THE REFUGEES AT KIEV.

WHEN Maxim Gorki wrote his famous play, The Lower Depths, there was a pool of human misery as yet unplumbed in our modern experience, a depth below even that of the dosshouse, with its bestial jealousy and drunken orgy, which, had he known, he would have re-written his play in different surroundings. But then it did not exist; it was not dreamed of as barely possible, and only in this year of grace has it come fully into being. It is a world apart from anything known before, from anything that exists beside it. Its inhabitants are of one class, one type, one character, and they have but one name. They are the Refugees. It is impossible to be with them and not be stirred to the depth of your soul. On the faces of all is the same expression, a look of mingled hopelessness and bewilderment: how have they come, why have they come, whither are they going, what will they do? None of these things they know, and, indeed, they hardly care, for they have reached the point of complete apathy. Once they were farmers, herdsmen, carpenters, bricklayers, washerwomen, clerks, students, priests now they are flotsam on the tide of war, carried aimlessly, helplessly, broken perhaps upon the rocks, perhaps whirled suddenly into some backwater where breath and a handhold are possible. They have nothing, and wherever they are their abode is the same: it is the Limit. Can they ever escape from this

hell? They hardly believe it.

To the noble city of Kiev, the mother of Russia, proudly seated on the wooded crests that overhang the Dnieper, fair as the garden of the Lord, buried almost beneath a screen of giant poplar, birch, and chestnut, from which the cupolas of a hundred churches spring glittering to meet the southern sky, to Kiev, fragrant with rose and jasmine, come the refugees. With the first pressure of the renewed German offensive in Galicia, stragglers began to arrive from Tarnow, over three hundred miles away; and as the enemy advanced the whole countryside fled before him, seeking to escape death and outrage, or the horrid fate for men of serviceable age of being forced at the bayonet point to fight against their Russian brothers. For by blood and speech these Ruthenian peasants are one with the Little Russians of the Ukraine, and in religion, belonging as they do to the United Greek Church, are not widely separated from them. In

everything they tend towards Russian culture, and, strengthened in their resolve by the Austrian prohibition of the Russian alphabet, they had long since fixed their hopes on Russia as saviour and as friend. When the war began many were forced unwillingly into the Austrian ranks, many more were imprisoned as friends of the Muscovite-"Moscali" they were called-and many tasted death against a wall or at the end of a rope as the Austrians retreated. Faint echoes come through of the fate meted out to such as have now stayed. To take but one instance: in a village not far from Sanoc twelve young girls were hanged. And why? Because the day that the Russian Emperor drove through they, poor mites, had sung a song of welcome. What wonder, when such things are done, that all who could escaped beforehand? While yet the Russian line was beyond Lemberg the greater number stayed within the Galician border, huddled together like field-mice in the corner of corn that has not yet been reaped. Fifty thousand a day were fed in Lwow, and yet children lay and died in the streets; in the one little village of Jagelnitze twenty-two thousand were fed in nine days. But when our Allies, grandly fighting, fell back further, the Galicians could stay no more: they turned and poured into southern Russia, a wailing multitude. Not perhaps since the settlement of Europe after the great movement known as the Wandering of the Peoples has there been in our hemisphere so frightful an upheaval of social life as has marked the track of the Teutonic armies in Poland and Galicia during this war. And now, as the degree of civilisation is higher so much more profound is the depth of suffering.

This last exodus is the most tragic of all, and the case of these refugees the most pitiable. Perhaps they started with some little property; if so they have been forced to sell or abandon it on the way. No one knows yet how many there are or will be at first fifty thousand was the figure given, then eighty, now it is supposed that there must be over a hundred thousand. The Zemstvo organisations, the town authorities, a special committee at Kiev appointed to deal with the problem, catch them on the way, divert them into villages, prepare schoolhouses for them, try to prevent their flocking into and overcrowding the towns, sift them, label them, but still they come.

At first Kiev was unprepared. The refugees lay in the streets and fainted from hunger. Then they were got into monastery buildings, into the rooms of the academy, into private houses and places of business, and when I came a week ago1 there was not much evidence of them to the casual passer-by. In many of the (1) [In the first week in July.]

refuges there is at all events some show of ordered life, though the only furniture of the dormitories consists of the pallet beds. But suddenly comes one that beggars description.

It is a big two-storied building, a kind of merchants' Exchange, standing in front of a sandy square, with two immense halls and numerous large adjacent rooms. In a small space cut off by a paling from the square, the entrance to which is guarded by a policeman, is a swaying crowd, very filthy, very ragged, and quite undisturbed by the stench that rises from the neighbouring extemporised latrines. We push through, up an outer iron staircase into the main room, to find ourselves in the midst of hundreds of refugees, intermingled with yet others, prisoners brought from Galicia on charge of espionage. Over a thousand people must be in the building. They lie on the floor in every stage of misery and weakness; there is not a stick of furniture in the place, nothing but the refugees and their frowsy rags. Yes, it is the Limit. Many are crying, silently. They come round us, not obtrusively, but in a piteous, friendless way, as if hardly daring to believe that anyone can take interest in them. They began to talk, for among the visitors is one from their own land, a bluff, genial, bearded figure, who knows every village and every family in the country. "Where's your mother? "Dead."-"Father?" "Captured."-"Who is this girl?" "An orphan."-Here is another, one of seven sisters; she knows where five are, or thinks she does, the sixth has disappeared. There are over sixty little children in the room, most lying quietly, and not even crying, but one scampers ceaselessly about crowing and stamping, with a broad grin and dancing brown eyes. He cannot be above three years. He was found in Lwow, but beyond that no one knows anything about him. For his fun and sweetness they call him "Jolly Willy." In one corner a young woman, with a face like Michael Angelo's Delphic Sibyl, is trying to suckle her baby. Twice she tries to give it milk, but she cannot. There is none to give. She is too weak. Hard by is another couple. The mother looks healthy, but the child of three weeks, born out of time on the road, lies open-mouthed with eyes staring. It has the face of a very old man, sharp and puckered.

Then they all begin to tell us. They are hungry. Some have not eaten for days. None have had enough to keep them above the point of constant suffering. Most literally they are starving. Fortunately the representatives of a British relief organisation who are in Kiev are on the spot and the situation is taken in hand. Three hundred pounds of bread are procured, tea, and as much milk as the neighbourhood can provide, a sausage-maker's shop is bought out, a big boiler found and set going, meal tickets

written and distributed, and before long the refugees are having their first real dinner since who knows how long. It was late before the workers got to bed that night.

The next day showed how valuable one simple meal may be. Already the look of sharp misery on their faces was less, their eyes less tormented. The bread of yesterday had done more than give them fresh blood, it gave them hope they have begun again to believe in life. By midday an old kitchen had been cleared out, and in the big coppers some ninety gallons of "kasha" and pork bubbled merrily for the first dinner. The general look of the place had not yet changed much, but the work had begun. An English engineer, a neat, hardy Yorkshireman, himself escaped from death on the Galician oilfields with his wife and child of sixteen months, came forward to help the British committee, and is now rebuilding the stove and fitting a third copper; another committee has been found to tend the prisoners; the Grand Duchess Tatiana's committee has promised a doctor and medical supervision, and with the engineer will improve the imperfect sanitation, a daily source of danger. Best of all, a bath has been bought and forty children already washed. Of course they cried, but afterwards! The change wrought in them can nohow be so well described as by the simple fact that they shrank from putting on again their dirty clothes. The feeling of cleanliness was pleasant to them, their skins had become miraculously white and soft, and instinct told them, what one may be sure none else had ever done, that a sweet, clean little body should not be covered up with linen brown with grime. But much time must pass before enough linen can be obtained for these and the other thousand men, women, and children all in the same need.

What is tragic in the situation is that these hundreds whose sufferings have begun to be relieved make but a small fraction of the total number, and what is happening at Kiev is surely repeating itself in every town to which the Galician refugees come. Only much hard work and very much money can redeem them from their evil plight and keep them in such a state of body and mind that when their country is won back by their great Russian brothers they may be fit to take up their life of solid, useful toil. Without the one or without the other they must inevitably sink into a rabble, ghosts of men, hopeless and rotten with disease. The British public has already been generous almost beyond belief towards those crushed by the tramp of war. In opening their hearts for the needs of the Galicians who have lost everything because they believed in the Right for which we are fighting, they will be but doing one more good deed.

JOHN POLLOCK.

FEODOR SOLOGUB.

DURING the 'eighties Russian literature passed through a period of gestation. The introduction of modern industries brought great changes in the social fabric of the country. As villages became towns, "the provinces " were created; and with this provincial element, a new expression stole into the belles lettres, which gradually gained predominance.

It was not merely that the profound upheaval caused by the new conditions provided the poet and the novelist with fresh material, for Russian writers since Pushkin and Gogol have written about the town; but it has changed their vision, and even to a greater degree their method of expression. Rapid transportation and intercommunication, the extreme restlessness, nervousness and "artificiality" of our age, the hurried way of living, have affected the Russian writer in this wise: he ceased to see life broadly, in panoramic sweeps; he began to see it swiftly rather than thoroughly, as a series of impressions rather than as a whole; as a thing of fragments; with Balmont, a whole group of poets sprang up who sang the joy of the instant.

"With every instant, I am consumed.

In every change I am reborn."

So writes Balmont-and a single street, the Nevsky Prospect, has found its own poet in Alexander Blok!

The critic Korney Chukovsky points all this out elaborately and brilliantly in his book, From Chekhov's Days to Ours. In one sense life became richer. It lost breadth, but it gained in the multiplicity of impressions. Says Chukovsky: "You walk in the street. You reflect for a moment. A pretty face flashes by. You fall in love with it for a moment. Someone jostles you. You are angry for a moment. Someone smiles at you. You are glad for a moment. moment. These are the daily feelings of the town person. And how unlike they are to the lingering, precise, ductile feelings of the recent villager lost in the contemplation of three firs."

The town was not neglected in literature, but those who wrote about it wrote like countrymen of genius-crudely sometimes, but always deeply and broadly. They wrote about the town, but "in spirit, in style, and in form, Russian literature was protractive, unsmiling, almost wholly the creation of forests and steppes, and remote, sequestered farms. She had been the most