The advance to Lemberg by the Russians was swift.  In the panic that followed this great city of 200,000 had scarcely 70,000 left when the invaders took possession.  Families were broken up; none of the refugees had time to take supplies or clothes.

Germany’s first move against Russia came from the great fortresses along the Oder and Vistula.  All of western Poland was overrun.  When the Russian advance from Warsaw drove back the invaders, the scars of the conflict left this section of Poland badly battered.  Then came Von Hindenburg’s victorious armies, and again this section was torn by shot and shell and wasted.  While some of the larger places, such as Lodz, Plock, Lowicz, Tchenstochow and Petrokov, were spared, the smaller towns, villages, and hamlets in the direct line of battle suffered equally from the defenders and invaders.

All the section to the northeast of Warsaw between the East Prussian frontier and the Bug, Narew, and Niemen rivers has suffered even a worse fate, as the bitterness engendered by the devastation worked by the Russians in East Prussia led to reprisals that not even the strict discipline of the German army could curb.  Not only were the peasants’ homes pounded to bits by the opposing artillery fire, but the armies as they fought back and forth took all the cattle, horses, and stock that came to their hands.  Disease added to the suffering of the stricken people.

THOUSANDS OF VILLAGES DESTROYED

Henry Sienkiewicz, the great Polish writer and author of “Quo Vadis,” a refugee in Switzerland, said, on March 15, 1915: 

“In the kingdom of Poland alone there are 15,000 villages burned or damaged; a thousand churches and chapels destroyed.  The homeless villagers have sought shelter in the forests, where it is no exaggeration to say that women and children are dying from cold and hunger by thousands daily.

“Poland comprises 127,500 square kilometers.  One hundred thousand of these have been devastated by the battling armies.  More than a million horses and two million head of horned cattle have been seized by the invaders, and in the whole of the 100,000 square kilometers in the possession of the soldiers not a grain of corn, not a scrap of meat, nor a drop of milk remain for the civil population.  “The material losses up to the present are estimated at 1,000,000,000 rubles ($500,000,000).  No fewer than 400,000 workmen have lost their means of livelihood.

“The state of things in Galicia is just as dreadful for the civil population—­innocent victims of the war.  Of 75,000 square kilometers all except 5,000 square kilometers around Cracow are in possession of the Russians.  They commandeered 900,000 horses and about 200,000 head of horned cattle and seized all the grain, part of the salt fields, and the oil wells.

“The once rich province is a desert.  Over a million inhabitants have sought refuge in other parts of Austria, and they are in sheer destitution.”