia! balance to carrv o\-er. 
war 
20 
