This I have seen. I could not believe it unless I had seen it through and through. For several weeks I lived with it; I went all about it and back of it; inside and out of it was shown to me—until finally I came to realize that the incredible was true. It is monstrous, it is unthinkable, but it exists. It is the Prussian system. A year ago I went to Poland to learn its facts concerning the remnant of a people that had been decimated by war. The country had been twice devastated. First the Russian army swept through it and then the Germans. Along the roadside from Warsaw to Pinsk, the present firing line, 230 miles, nearly half a million people had died of hunger and cold. The way was strewn with their bones picked clean by the crows. With their usual thrift, the Germans were collecting the larger bones to be milled into fertilizer, but finger and toe bones lay on the ground with the mud-covered and rain-soaked clothing.

Wicker baskets were scattered along the way—the basket in which the baby swings from the rafter in every peasant home. Every mile there were scores of them, each one telling a death. I started to count, but after a little I had to give it up, there were so many.

That is the desolation one saw along the great road from Warsaw to Pinsk, mile after mile, more than two hundred miles. They told me a million people were made homeless in six weeks of the German drive in August and September 1915. They told me four hundred thousand died on the way. The rest, scarcely half alive, got through with the Russian army. Many of these have been sent to Siberia; it is these people whom the Paderewski committee is trying to relieve. . . . In that situation, the German commander issued a proclamation. Every able-bodied Pole was bidden to Germany to work. If any refused, let no other Pole give him to eat, not so much as a mouthful, under penalty of German military law.

This is the choice the German Government gives to the conquered Pole, to the husband and father of a starving family: Leave your family to die or survive as the case may be. Leave your country which is destroyed, to work in Germany for its further destruction. If you are obstinate, we shall see that you surely starve. . . . Germany will set him to work that a German workman may be released to fight against his own land and people. He shall be lodged in barracks, behind barbed wire entanglements, under armed guard. He shall sleep on the bare ground with a single thin blanket. He shall be scantily fed and his earnings shall be taken from him to pay for his food.

That is the choice which the German Government offers to a proud, sensitive, high strung people: Death or slavery.

When a Pole gave me that proclamation, I was boiling. But I had to restrain myself. I was practically the only foreign civilian in the country and I wanted to get food to the people. That was what I was there for and I must not for any cause jeopardize the undertaking.

Frederick C. Walcott, a member of the U.S. Commission for Polish Relief, reporting on his visit to Poland in September 1917, from Source Records of the Great War, pp. 426–427.