Page:The Destruction of Poland - Toynbee - 1916.djvu/12

 German organisers to intervene. They did so.

They proceeded to invade the Polish countryside with all kinds of German machines—motor lorries and threshing machines and machines for digging up potatoes—and they dug and threshed, and transported the autumn through. The foodstuffs in Poland were mobilised most effectively by this German organisation. Only, when they were collected, the Imperial German Government commandeered them all. The motor lorries spirited them away into Germany, while Lodz and Dombrova continued to starve.

When winter came, the German forces had strengthened and extended their hold over the country, and the German authorities were able to elaborate their organisation to a higher degree. Food supplies in Poland were now admittedly scarce (the previous organisation had seen to that), so it behoved a paternal military administration to safeguard the Polish population from unscrupulous speculation and forcing up of prices. The remedy was simple. The transport of food from one locality to another was strictly forbidden. Yet this drastic edict, though excellently designed to fulfil its negative purpose, was calculated to produce an immediate crisis in the thinly-stocked and thickly-populated industrial districts, unless it were supplemented by some central organisation of a positive kind. But the authorities had not been improvident. No sooner had uncontrolled local transport been prohibited, than they conferred the monopoly of trading in foodstuffs throughout Russian Poland on an accredi-